Page:Twelve men of Bengal in the nineteenth century (1910).djvu/59

Rh however, sufficient compensation. Manu Jan Khanum, relieved of all anxiety as to her worldly affairs, devoted her remaining years to charity and prayer, tenderly cared for by Mahomed Mohsin whose earliest years she herself had so carefully watched over. She died at the age of eighty-one in 1803 A.D. leaving as the last and greatest proof of her affection for Mahomed Moshin a will bequeathing him the whole of her estate.

It was thus not until Haji Mahomed Mohsin had reached the age of seventy-three that he became possessed of the great wealth which he was to put to so good a use. He had never married and the death of his half-sister left him without near relatives. There is something pathetic in the figure of this old man in its utter loneliness, which the great wealth that had suddenly come to him but served to accentuate. There lived with him, it is true, the two companions whom he had brought with him from Murshidabad, Rajib Ali Khan and Shakir Ali Khan, but how little they were truly his friends subsequent events were only too clearly to prove. But undismayed by the responsibilities before him, Mahomed Moshin set himself to administer the estate wisely and well. So far as he was personally concerned, this new access of wealth made but little change. He lived as he had lived before, the same simple frugal life of the traveller and the scholar that he had always known. But in so