most gratifying, and could not bring myself to deprive him by asking
for another help.

Then again Iswar was entrusted with a daily allowance of money for
procuring our afternoon light refreshment. He would ask us every morning
what we should like to have. We knew that to mention the cheapest would
be accounted best, so sometimes we ordered a light refection of puffed
rice, and at others an indigestible one of boiled gram or roasted
groundnuts. It was evident that Iswar was not as painstakingly
punctilious in regard to our diet as with the shastric proprieties.

(5) _The Normal School_

While at the Oriental Seminary I had discovered a way out of the
degradation of being a mere pupil. I had started a class of my own in a
corner of our verandah. The wooden bars of the railing were my pupils,
and I would act the schoolmaster, cane in hand, seated on a chair in
front of them. I had decided which were the good boys and which the
bad--nay, further, I could distinguish clearly the quiet from the
naughty, the clever from the stupid. The bad rails had suffered so much
from my constant caning that they must have longed to give up the ghost
had they been alive. And the more scarred they got with my strokes the
worse they angered me, till I knew not how to punish them enough. None
remain to bear witness to-day how tremendously I tyrannised over that
poor dumb class of mine. My wooden pupils have since been replaced by
cast-iron railings, nor have any of the new generation taken up their
education in the same way--they could never have made the same
impression.

I have since realised how much easier it is to acquire the manner than
the matter. Without an effort had I assimilated all the impatience, the
short temper, the partiality and the injustice displayed by my teachers
to the exclusion of the rest of their teaching. My only consolation is
that I had not the power of venting these barbarities on any sentient
creature. Nevertheless the difference between my wooden pupils and those
of the Seminary did not prevent my psychology from being identical with
that of its schoolmasters.

I could not have been long at the Oriental Seminary, for I was still of
tender age when I joined the Normal School. The only one of its features
which I remember is that before the classes began all the boys had to
sit in a row in the gallery and go through some kind of singing or
chanting of verses--evidently an attempt at introducing an ele