cted, these and the like worries run their course as infantile
maladies and leave one leisure in later life to attend to one's literary
work in a healthier frame of mind.

Bengali literature is not old enough to have elaborated those internal
checks which can serve to control its votaries. As experience in writing
is gained the Bengali writer has to evolve the restraining force from
within himself. This makes it impossible for him to avoid the creation
of a great deal of rubbish during a considerable length of time. The
ambition to work wonders with the modest gifts at one's disposal is
bound to be an obsession in the beginning, so that the effort to
transcend at every step one's natural powers, and therewith the bounds
of truth and beauty, is always visible in early writings. To recover
one's normal self, to learn to respect one's powers as they are, is a
matter of time.

However that may be, I have left much of youthful folly to be ashamed
of, besmirching the pages of the _Bharati_; and this shames me not for
its literary defects alone but for its atrocious impudence, its
extravagant excesses and its high-sounding artificiality. At the same
time I am free to recognise that the writings of that period were
pervaded with an enthusiasm the value of which cannot be small. It was a
period to which, if error was natural, so was the boyish faculty of
hoping, believing and rejoicing. And if the fuel of error was necessary
for feeding the flame of enthusiasm then while that which was fit to be
reduced to ashes will have become ash, the good work done by the flame
will not have been in vain in my life.

PART V

(24) _Ahmedabad_

When the _Bharati_ entered upon its second year, my second brother
proposed to take me to England; and when my father gave his consent,
this further unasked favour of providence came on me as a surprise.

As a first step I accompanied my brother to Ahmedabad where he was
posted as judge. My sister-in-law with her children was then in England,
so the house was practically empty.

The Judge's house is known as _Shahibagh_ and was a palace of the
Badshahs of old. At the foot of the wall supporting a broad terrace
flowed the thin summer stream of the Savarmati river along one edge of
its ample bed of sand. My brother used to go off to his court, and I
would be left all alone in the vast expanse of the palace, with only the
cooing of the pigeons to break the midday stillness; and an
un