mothered in its dust covering.

And the thought that behind every part of the vault of blue reposed the
mysteries of the sky would also spur our imaginings. When our Pundit, in
illustration of some lesson in our Bengali science primer, told us that
the blue sphere was not an enclosure, how thunderstruck we were! "Put
ladder upon ladder," said he, "and go on mounting away, but you will
never bump your head." He must be sparing of his ladders, I opined, and
questioned with a rising inflection, "And what if we put more ladders,
and more, and more?" When I realised that it was fruitless multiplying
ladders I remained dumbfounded pondering over the matter. Surely, I
concluded, such an astounding piece of news must be known only to those
who are the world's schoolmasters!

PART II

(4) _Servocracy_

In the history of India the regime of the Slave Dynasty was not a happy
one. In going back to the reign of the servants in my own life's history
I can find nothing glorious or cheerful touching the period. There were
frequent changes of king, but never a variation in the code of
restraints and punishments with which we were afflicted. We, however,
had no opportunity at the time for philosophising on the subject; our
backs bore as best they could the blows which befell them: and we
accepted as one of the laws of the universe that it is for the Big to
hurt and for the Small to be hurt. It has taken me a long time to learn
the opposite truth that it is the Big who suffer and the Small who cause
suffering.

The quarry does not view virtue and vice from the standpoint of the
hunter. That is why the alert bird, whose cry warns its fellows before
the shot has sped, gets abused as vicious. We howled when we were
beaten, which our chastisers did not consider good manners; it was in
fact counted sedition against the servocracy. I cannot forget how, in
order effectively to suppress such sedition, our heads used to be
crammed into the huge water jars then in use; distasteful, doubtless,
was this outcry to those who caused it; moreover, it was likely to have
unpleasant consequences.

I now sometimes wonder why such cruel treatment was meted out to us by
the servants. I cannot admit that there was on the whole anything in our
behaviour or demeanour to have put us beyond the pale of human kindness.
The real reason must have been that the whole of our burden was thrown
on the servants, and the whole burden is a thing difficul