bed-ridden at Chinsurah. He sent for me and my
brother Jyoti. He asked my brother to accompany me on the harmonium and
got me to sing all my hymns one after the other,--some of them I had to
sing twice over. When I had finished he said:

"If the king of the country had known the language and could appreciate
its literature, he would doubtless have rewarded the poet. Since that is
not so, I suppose I must do it." With which he handed me a cheque.

My father had brought with him some volumes of the Peter Parley series
from which to teach me. He selected the life of Benjamin Franklin to
begin with. He thought it would read like a story book and be both
entertaining and instructive. But he found out his mistake soon after we
began it. Benjamin Franklin was much too business-like a person. The
narrowness of his calculated morality disgusted my father. In some cases
he would get so impatient at the worldly prudence of Franklin that he
could not help using strong words of denunciation. Before this I had
nothing to do with Sanskrit beyond getting some rules of grammar by
rote. My father started me on the second Sanskrit reader at one bound,
leaving me to learn the declensions as we went on. The advance I had
made in Bengali[27] stood me in good stead. My father also encouraged me
to try Sanskrit composition from the very outset. With the vocabulary
acquired from my Sanskrit reader I built up grandiose compound words
with a profuse sprinkling of sonorous 'm's and 'n's making altogether a
most diabolical medley of the language of the gods. But my father never
scoffed at my temerity.

Then there were the readings from Proctor's Popular Astronomy which my
father explained to me in easy language and which I then rendered into
Bengali.

Among the books which my father had brought for his own use, my
attention would be mostly attracted by a ten or twelve volume edition of
Gibbon's Rome. They looked remarkably dry. "Being a boy," I thought, "I
am helpless and read many books because I have to. But why should a
grown up person, who need not read unless he pleases, bother himself
so?"

(15) _At the Himalayas_

We stayed about a month in Amritsar, and, towards the middle of April,
started for the Dalhousie Hills. The last few days at Amritsar seemed as
if they would never pass, the call of the Himalayas was so strong upon
me.

The terraced hill sides, as we went up in a _jhampan_, were all aflame
with the beauty of the fl