vels, and, with the
strain of each repetition, the narrative got looser and looser till it
utterly refused to fit into the facts. Like everything else, alas, a
story also gets stale and the glory of the teller suffers likewise; that
is why he has to add fresh colouring every time to keep up its
freshness.

After my return from the hills I was the principal speaker at my
mother's open air gatherings on the roof terrace in the evenings. The
temptation to become famous in the eyes of one's mother is as difficult
to resist as such fame is easy to earn. While I was at the Normal
School, when I first came across the information in some reader that the
Sun was hundreds and thousands of times as big as the Earth, I at once
disclosed it to my mother. It served to prove that he who was small to
look at might yet have a considerable amount of bigness about him. I
used also to recite to her the scraps of poetry used as illustrations in
the chapter on prosody or rhetoric of our Bengali grammar. Now I
retailed at her evening gatherings the astronomical tit-bits I had
gleaned from Proctor.

My father's follower Kishori belonged at one time to a band of reciters
of Dasarathi's jingling versions of the Epics. While we were together in
the hills he often said to me: "Oh, my little brother,[28] if I only had
had you in our troupe we could have got up a splendid performance." This
would open up to me a tempting picture of wandering as a minstrel boy
from place to place, reciting and singing. I learnt from him many of the
songs in his repertoire and these were in even greater request than my
talks about the photosphere of the Sun or the many moons of Saturn.

But the achievement of mine which appealed most to my mother was that
while the rest of the inmates of the inner apartments had to be content
with Krittivasa's Bengali rendering of the Ramayana, I had been reading
with my father the original of Maharshi Valmiki himself, Sanscrit metre
and all. "Read me some of that Ramayana, _do_!" she said, overjoyed at
this news which I had given her.

[Illustration: The Servant-maids in the Verandah]

Alas, my reading of Valmiki had been limited to the short extract from
his Ramayana given in my Sanskrit reader, and even that I had not
fully mastered. Moreover, on looking over it now, I found that my
memory had played me false and much of what I thought I knew had become
hazy. But I lacked the courage to plead "I have forgotten" to the eager
m