I said: 'I am glad to hear you talk like that. It illustrates the difference of your generation from mine. In mine we did not believe in anything hardly, not even in our own genius or race.'

'We are hoping, sir,' he said eagerly, 'to bring in the new spirit. We are working against the adamantine obstructive conspiracy of the Westerners who have helped and taught the world to think that Asia has always been backward and always inferior. You know, sir, an ant grows wings to fly; but no sooner does it hop off the ground than the insect-eating bird catches it in mid-air and devours it. The Western ant is growing wings of vanity. Once it flies, the bird of the East will swallow it. It is a pity that you have lived so long in the West; it has dazzled your eyes, but it cannot dazzle ours. Our generation in Asia will brush the Western fly out of existence.'

When they left me I felt drowned in melancholy. Could it be possible that boys, hardly twenty years younger, could be just the opposite of what we were at that age? I do not mean that they were wrong; there was a great deal of sense in what they said. But why so much optimism? It sounded so crude, so vulgar. Yet perhaps, I thought, boastfulness is only natural to the injured vanity of the young men of a long-conquered race.

Still the seed of the next war was being planted; arrogant West grappling

the new arrogant East - and whose fault was it?

In passing, I may remark that the speech of the Indian young of to-day is not poetic and picturesque as it was thirty years ago. They speak with a realistic turn of phrase scarcely mitigated by a fluid use of historical fact. Instead of inventing a story in order to illustrate a point, the intelligent young man quotes an event in history. This is the beginning of a mental barrenness which will kill our fertile imagination; I can forecast a day that I shall live to see when no Hindu will make his point without quoting abundant statistics. The pestilence of figures is spreading from mind to mind.

III

That some of my old friends had grown rich in India while I was in America was no fault of mine. So far as I knew, the war so upset the economic life of India that some new groups had to become wealthy, and I admit I was a bit elated to find among them one or two friends of my own!

Nilu had begun life as a college professor; but now, at the age of thirtysix, he owned three factories and had about seventeen-hundred souls in his employ. I could not believe my eyes when I beheld the lad of five-feet-six, now grown somewhat rotund, jumping from his Rolls-Royce car! I simply could not entertain the vision as a reality. But there he was coming to me with hands stretched out to take mine in his. How could he be my boyhood's friend and grow rich? Impossible!

He was stout, and pale-brown in complexion, with a round, beneficentlooking face. The short, sharp nose was pugnacious, no doubt, but not the rest of him! Girlish eyes, large and deep,- dark brown, an even brow,

high, smooth, care-free forehead, and moderately marked chin- there was not a feature to indicate anything but the college professor. His mouth was small, its bow-shaped lips were like those of a child of six or seven. How could such a helpless fellow manage to be clever enough to be rich? To my mind, the acquisition of wealth presupposes a Mephistophelian ability, reinforced by a Napoleonic will-topower; yet lo, here was a rich man who was Napoleonic in nothing but in stature!

I asked Nilu to be seated on the floor of our temple porch. He had come all the way from Calcutta to the edge of the town where we dwelt. Before us were a few trees, a green pasture, and the Ganges where people were bathing.

I spoke to him in English; for I could n't imagine any other of our languages suited to the Rolls-Royce

car.

'It is very kind of you to come to see me, particularly now that you are so busy.'

He fanned his face with his silken chuddar. He was dressed in exquisite silk robes of ivory yellow from which his brown head rose like the fragment of a statue on an ivory pedestal. After having fanned himself for a while, he spoke in reminiscent vein.

'I wish I had my old courage to be poor, and had stuck to teaching history, but I cannot afford to be poor, and so I have no time to live. Look here! I want you to see something of our rich people. I shall put that car of mine at your disposal.'

'But, my dear fellow, I do not need your car,' I answered earnestly.

'Childish as ever,' Nilu admonished me. 'If you do not own a car you are no gentleman. That is one of the rules of our set.'

'But I am a Brahman; that I con

sider is passport to any place.' I spoke loftily.

'Oh no, my boy. That was all right before the war, but between the war and Gandhi the Brahman's prestige has been knocked into a cocked hat. The rich, particularly the newly rich, are the model of our life. You must have the trappings of a rich man. Don't demur, old fellow. I shan't hear of it. In an hour, another car will come to fetch me. It is, let me see, four in the afternoon; I shall expect you to dine with us at seven. Use the car as your own as long as you are here; it will facilitate your entrée into many exclusive places.

"By the bye, have you any telephone in this temple?'

That made me furious.

"Telephone in the house of God!' I exclaimed.

'Of course not! How stupid of me,' he said to himself, taking not the slightest notice of my indignation. 'Well, I shall have to telegraph you from time to time. I want to show you what our Indian hospitality is. Let me just take charge of you; I want you to see what has happened here while you have been wasting your time in America. I myself wasted three years in Harvard, but knew better than to stay there, but you spent thirteen years. Golly! What a waste of time! Yet I must say that America taught me how to get where I am.'

Here my friend looked at his watch. It wanted some twenty minutes to five. He said, 'I married out of caste, as you know. My wife is coming to meet you.'

'What? A Hindu girl going about alone in an automobile?' I questioned in amazement.

'What do you want her on — an elephant?' Nilu hit back. 'You have kept your mediævalism alive in spite of America. Why should n't my wife go about in her husband's car?'

'Look here!' I began a long ha

rangue. 'I am very much obliged to you for your car. I am glad that you will show me the life of the new rich, but let us talk Bengali. Why are you so restless? India is eternal. Why look at your watch? Why should you count the minutes in Eternity? There is the Ganges; she flows on now that the bathers are very few with the same inevitable ease as when the bathers were many in the morning.

"The English tongue that we have spoken registers only the froth and scum of our being. Now give thy heart's inmost talk. Let the wing of forgetfulness bear away the burden of work. Thou knowest that I long for the light of thy soul in the gaze of thine eyes, brother. It is an age since we dreamed on the green fields and by the rushing waters. I care not if thou art riding the stallion of wealth or walking on the unsandaled feet of poverty; only tell me thine inmost story, thy heart's longing and thy spirit's dream. I meet thee across the river of boyhood on the shore of middle-age! Tell me if thy head rests on the pillow of serenity and thy limbs repose on the couch of friendliness and love."

'Shiva Vishnu! Dost thou know I spend all my days speaking English?' he burst forth. 'I deal with English firms, they send men who are ignorant of any tongue save their own, and I speak better than they. The hours of the day I waste talking alien speech! My soul has no time. My heart knows no serenity. My head rests - if rest that be-on the pillow of care. Gunga, mother of waters, I never see; I bathe in my private bath; I work in my private office. I am alone - lonely as I used to be in solitary confinement when the British put me in prison on my return from America at the inception of the war.'

'Did they charge thee with treason? Wert thou tried?' I asked.

'Nay, brother,' he answered. 'In the time of that insane slaughter, the State turned the key on anyone it suspected, in any place it saw fit. I, among others, was never tried, and I was released after four years, when it suited the convenience of the State.'

'How many were you?'

'We were fifteen in one beauty parlor (exact translation of Shrighar). At first they put us in solitary cells in order to make us confess what we might know. There I meditated on God, but somehow that did not help to soften the hearts of our jailers, so we all began a hunger strike. I fasted sixty days. Rama, Rama, that broke the resistance of our jailers! Those protectors of peace did not wish to have us die; so when the third score of days passed and I would not break my fast, they gave us what we wanted and let us have our way in the King's hotel, as we called the jail. From now on we had books, papers, good food, and no more solitary confinement, and my soul could dream untrammeled by telephones, and unsought by visitors.'

'It is strange that India's Harvard and Oxford graduates have given more of themselves to their country than Indians from other Western universities,' I remarked.

Nilu answered, "True, very true. Harvard University at present has contributed more men that follow Gandhi's teachings than any other American university where Hindus have studied. Harvard has the greatest prestige in India; for it has supplied us with the largest number of jail-birds!' he concluded in English.

Just then my friend's wife arrived in her car. She wore a beautiful sari of violet fringed with gold. I noticed that she had slippers but no stockings her bronze-colored ankles needed no covering.

It thrilled me when she knelt down

and took the dust from my feet. Ah, still to be honored as a Brahman what a privilege! I was on the verge of tears. I blessed her: 'Be thou thy husband's jewel of pride. Bear him royal sons.'

Then all three of us took off our slippers and climbed the cool cemented stairway to the shrine proper, two flights above. There we bowed to Krishna; then sat on the porch in silence for a time, until my sister came from our adjoining house to greet Nilu's wife. She offered us sweetmeats from the remnants of the noon offering to the god.

Nilu's wife touched the sacramental morsel to her forehead first, as a salutation to it, then put it in her curving mouth.

It was a pity they could not linger, but the Rolls-Royce stayed behind for my use. Again that violet-draped woman bowed to my sister and to me, took the dust from our feet, and went.

'Is there anything more beautiful than the good old courtesies?' I said to her husband, who saluted us after, following her example. I blessed them both.

As they climbed into their car, Nilu said in English, 'You know this salutation-business is beautiful for you Brahmans; but we, who are not Brahmans, feel as if our backs would break!'

My sister, it appeared, had for her the same worship as my brother and I. She came to know her long before we did, because she was about fifteen years older than my brother, who was separated from me by four years. Doubtless she could tell us much about her that would be new to us.

I had found my sister little changed. She had never resembled the rest of us- she had lighter skin, 'coffee, tempered by cream,' my brother used to say, not coffee-clear like ours; her nose was aquiline, almost Semitic; her eyes were slanting, not round, darkened by long black lashes; there was some gray now in her thick jet hair and a line or two in that smooth brow, but nothing else, save her white widow's sari, spoke of any change. In the darkness, I could distinguish nothing but the whiteness of her dress, but I knew that its severity was unmitigated by any borders of colorful design. She had never worn ornaments even in her youth. Great was her austerity, and fortunately she was very strong. None of us could remember a day when she felt tired enough to omit the fulfillment of a single duty. She lived on two small meals a dayaltogether a one-half pound of rice and a pound of milk, while she superintended the work of a temple, fed forty or fifty people, and meditated on God three solid hours every day, beside which she took care of a daughter-inlaw, son, and grandson. She gave an hour and a half each day to her grandson, as a part of religious communion. But, in spite of her competence, she was not like our mother; she had a plethora of common sense. Once, when a European lady had invited her to tea, my sister inquiring the hour and hearing that it was half-past four, answered, 'Oh! I am sorry to say then that it will be impossible for me to come, as the important preparation of

God-business begins after four, and if I do not attend to it, the evensong will not be as good as usual.'

Such a reply would have been impossible from my mother; to her God was as light as a whim, not a heavy weight on her mind. I am certain that she would have found as much of Him in a tea-cup as in an evensong. Was he not spirit omnipresent?

While I was thinking of these things, my sister was saying: 'To me, mother gave different instructions from yours, my brothers. I was taught only stories and songs of devotion. I do not know whether she had a premonition that I should become a widow at twenty-two, but, none the less, she taught me as if she felt certain of it, her sweet understanding firmly paving the road, so that it would be firmer under my feet at the bleak hour of calamity. And I believe that was why she had me taught English.'

I expressed surprise at this for my mother herself knew not how to read or write. My sister explained that mother had said to her:

'I belong to the age when wisdom came to men's hearts naturally, but thou, my child, art born in a time when only printed words are considered true. Learn English, my daughter; it is the ruler's language and since thou canst not rule men without some cunning, the English tomes may help thee to hold thy place in this world.'

'It did serve me in good stead after my husband's death,' went on my sister. 'But, thank God, I have forgotten all of that language now.'

'Why?' I asked.

'Oh, it has so little wisdom and so much beauty. The last story I read in English was about a dead man's ghost who tells his son how he, his father, was murdered, then the young prince, an innocent dreamer, kills an old fool, whose daughter's heart he breaks and

fights her brother at her funeral. Later, the prince is killed by the brother whom he kills as well. It has luscious words in it, for an innocent young man's sorrow tastes sweet to the reader; but how can it be a tale of wisdom which our mother would have had me learn? Can ghosts be so revengeful? Is it right to tell one's mother that she is unchaste, and all because of the idle talkativeness of a good-fornothing spirit, who should go to Heaven instead of walking about at night to poison his son's life with cruel thirst for vengeance? That tale destroyed all my ambition to know English. Thou dost know the language well; was I not right to give it up?'

'Yes, that wanton tale of beauty should discourage anybody.' Thus I disposed of Prince Hamlet.

My sister resumed: 'I took to learning from mother all the stories about our ancestor Chaitanya. She began them all in the same way. 'Listen, oh listen to the prophet of love! He was born to preach love to Hindu and Mohammedan alike in order to show that there is only one God, though we give him many names, and he was our ancestor.'

'How old wert thou, sister, when mother taught thee this story?' I asked.

'I was fourteen. After that she taught me line upon line of the story of Savitri and how she saved her husband from death. Next I memorized the trial of Sita. When I grew to be a woman, I was made to fast twenty-four hours in seclusion with her, and in that seclusion she taught me Gita Govinda, the Song of Songs, and imparted the secret and wisdom of love to my heart.' Suddenly she stopped to ask me, 'How do Western mothers teach their daughters the art and wisdom of love?'

'Am I a woman or a Westerner