owering spring crops. Every morning we would
make a start after our bread and milk, and before sunset take shelter
for the night in the next staging bungalow. My eyes had no rest the
livelong day, so great was my fear lest anything should escape them.
Wherever, at a turn of the road into a gorge, the great forest trees
were found clustering closer, and from underneath their shade a little
waterfall trickling out, like a little daughter of the hermitage playing
at the feet of hoary sages wrapt in meditation, babbling its way over
the black moss-covered rocks, there the _jhampan_ bearers would put down
their burden, and take a rest. Why, oh why, had we to leave such spots
behind, cried my thirsting heart, why could we not stay on there for
ever?

This is the great advantage of the first vision: the mind is not then
aware that there are many more such to come. When this comes to be known
to that calculating organ it promptly tries to make a saving in its
expenditure of attention. It is only when it believes something to be
rare that the mind ceases to be miserly in assigning values. So in the
streets of Calcutta I sometimes imagine myself a foreigner, and only
then do I discover how much is to be seen, which is lost so long as its
full value in attention is not paid. It is the hunger to really see
which drives people to travel to strange places.

My father left his little cash-box in my charge. He had no reason to
imagine that I was the fittest custodian of the considerable sums he
kept in it for use on the way. He would certainly have felt safer with
it in the hands of Kishori, his attendant. So I can only suppose he
wanted to train me to the responsibility. One day as we reached the
staging bungalow, I forgot to make it over to him and left it lying on a
table. This earned me a reprimand.

Every time we got down at the end of a stage, my father had chairs
placed for us outside the bungalow and there we sat. As dusk came on the
stars blazed out wonderfully through the clear mountain atmosphere, and
my father showed me the constellations or treated me to an astronomical
discourse.

The house we had taken at Bakrota was on the highest hill-top. Though it
was nearing May it was still bitterly cold there, so much so that on the
shady side of the hill the winter frosts had not yet melted.

My father was not at all nervous about allowing me to wander about
freely even here. Some way below our house there stretched a spur