we journey, the wayside shelter in which we pause,
are not pictures while yet we travel--they are too necessary, too
obvious. When, however, before turning into the evening resthouse, we
look back upon the cities, fields, rivers and hills which we have been
through in Life's morning, then, in the light of the passing day, are
they pictures indeed. Thus, when my opportunity came, did I look back,
and was engrossed.

Was this interest aroused within me solely by a natural affection for
my own past? Some personal feeling, of course, there must have been, but
the pictures had also an independent artistic value of their own. There
is no event in my reminiscences worthy of being preserved for all time.
But the quality of the subject is not the only justification for a
record. What one has truly felt, if only it can be made sensible to
others, is always of importance to one's fellow men. If pictures which
have taken shape in memory can be brought out in words, they are worth a
place in literature.

It is as literary material that I offer my memory pictures. To take them
as an attempt at autobiography would be a mistake. In such a view these
reminiscences would appear useless as well as incomplete.

(2) _Teaching Begins_

We three boys were being brought up together. Both my companions were
two years older than I. When they were placed under their tutor, my
teaching also began, but of what I learnt nothing remains in my memory.

What constantly recurs to me is "The rain patters, the leaf quivers."[1]
I am just come to anchor after crossing the stormy region of the
_kara_, _khala_[2] series; and I am reading "The rain patters, the leaf
quivers," for me the first poem of the Arch Poet. Whenever the joy of
that day comes back to me, even now, I realise why rhyme is so needful
in poetry. Because of it the words come to an end, and yet end not; the
utterance is over, but not its ring; and the ear and the mind can go on
and on with their game of tossing the rhyme to each other. Thus did the
rain patter and the leaves quiver again and again, the live-long day in
my consciousness.

Another episode of this period of my early boyhood is held fast in my
mind.

We had an old cashier, Kailash by name, who was like one of the family.
He was a great wit, and would be constantly cracking jokes with
everybody, old and young; recently married sons-in-law, new comers into
the family circle, being his special butts. There was room