THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 Ib flIMssfonarie 
 
 BY SIR WILLIAM W. HUNTER, K.C.S.I., M.A., LL.D. 
 
 TWENTY-THIRD THOUSAND 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAJOR-GENERAL SIR CHARLES D"OYLY, BART. 
 
 HENRY FROWDE: 1897
 
 HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
 
 OS 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE Two ENCAMPMENTS ..... 5 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CHILD 29 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 45 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN .... 66 
 
 1314171
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 I. THE LIEUTENANT-GOVERNOR'S CAMP - Frontispiece 
 
 II. THE MISSIONARY ENCAMPMENT - To face p. 12 
 
 III. THE ANCIENT FACTORY 44 
 
 IV. THE START FOR NEW HOMES - - ,,64 
 V. THE STATION GRAVE -YARD - - ,,134
 
 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 
 
 SUNDAY passed rather languidly in the Lieu- 
 tenant-Governor's camp. The aide-de-camp had 
 officially marked the claims of the day by appearing 
 in his staff-spurs at breakfast, and the judge read 
 service in the mess-tent. The small party then 
 separated, the younger men to watch the cleaning 
 of their guns and examine the scratches which 
 the dogs had got during yesterday's jackal-hunt, 
 the seniors to work off the arrears of the week 
 or to write letters home. 
 
 It was only the flying camp of the Lieutenant- 
 Governor of Bengal, and had little of the elaborate 
 equipage which attends a progress of the Vice- 
 roy, or the prolonged cold-weather tours of the
 
 6 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 Lieutenant- Governors of the North-west and the 
 Punjab. Half a dozen tents on either side formed 
 a short broad street down the middle of a mango - 
 grove, with a strip of lawn between and a noble 
 pipal-tree closing in the upper end. On the 
 right of its towering masses of foliage stood the 
 Lieutenant-Governor's pavilion, the British flag 
 twisting lazily round its pole in the sunshine. 
 
 The tents of the Secretary to Government, the 
 private secretary, the aide-de-camp, and the officer 
 commanding the escort, were ranged in military 
 line on one side of the lawn. The less regular 
 row facing them was made up of the tents of our 
 small District staff, the judge, the magistrate and 
 his assistant, the superintendent of police, and the 
 old doctor with his melancholy flute. A structure 
 of yellow native cloth for mess purposes and 
 public receptions stood at the head of our side of 
 the little white street, and was connected with the 
 Lieutenant- Governor's pavilion by a covered way 
 of canvas across the grass. A few clerks, the 
 troopers of the escort, and the servants, had their 
 humble pent-roof encampment behind the pipal- 
 tree on the outskirts of the grove.
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 7 
 
 After luncheon the party drew together again, 
 and blue spires began to curl upwards from so- 
 ciable cheroots under the tent door-flaps. The 
 feathered republic of the grove also awakened 
 from its noonday silence. The harmless De- 
 cember sun poured its floods of light through 
 the foliage, carpeting the lawn with patterns of 
 rich tracery. Two crows became suddenly aware 
 that it was the afternoon, and fell to plotting 
 in harsh caws how to steal their supper. A joint- 
 family of minas, in their cold-weather plumage, 
 resumed their lovers' quarrels where they had left 
 off before their siesta, dashing from bough to 
 bough in mock pursuit, amid much chattering 
 and noisy flirtation. Squirrels with twitching 
 tails and lizards with watchful glances ran up 
 and down the trunk and lower arms of the great 
 pipal-tree; a colony of little warblers fluttered 
 in the middle stories ; and one kite, wheeling 
 on motionless wings above, kept a hungry eye 
 upon all. 
 
 Presently the assistant magistrate, the aide-de- 
 camp, and the escort officer rode off with the 
 dogs, leaving their comrade the private secretary
 
 8 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 to puzzle out the precedence of the hill chiefs who 
 were to attend the Darbar next morning. The 
 Secretary to Government, jaded by his day's 
 work, settled himself reposefully in a long cane 
 chair, with a glass ot freshly mixed lemonade 
 and a volume of Browning. The judge came 
 forth from an interview in the pavilion ; and it 
 fell to my duty, as magistrate of the District, to 
 attend the Lieutenant-Governor on his evening 
 ride. 
 
 Our path lay upward, across the dips and undu- 
 lations amid which the hill-country breaks down 
 upon the plains. The scrub jungle stretched 
 before us, until it merged in the heavier forest 
 of the mountains. On our left a broken line ot 
 embankments came at intervals in sight, the re- 
 mains of a road commenced as a relief work for 
 the highland people during a famine, and given 
 up when the scarcity passed off. Its grass-grown 
 sides, furrowed by four rainy seasons, and the 
 unbridged chasms left for the water-courses, were 
 eloquent with the silent reproaches of an unfin- 
 ished work. I was pleading its cause, and urging 
 its completion as a means of opening up hill fairs ;
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 9 
 
 throwing in the hope of a coal-mine on the route, 
 from the argument of some rather unpromising 
 shale which I had picked up in a gully. 
 
 'Ah! Ormiston,' said the Lieutenant-Governor, 
 with good-natured pleasantry, 'so you too have 
 joined the reformers! I thought that the work 
 of the Secretariat might have rendered you a safe 
 man. But I suppose you are now going to make 
 up for three years of discouraging criticism of 
 other men's projects by starting plenty of your 
 own. Wherever I go it is the same. You Com- 
 petition men come to Bengal with your heads full 
 of ideas, and you expect me to find the money 
 to carry them out. Why cannot you be content 
 with things as you find them, as we were before 
 you? It is only a few years since poor John 
 Company was shovelled underground, and already 
 his peaceful ways seem to belong to a remote 
 antiquity. 
 
 ' If I set down a man as a harmless sportsman, 
 with his soul safely centred in his guns and dogs, 
 he no sooner gets charge of a District than he 
 sends up a report on the cattle disease, with a 
 draft Bill for preserving the village pastures. If
 
 10 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 he is a reading man, he has a scheme for rebuilding 
 our superfine education department on the rational 
 basis of the indigenous schools. If law is his 
 fancy, he objects to the time-honoured practice of 
 the native magistrates taking evidence in two or 
 three cases at the same time, or he believes in the 
 possibility of reforming the Village Watch. But 
 the District Officer with a taste for public works is 
 the most fatal of your gifted generation. One man 
 wants to bridge a river, another to cut a canal, a 
 third dreams of cheap tramways. Your neighbour 
 in the next District presented me yesterday with 
 a complete scheme for improved lock-ups, and you 
 yourself are manifestly in the early stage of road 
 fever. I do not dare to take my Public Works 
 Secretary with me on tour, lest he should be won 
 over to your projects as well as myself. But since 
 the Mutiny, the deluge ! ' 
 
 It was in the early time of promise, soon after 
 India had passed to the Crown, when the spirit 
 of improvement woke up from its long lethargy, 
 and each year brought forth some great measure. 
 The Codes which stand as stately landmarks at 
 the commencement of Her Majesty's rule were
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS II 
 
 recently enacted, and pledges that lay dormant 
 during- three - quarters of a century had been 
 redeemed by the land-law defining the rights 
 of the tillers of the soil. No one could have 
 a better claim than Sir Charles Fairfax to a little 
 comic grumbling at the rapidity of the pace, for 
 no one in the old torpid days had been a stouter 
 champion of progress. As his talk ran up and 
 down the gamut from grave to gay, we insensibly 
 wound into the hills. The scrub jungle gave place 
 to fair-sized sal-trees ; the couple of troopers who 
 followed at a little distance were no longer visi- 
 ble, and only made their presence known by the 
 crackling of their horses through the dry brush- 
 wood, or an occasional gleam of their lances among 
 the foliage. Suddenly we came upon a scene 
 in strange contrast with the secular thoughts and 
 avocations of our own day. The forest opened 
 out into a long grassy glade, in which the Old 
 Missionary was holding his yearly gathering of 
 the hillmen after the November harvest. 
 
 At the further end of the narrow valley a banian- 
 tree rose in decaying dignity over a ruined shrine, 
 which it had once climbed as a creeper. The
 
 12 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 thin ancient bricks were clamped together in a 
 vegetable grasp stronger than iron, and the 
 domed roof now formed the heart of the mighty 
 stem. The branches had thrown down suckers 
 to the ground, in which many of them had struck 
 and become new sources of sap, so that the pile 
 of foliage and timber was supported around its 
 magnificent circumference by colonnades of roots. 
 Two of these pillared recesses were converted into 
 huts. An outer circle of hanging roots, with rude 
 structures peeping through, obscured the central 
 stem and ancient shrine. 
 
 In front of the wooded mass the Old Missionary 
 sat bare-headed on a steep bank of turf, with 
 a semicircle of elderly hillmen pleading some cause 
 before him. To his right, half hidden among a 
 cloister of hanging roots, a fair little English 
 girl seemed to be explaining a picture-book to 
 a group of brown children. Further off, on his 
 left, a crowd of hillmen and their wives squatted 
 around a native preacher who was haranguing 
 with earnest gesticulations. 
 
 It was one of the ancient halting-places on the 
 western pilgrim route, and had a story of its own.
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 13 
 
 About four hundred years ago a Rajput chief and 
 his wife rested here on their way to the holy city 
 on the Orissa shore. The chief was childless, and 
 having visited the shrines of the Upper Ganges in 
 vain, he was at length wearied by the prayers of 
 his princess into making the great pilgrimage to 
 Jagannath, from which few devotees then returned. 
 His State lay near the desert in the north-west of 
 India, eight months' march from the holy city on 
 the Bay of Bengal. So he levied two years' taxes 
 from his subjects ; and having placed his territory 
 in charge of his old Brahman Minister, he set forth 
 with a train of nephews who might have given 
 trouble in his absence, and a hundred of his bravest 
 swordsmen. 
 
 After he and his princess, but more particularly 
 the princess, had done everything that piety could 
 suggest at the shrines of Benares and Gaya, they 
 took the western route through the jungle to the 
 Orissa coast. The chief, fatigued with so much 
 unwonted religion, perhaps chose this route as 
 only one more place of pilgrimage lay upon it, 
 and his little band of Rajput chivalry made him 
 careless of attacks by the forest tribes. His wife
 
 14 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 no doubt learned with equal gladness that the 
 shrine on the way was one of those very ancient 
 retreats in which the wild worship of the hillmen 
 mingles with that of the Brahmans ; shrines seldom 
 visited by reason of their remoteness, and therefore 
 the more efficacious in granting the prayers of 
 their devotees. The sport-loving chief hunted in 
 the forest with his followers as they journeyed 
 along. The princess performed her devotions 
 with her Spiritual Guide at every brook of flowing 
 water, and as they crossed each successive ridge 
 in the hills ; halting for a full day's prayer when- 
 ever they came upon a spot where two streams met. 
 They had left behind them the shrine of the 
 hill-god, half temple half cave, with its weird rites, 
 and another month would bring them to the end 
 of their pilgrimage; to the abode of Jagannath 
 on the Orissa shore. The gentle and beautiful 
 worship of Jagannath, literally the Lord of the 
 Universe, before whom all men are equal, and 
 within whose purifying precincts alone all castes 
 can eat together, appeals in a special manner to 
 the repressed sympathies of Indian women. The 
 offerings to this much misrepresented god are
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 15 
 
 offerings of flowers and grain, not of blood. 
 Thousands of Hindus go through life with a longing 
 to partake of the consecrated rice at his shrine, 
 and to die at the ' Gate of Heaven,' a strip of sand 
 with the temple bells of his holy city on one side 
 and the boom of the ocean on the other. He is 
 the hearer of prayer ; and the poor princess, like 
 many a childless woman since, was hastening the 
 march in the belief that she had only to pour out 
 her heart before the kind god, in order that its 
 desire should be satisfied. 
 
 But one evening the chief, who had been hunting 
 in the forest, was brought into camp clawed by 
 a bear. He died next morning, and the nephews, 
 having no leisure to settle their claims to the 
 succession, proclaimed the princess regent to give 
 them time for intrigue. She sent word that she 
 had already devoted herself as Sati, literally the 
 True Wife, and would rejoin her husband on 
 the funeral pile. The kinsmen tried to imprison 
 her by pegging down the door-flaps of the tent, 
 but the Rajput princess cut through the canvas 
 with her husband's sword, and calling down the 
 wrath of God on any who should stay her path,
 
 1 6 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 she walked unveiled to the pyre and consummated 
 the awful rite. She had found her Gate ot 
 Heaven though not on the Orissa shore. 
 
 The nephews erected one of those little plat- 
 forms of brick, with a stunted dome and the rudely 
 carved impression of a hand, which at that period 
 marked the site of a Sati; burned down a space 
 in the jungle around it; and after the due rites 
 hurried north to fight for the succession. The 
 superstition of the hillmen kept the ground clear 
 in after generations. The grazing of the pack- 
 bullocks that halted there enlarged it, and a creeper 
 of the Indian fig or banian, which found root 
 in the crumbling monument, grew into a great 
 tree. The shape of the brick dome could still 
 be traced in the heart of its mighty hollow trunk. 
 
 The spot became a place for tribal meetings 
 of the hillmen, and a favourite camping-ground 
 on the western pilgrim route. One of the last 
 of the independent sovereigns of Bengal, having 
 happened to halt there with his troops, caused an 
 artificial lake to be dug for the use of travellers. 
 The tree, now about three hundred years old, still 
 went by the name of the Rajput Princess's Banian,
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 1J 
 
 and a slab of blue-stone on the steps leading- down 
 to the water bore the Persian inscription of the 
 Muhammadan king 1 : ' By order of God, whoso- 
 ever shall do a good deed, he shall be rewarded 
 tenfold. Allah-ud-din, commonly called Husain 
 Shah Badshah, son of Sayyid Ashraf Husain, con- 
 structed this lake. On him blessings. May God 
 preserve his kingdom and his people. A.H. 922 * 
 ( = A.D. 1516). 
 
 As we dismounted, the Old Missionary rose and 
 courteously greeted his unexpected visitors. He 
 was a striking figure, tall and gaunt, with a long- 
 white beard and large sunken eyes which had in 
 them a look of settled calm. He and the Governor 
 met as old friends, and after some talk between 
 them about the past, Sir Charles begged our host 
 to go on with the matter before him. 
 
 A hillman, who had been away from his village 
 a few years at work on the new railway, loudly 
 complained that, now he had come back, he found 
 his homestead ploughed up, and his fields par- 
 celled out among the tribesmen. The village head 
 pleaded, in reply, the hill custom of re-distributing 
 a man's land if he remained absent during- two 
 
 C
 
 l8 THE OLD MISSIONARY . 
 
 harvests, but offered, according to that custom, 
 to again allot to the returned kinsman a share 
 in the hamlet fields, if he would give the usual 
 feast to the village. ' But now that he has come 
 back rich, he has grown stingy and will give 
 nothing.' The other elders signified their assent 
 to this unflattering statement, grunting out : * He 
 will give nothing; he will give nothing.' The 
 complainant rejoined that the fields offered to 
 him lay high, and beyond the reach of water from 
 the village tank, while his old ones were among 
 the best in the hamlet. 
 
 After hearing both sides the Old Missionary 
 delivered judgement, that the man was to give 
 a feast, that he was to get back a fair share of the 
 watered lands with the grazing right for his buffa- 
 loes in the jungle, and that, to make his name great, 
 he should enlarge the village tank which no longer 
 sufficed to irrigate the surrounding cultivation. The 
 elders again signified their approval, repeating 
 cordially : ' His name will be great ; his name will 
 be great.' The man also agreed, and the reconciled 
 kindred moved off to have a friendly wrangle as 
 to the exact outlay on goat-flesh and rice-beer.
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS ig 
 
 Other village groups edged forward in front of 
 the Missionary, with salutations of ' O Incarnation 
 of Justice,' ' O Refuge of the Poor,' each bringing 
 a boundary dispute, or a feud about the water- 
 courses, or some knotty question of inheritance, 
 which must otherwise be determined by blows. 
 I afterwards learned that it was a practice of the 
 Old Missionary on Sunday evenings in camp to 
 settle all quarrels in the neighbouring hamlets, so 
 that at least upon one day in the week the sun 
 should go down on no man's wrath. Sir Charles, 
 who remembered his friend's custom, sat down 
 on the grassy bank beside him to watch the pro- 
 ceedings. My own attention was drawn to the 
 throng around the native pastor, and thither 
 I strolled, leaving the Old Missionary judging his 
 little Israel under the tree. 
 
 The preacher, a young Brahman whose slender 
 form and finely-cut features contrasted with the 
 square-set bodies and bullet-heads of the hillmen 
 before him, appeared to be coming to the end of 
 his discourse. From the frequent recurrence of the 
 words, I gathered that he was enforcing the text, 
 4 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words 
 C 2
 
 20 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 shall not pass away.' He spoke of the ancient hill 
 shrines in the country around, and how their poor 
 aboriginal gods had had to give place to the strong 
 clever deities from the Hindu plains. He reminded 
 the tribesmen that one Hindu priest after another 
 had come into their glens, each bringing his own 
 divinity, and each demanding separate offerings 
 under penalty of heaven-sent destruction and wrath. 
 There was a new Hindu god to be appeased at seed- 
 time, another to be paid at harvest, a third to be 
 propitiated in seasons of famine, a fourth for a con- 
 sideration would avert the small-pox, besides a mul- 
 titude of lesser deities who took toll and tax at every 
 incident of domestic life. Here some accidental 
 listeners from a non-Christian hamlet muttered feel- 
 ingly, ' The Brahman speaks true.' So, he con- 
 tinued, your fathers were in bondage to many gods, 
 for there was no single one in whom they could put 
 their whole trust. Then he burst forth in praise 
 of the one Christian God, whose ear is open in all 
 seasons of sorrow and in all time of gladness : He 
 who slumbers not nor sleeps, but stands watch over 
 His people, as the mountains stood around their 
 homes, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 21 
 
 I afterwards knew that Indian preacher well; 
 knew him when his higher nature seemed stifled 
 amid the paltry adulation of London drawing- 
 rooms ; knew him also years later, when, in sor- 
 row and solitude, he began afresh the work which 
 has endeared his memory to the hill races. But 
 never during the checkered years of his too short 
 life, neither at the height of his fame, nor in the 
 pathos of his self-abasement, can I recall anything 
 that came from him more impressive than the 
 words with which, then a youth fresh from college, 
 he ended his discourse in that forest glade. It 
 is difficult in a translation to preserve the effect, 
 at once simple and solemn, of his sentences as 
 they flowed forth in the native tongue: 
 
 ' Heaven and earth shall pass away. During 
 the first half of the harvest moon you see thou- 
 sands of lights shooting through the air. You 
 call them the Reapers' Torches, and learned 
 men in cities say they are the materials of stars 
 rushing red-hot through the sky till they scatter 
 and go out. You think they come to tell you 
 when to cut your November rice. But God 
 sends them as His blazing heralds from heaven
 
 22 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 to proclaim that the heavens themselves are 
 passing away. 
 
 4 Earth, too, is crumbling beneath our feet. 
 The river from your hills no sooner spreads 
 itself upon the low country than it begins to rend 
 away its banks, tearing out for itself deep chasms 
 every rainy season, and covering with water what 
 was solid land. The villagers along its sides, as 
 they listen in terror through the night to the 
 thud, thud of the bank falling into the current, 
 hear in every noise a warning that the river is 
 drawing nearer to devour their homes. But those 
 sounds are the voice of God sent forth from the 
 darkness, declaring that this earth itself is passing 
 away. 
 
 4 Next harvest, when you lie out in the fields 
 and see the Reapers' Torches in the air, say to 
 yourselves, The heavens are telling of the glory 
 of God ; one night certifieth another. When you 
 are floating down your sal-trees in the rains, and 
 you tremble as the raft is swept towards the falling 
 bank, say, The earth is the Lord's; He is my 
 help and my deliverer; blessed be the name of 
 the Lord. For who is God save the Lord, or
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 23 
 
 who is a rock save our God ? Amid all changes, 
 He changes not. Heaven and earth shall pass 
 away, but one jot or one tittle of His word shall 
 not pass away until all be fulfilled. Amen and 
 amen.' 
 
 The short Indian twilight began to fade, and 
 it was time to return to our camp. The litigants 
 under the banian-tree had already dispersed, and 
 the Governor seemed to be arguing on some not 
 altogether harmonious subject with the Mission- 
 ary, whose daughter, a sweet and silent child of 
 nine, was now nestling close to the old man's 
 side. Sir Charles jumped up as I approached, 
 and saying, ' At any rate, I shall think over it/ 
 rode off with a cordial farewell. For the first 
 few miles his pace left no leisure for any reflection 
 except how to keep one's head clear of the 
 branches. But as we emerged from the brush- 
 wood on to the hard fissured downs, he slackened 
 into a trot, and asked what I thought of the 
 young preacher. I said he was a man of remark- 
 able eloquence. 
 
 ' I am glad to hear it,' replied Sir Charles, ' for 
 he is the first convert that my old friend has
 
 24 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 ever felt sure of. In former days, if I ventured 
 to congratulate him on his success among the 
 people, he used to say, sadly, that during his long 
 life he had baptized many, but he did not know 
 that he had made a single Christian. Christianity, 
 he maintained, can only grow up among native 
 converts in the second generation. This Brahman 
 lad, whom he sheltered from the wrath of his rela- 
 tives and sent to college in Calcutta, has given the 
 Old Missionary a new hopefulness in his work.' 
 
 ' But,' I interposed, ' who is the Old Missionary ? 
 He has been out on his cold-weather tour ever 
 since I came to the District.' 
 
 * Not been long enough in the District to know 
 the Old Missionary, and yet long enough to 
 almost persuade me to double your budget allow- 
 ance for roads ! Behold the ways of the Under- 
 secretary turned magistrate. At any rate, I should 
 know him well, for I spent the happiest years of 
 my life within sight of his deserted house on the 
 Solway. The first sound that I seem to remem- 
 ber is the tramp of his father's wooden leg, as 
 the old Commodore stumped up the aisle of our 
 Cumberland village church. The Old Missionary
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 25 
 
 himself joined the fleet as a midshipman during 
 its long- watch outside Toulon, and saw Nelson's 
 signal run up at Trafalgar. He left the navy at 
 the close of the war, and after several wild years 
 ending in a love-sorrow, he cut himself off from his 
 former life and shocked his people by going out 
 to India as a missionary. He had once, I believe, 
 a sort of connexion with some Society, and 
 received ordination from the Bishop of Calcutta; 
 but he would take no pay, buried himself in the 
 wilds of this then jungly district, and built his 
 church and school-house at his own expense. 
 
 4 When I was here as magistrate, he lived en- 
 tirely among the natives, and one of his fancies 
 was never to travel by carriage or horseback on 
 an earth over which his Master had journeyed 
 on foot. Trafalgar Douglas we used to call him, 
 and already even his nickname seems to be for- 
 gotten ! He has a child now, but I could as soon 
 have imagined Saint Simeon Stylites a married 
 man. The fact is that about ten years ago, 
 a brother missionary on his way down from 
 Benares died after a long illness in his house, 
 leaving a daughter penniless and without a friend.
 
 26 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 So Trafalgar Douglas, who was the soul of chivalry 
 to women although he never spoke to them, finding 
 it inconvenient to shelter the young lady on other 
 terms, married her. She died in giving birth to 
 the little girl whom you saw this evening.' 
 
 We rode on in silence, the Governor apparently 
 pursuing some train of thought which it was not 
 my place to interrupt. As our camp fires came 
 in sight, he suddenly asked : 
 
 1 How many of the hillmen have you still in 
 jail for their last outbreak?' 
 
 'About fifty, sir,' I replied. 
 
 ' Seven years,' he said, 4 are a long time to have 
 suffered for a folly which was perhaps as much 
 our fault as theirs. The judge was at me all the 
 afternoon on their behalf; and strangely enough 
 the Missionary got upon the same subject. I must 
 say for Trafalgar Douglas that if we had listened 
 to his warnings, the oppressions of the money- 
 lenders which drove the tribes to revolt would 
 have been looked into before the rising instead 
 of after it. He kept his own hillmen quiet, too, 
 through the business, and so broke up the com- 
 mon agreement which might have rendered the
 
 THE TWO ENCAMPMENTS 27 
 
 affair more awkward than it proved. He men- 
 tioned that there were nearly a hundred sentenced ; 
 what has become of the balance ? ' 
 
 4 The doctor tells me that the older men pined 
 to death in their first year of confinement. A few 
 have been liberated; these that remain seem 
 happy enough, and raise vegetables for the 
 whole Station as well as for the jail. They 
 have an idea that they are to serve the Queen 
 for fourteen years, and then go back in honour 
 to their villages.' 
 
 1 Well, send me the record of the case, please ; 
 with the names of the ten against whom least 
 was proved. I scarcely understand how the 
 Missionary led me into a subject which I have 
 always avoided with him. But the highest piety 
 seems to win its way as unconsciously as the 
 finest tact. What a work he has done in those 
 hills without ever knowing it ! I once asked him, 
 when I was magistrate of the District, to tell me 
 his secret for managing six thousand borderers 
 without a policeman or a case ever coming into 
 court. He answered simply that they were Chris- 
 tians. Why, his encampment to-night is on the
 
 28 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 very spot where the clans assembled yearly 
 after the November harvest, to hold their drunken 
 festival of the New Rice, and then to sally forth 
 on their cold-weather raid upon the lowlands. 
 If anything were to happen to my old friend, 
 I wonder what would become of his Civitas Dei 
 in the forest.' 
 
 Next day we all rode with His Honour to 
 the borders of our jurisdiction, where the officers 
 of the next District were waiting for him. With 
 the help of the clever pen of the assistant magis- 
 trate, I made what we flattered ourselves was an 
 unanswerable case for the release not of ten but 
 of twenty of the hill prisoners ; experience having 
 taught us that if a District Officer is to get an 
 inch from the Secretariat he must show cause for 
 an ell. In a couple of months a release arrived 
 from Government for fifteen of them, and as the 
 Old Missionary had come in from camp, I rode 
 over to his house to tell him the good news.
 
 [ '9 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CHILD 
 
 V 
 
 THE Missionary's dwelling was a straggling 
 one-storied bungalow, with the thick thatch pro- 
 jecting low over the veranda. Originally it must 
 have consisted of two small rooms. Various artless 
 additions, jutting out at angles to avoid the sun or 
 to catch the breeze, recorded the changing needs 
 of a long life, as the want of an office for the sale 
 of books, or of a dispensary for the sick, or of 
 chambers for his wife and child, arose. But the 
 rough wooden pillars of the veranda were festooned 
 with flowering creepers which gave a picturesque 
 unity and a grateful sense of greenness to the 
 whole. The cottage stood in an ample orchard of 
 mangoes, guavas, custard-apples, and other fruit- 
 bearing trees, planted by the Missionary's own 
 hand in skilful rows to allow free passage for 
 the wind. 
 
 A servant told me that his master would be
 
 30 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 back presently from Morning Service, and I amused 
 myself till his return by straying about his library. 
 This room, large, bare, and coarsely matted, 
 with only a folding camp-table and a few cane 
 chairs and country-made bookshelves rising to the 
 whitewashed canvas ceiling, had the faint smell of 
 damp volumes and decaying binding which is the 
 true odour of literature in Bengal. It opened on a 
 little rose-garden that led down by dilapidated brick 
 steps to a fish-pond overgrown with water-lilies, 
 from whose depths had been excavated the clay 
 for the thick mud walls of the house, and for 
 the mission chapel half screened by trees on the 
 opposite bank. 
 
 The Old Missionary's library contained a nonde- 
 script and rather tattered collection of grammars 
 and lexicons of the Indian vernaculars, a few San- 
 skrit texts, translations of the Testament in various 
 Indian dialects, medical works, and a dusty shelf 
 of treatises of the Irvingite sect. The inner end 
 of the room was lined with a bookcase partitioned 
 into pigeon-holes, for the manuscript slips of the 
 dictionary of the hill-language on which the old 
 man had long been at work. In earlier life he
 
 THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CHILD 31 
 
 compiled a grammar of that hitherto unwritten 
 speech. The dictionary was the labour of his age, 
 and as its progress became slower with advancing 
 years, the venerable scholar had grown almost 
 querulously anxious about its completion. Of late 
 the assistant magistrate, and the Sanskrit pandit 
 who followed the fortunes of that young officer, 
 had been helping as volunteers. In a corner of 
 the room stood a redwood press filled with books 
 of a very different sort voyages and naval bio- 
 graphies of the last century, with bundles of faded 
 letters and papers sent out to the Missionary from 
 his deserted Scottish home, on his father's death. 
 
 These bundles afterwards passed into my hands, 
 and from them I have learned what I know about 
 my old friend's family and life. The branch of the 
 Douglases of which he was the last male repre- 
 sentative perched securely through the Border 
 wars on their tower overlooking the Solway. But 
 an unlucky ancestor followed King James to London 
 in 1603, and was one of those foolish Scottish 
 gentlemen who ruined themselves by vying with 
 the richer English courtiers. His impoverished 
 descendants lost place among the magnates of
 
 32 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 their shire, and they were hated by the peasantry 
 for their Episcopalian faith, which was all that 
 the spendthrift knight brought back from the 
 South. Before the Jacobite rebellions in the next 
 century, the family had sold their land almost to 
 the mouth of the river on whose high bank their 
 castle stood. Seignorial claims to harbour dues 
 embroiled each succeeding head of the house with 
 the fishermen and the masters of salt-sloops. The 
 king's officers suspected the Tower not merely 
 of the venial offence of smuggling, but of graver 
 dealings with the Pretender at St. Germains. 
 
 Only once during two centuries did the race 
 produce a man of note. This was a devoted 
 Anglican priest, whose character stood out in 
 strange contrast to the wild and sullen stock from 
 which he sprang. Having resisted for conscience 
 sake the warnings of the Covenanting farmers, 
 he was driven across the Border with violence, 
 and ended as a canon of Carlisle. Among the Old 
 Missionary's books an early copy of Quarles's 
 Emblems in wooden boards bore a faded signa- 
 ture, l Carolus Douglas, presb.,' with the comment 
 'Rabbled in 1689' in a later hand. A quaint
 
 THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CHILD 33 
 
 duodecimo of 1633, the first edition of George 
 Herbert's Temple, had the words ' Saved from 
 the Rabblement ' on the title-page. 
 
 The Douglases of the Tower emerged like many 
 another depressed Scottish family during Lord 
 Bute's brief supremacy in 1762. The heir of the 
 house entered the navy, and, having raised a ship's 
 company among the Solway fishermen, advanced 
 in his profession. Forty-two years he passed in 
 the service, forty of them at sea, sometimes 
 cruising for over twenty months without drop- 
 ping anchor. He became one of the famous 
 ' chasing captains ' of the long war, and purchased 
 back a stretch of the family moorland with his 
 prize-money. He retired with a shattered leg as 
 Commodore, sailing home to the Solway in a half- 
 sinking frigate which he had captured from the 
 Spaniards, and afterwards bought in for a trifle 
 from the Admiralty. With its timbers and fine 
 mahogany planks he rebuilt the old staircase of 
 the Tower, so that every morning he might have 
 the fierce pleasure of treading the enemy under foot. 
 A gentle Cumberland girl, whom he married 
 during a short interval on shore, did not live long. 
 
 D
 
 34 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 Their only child, now the Old Missionary, was 
 early sent to sea. A letter in his boyish hand 
 just after Trafalgar, told the weather-beaten father 
 how his ship, * the Royal Sovereign, Rear- Admiral 
 Collingwood, was the first to break the enemy's 
 line by passing astern a Spanish three-decker 
 and ahead of a Spanish eighty-four,' together with 
 several curious episodes of the fight. The gallant 
 little midshipman was sent adrift at the close of 
 the war. 
 
 What brought him out to India as a missionary 
 some years afterwards, whether remorse for a mis- 
 adventure in which a friend lost his life as seems 
 hinted, or a love-sorrow as was popularly sup- 
 posed, does not appear in the papers. He once 
 mentioned to me that it was while reading Captain 
 Cook's Voyages the missionary idea occurred to 
 him. A few years of Evangelism convinced him, 
 however, that little was to be done by mere 
 preaching. He went home, studied in Edinburgh 
 for a degree in surgery, and after coming under 
 the influence of Edward Irving, returned to India 
 as a medical missionary, deeply imbued with the 
 mysteries and symbolism of the Catholic Apostolic
 
 THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CHILD 35 
 
 Church. In later life he advanced beyond this 
 phase. Long before I knew him he had become 
 simply the spiritual and temporal leader of the 
 hillmen. He remained a Scotch Episcopalian as 
 his forefathers had been ; but with no strong 
 dogmas, and only a great daily desire to do the 
 best for his people. 
 
 Presently I heard him walking round the fish- 
 pond from the little chapel, in converse with the 
 young Brahman preacher of the forest glade. 
 When they came to the door, the youth made 
 a deep obeisance to his senior, and passed on to 
 the school- house. 
 
 1 Ah!' said the Old Missionary, after I had told 
 my news, ' Providence is very kind. All my life 
 I have been doubting whether there was any fruit 
 of my labour. And now, in my old age, God has 
 sent that young man to touch the hearts of the 
 people in a way that I never could. You, too, 
 bring welcome tidings about the deliverance of 
 these poor hillmen. Only think, Mr. Ormiston, 
 that good Brahman youth has secretly saved up 
 the scholarship stipend which he won at college, 
 saved it by stinting his own food for three years, 
 D 2
 
 36 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 and has had a bell cast for the chapel. He was 
 just asking leave to put up a belfry in which to 
 place it. But I wonder what keeps Mr. Ayton ? 
 He and his pandit are usually here and at work 
 before I come in from prayers.' 
 
 Ayton was the assistant magistrate. A Boden 
 Scholar and a Fellow of his college, he formed one 
 f the brilliant group whom the Indian Civil 
 Service, on its being thrown open to competition, 
 attracted from the Universities. On that morning 
 I had sent him out to look at a bridge on a new 
 road ten miles off, where the contractors were 
 trying to scamp their work. I explained his 
 absence to the Missionary, and asked, with some 
 hesitation, if I could be of any use in his place. 
 The old man courteously concealed his chagrin, 
 and accepted the offer. Meanwhile the pandit 
 slipped into the room with a dignified saluta- 
 tion, and the Missionary's little daughter silently 
 took her seat at the writing-table by her father's 
 side. 
 
 It was the last stage in dictionary-making, and a 
 novel experience to me. The Missionary, having 
 collected his list of words among the highlanders
 
 THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CHILD 37 
 
 of the border, was not always certain whether 
 they really belonged to the aboriginal hill-lan- 
 guage, or whether they might not have been 
 imported from the Sanskrit dialects of the plains. 
 The slips of paper, each containing a word and its 
 meanings, were brought forth from their alpha- 
 betical pigeon-holes and placed before him. The 
 pandit, who sat contemplative, pronounced accord- 
 ing to his ancient rules whether each successive 
 word had a connexion with any Sanskrit root. 
 Meanwhile I examined the lexicons of several 
 Indian vernaculars, to see if it had a counterpart 
 in the dialects of the lowlands. When the process 
 was finished and the result noted down, the little 
 daughter neatly pasted the slip in its alpha- 
 betical order on a sheet of tough yellow country 
 paper yellow from the arsenic which had been 
 mixed in the pulp to protect it from fish-insects 
 and white ants. 
 
 It required a more profound knowledge ot San- 
 skrit than I possessed, although in my time a High 
 Proficiency man, to check the learned pandit's 
 decisions. In fact, my only use was to save the 
 Missionary's eyes, which had lately been troubling
 
 38 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 him, by looking through the dictionaries of the 
 lowland dialects. The old man felt the want of 
 Ayton's finer touch ; and I was glad when, soon 
 after eight, the short springy canter of an Arab 
 along the road announced his approach. 
 
 'Quick, May dear,' said the Missionary. 'Get 
 some tea and toast. I hear Mr. Ayton's horse, 
 and he must have been out before sunrise.' Pre- 
 sently that gentleman appeared in boots and spurs, 
 a tall and handsome young Yorkshireman, rather 
 heavy for the high-bred animal he rode. 
 
 ' It was good of you to come so quickly,' was 
 the old man's welcome. ' We have still two hours 
 before breakfast. But the roads are like iron now, 
 and I hope you have not ridden your Arab too 
 hard.' 
 
 ' Not a bit, thank you,' replied Ayton ; 4 1 sent 
 a pony on halfway, and Amir is all the better 
 for having a little taken out of him these cold 
 mornings.' 
 
 So we went to work in earnest, Ayton agreeing 
 with the pandit and passing each word in a 
 moment, or disagreeing with him, and flashing the 
 light of Western philology on the Brahman's old-
 
 THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CHILD 39 
 
 world methods. In either case his decision gave 
 that sense of finality which had been wanting be- 
 fore. But the quicker we got through the little 
 pile of slips, the more nervous the old scholar be- 
 came to hasten the pace. He seemed to feel, too, 
 that every word which Ayton rejected as not really 
 belonging to the hill-language was a personal loss. 
 Once or twice, when several had been thus put 
 aside in succession, a troubled look passed over his 
 face. At such moments the silent little girl would 
 touch his elbow almost imperceptibly with her soft 
 cheek, and the old man, without seeming to per- 
 ceive the motion, at once resumed his air of habitual 
 gentleness. Shortly after ten we broke up, Ayton 
 and I galloping home to bathe and breakfast before 
 going to our respective Courts. 
 
 A few weeks afterwards, in passing the Mission- 
 ary's cottage, I saw a bullock- cart under his trees, 
 and that small bustle of baggage- carriers and ser- 
 vants about the veranda which in India betokens a 
 move into camp. I rode up to ask what could be 
 taking my old friend out so late in the season, with 
 the hot winds of April already blowing. He was 
 sitting at his writing-table, with the dictionary un-
 
 40 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 heeded before him, much perturbed by news of a riot 
 attended by bloodshed in a Christian village forty 
 miles off. I found the place lay in the direction of 
 a jungle tract where I had to settle certain forest 
 disputes a part of my cold-weather tour which I 
 reserved till the drying up of the higher water- 
 courses might give me a chance at a tiger during 
 my visit. I begged the old scholar to allow me to 
 drive him out, and said I could arrange to start 
 next morning. At first he declined, explaining that 
 only his infirmities and his unwillingness to leave 
 his child at home, with no English lady in the 
 station, had led him to use a conveyance at all. 
 His objections to driving, whatever they may once 
 have been, were of no sentimental sort. Experience 
 taught him, he said, that it was only by walking 
 with a few disciples from hamlet to hamlet that he 
 had in early years been able to win the confidence 
 of the villagers, and he was afraid of impairing his 
 influence in his old age by coming among them in 
 any less simple form. 
 
 I suspect he was right. Indeed it often 
 occurred to me that we officials, by our horses 
 and retinues of well-dressed servants, always give
 
 THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CHILD 41 
 
 the natives a fear that they are intruding a 
 fear which only the greatest administrators like 
 Lawrence and Malcolm, and the greatest mission- 
 aries like Carey and Duff, have quite overcome. 
 I urged, however, the waste of half a week away 
 from his beloved dictionary in doing by bullocks 
 what horses could accomplish in a half-dozen hours. 
 The risks to his little girl from several days' ex- 
 posure so late in the season in a country cart, with 
 only a thin covering from the sun, were also con- 
 siderable. In the end he allowed himself to be 
 persuaded ; so my tents went off in the afternoon, 
 and next morning we started at daybreak. 
 
 At that time I used on my District tours, when 
 not riding, a light strong Stanhope which I had 
 bought during a three months' holiday in Australia, 
 broad enough to go down the steep banks of the 
 gullies without overturning. Its width allowed the 
 little girl to sit between the old man and myself on 
 the front seat, and it was pretty to see how the shy 
 child grew into a bright and observant companion. 
 During the first ten miles she watched the horses 
 working, without a word. When we paused at the 
 end of the stage for our second pair, and to have
 
 42 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 coffee under a tree, her small motherly cares for 
 her father were very pathetic. 
 
 Not less touching were her surprise and delight 
 at the modest preparations which had been made 
 for her comfort on our next halt, during the heat 
 of the day. It was one of the ordinary wayside 
 mango-groves used for camping by the District 
 officers on tour. But the trees were in full flower, 
 and my people, with the native's natural politeness, 
 had tried to make her little tent pretty. Her 
 exclamations of pleasure at finding her old nurse, 
 who had come on an hour earlier in my dog-cart, 
 and her little zinc bath, with her fancy work-basket 
 and a story-book and some flowers on a miniature 
 wicker-table, ' just as if she was at home,' spoke of 
 a childhood passed in ignorance of those petty 
 attentions which are a matter of course to English 
 children in India. 
 
 All forenoon the servants, proud of their un- 
 wonted charge but rather anxious, were trotting 
 after her with a sun-umbrella as she popped in and 
 out of the two tents, in the shade of the thick green 
 foliage. Now it was the first relay of horses march- 
 ing into the grove, and she must go forth to see
 
 THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CHILD 43 
 
 them fed. Then it was the second pair being sent 
 off to wait for us on the road, and she must give 
 them a parting plateful of chopped sugar-cane. 
 Her innumerable discoveries among the blossom- 
 laden trees, about the squirrels, and the flashing 
 scolding jays, and the very human antics of the 
 long-tailed monkeys, and a harmless water-snake 
 who had landed from a neighbouring pond to 
 warm himself in the spring sunshine, were poured 
 forth every few moments as she rushed into the 
 tent where her father reposed. The old man for- 
 got his unfinished work at home, and the trouble- 
 some task awaiting him on the morrow, and listened 
 to her swift succession of news from outside with a 
 pleasure scarcely less childlike than her own. After 
 luncheon she read him to sleep, and then plied her 
 fingers silently over some small feminine industry, 
 watching his slightest movement. It was the broken 
 sleep of anxious old age. If he started or muttered, 
 she at once went on reading at the point where she 
 had left off, and the uneasy dreamer without open- 
 ing his eyes became calm at the sound of her voice. 
 
 When at length he awoke, her quick little 
 divinations of his wants, and the way in which
 
 44 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 she gently but effectively took charge of our 
 comforts, were very sweet. One might have sup- 
 posed that she had all her life been accustomed 
 to make afternoon tea for two gentlemen under 
 the door-flap of a tent. 
 
 On our third stage of ten miles in the cool 
 of the evening, she became such a friend of the 
 horses that she held the reins. Before the fourth 
 stage was over, her little head, wearied out with 
 the excitement of the long day, was sound asleep 
 on her father's shoulder. As we splashed through 
 the river, beyond which shone the windows of the 
 Factory where we were to rest for the night, she 
 opened her eyes wonderingly on the shallow line of 
 water silvered over by the moonlight. Then mur- 
 muring ' How beautiful,' she nestled closer to her 
 father and fell over again in a moment. Presently 
 the horses were straining up the high river-bank, 
 and we carried her wrapped in a shawl, but still 
 fast asleep amid the red glare of torches and the 
 hearty greetings of our host, into the ancient 
 Factory.
 
 L 45 ] 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 THE Factory, once a residence of the native 
 Viceroys, was perched upon the steep river-bank. 
 Massive buttresses had protected its many-angled 
 walls and bastions against the current until fifty 
 years ago, when the channel shifted across to the 
 opposite side of its broad bed, leaving their solid 
 foundations high and dry in the air. During the 
 rainy season the floods still dashed against the 
 outworks. But throughout eight months of the 
 year, one looked down from the battlements on 
 a distant thread of water glistening amid a wide 
 expanse of sand. 
 
 It was one of the East India Company's earliest 
 silk factories in Bengal, planted on the edge of 
 a forest region which had yielded the delicate 
 fabrics worn in the Imperial seraglio. Fortified 
 alike against the river and the hill tribes, it be-
 
 46 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 came a safe place for merchandise and industry 
 during 1 the breaking up of the Mughal dynasty. 
 Settlements of silk-weavers clustered under its 
 walls, and the surrounding jungle was gradually 
 thrust back before an advancing semicircle of 
 mulberry cultivation. When the East India Com- 
 pany retired from trade to concentrate its energies 
 on government, the old Factory and its adjacent 
 lands were bought for a small price by an 
 Italian. This worthy artisan had been brought 
 out to instruct the Company's silk-workers in 
 better methods of treating the cocoons, and, after 
 faithful service to his Honourable Masters, found 
 himself in his old age making a fortune for him- 
 self. His first thought was to obtain the com- 
 panionship of a fellow-countryman in his exile, 
 and at the same time to render thanks to our 
 Lady of Siena for his good luck. He accom- 
 plished both objects by sending for his nephew, one 
 of those kindly peasants dipped in ink who then 
 formed the rank and file of the Italian priesthood. 
 
 The young kinsman proved to be a man with 
 plenty of rustic shrewdness, and he made himself 
 quite at home among the husbandmen. Indeed,
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 47 
 
 the Indian peasant proprietors were exactly of the 
 class amid whom he had been born and brought 
 up in Tuscany. He won their goodwill by stamp- 
 ing out a troublesome disease of the silk-worms, 
 partly by improved ventilation, but visibly aided 
 by the sprinkling of holy-water in the breeding 
 sheds, and by a procession through the mulberry 
 fields, himself marching at its head with the Host 
 and a censer, lustily chanting a Latin psalm. 
 
 The simple folk saw no harm in adding the 
 pretty stucco Lady, whom he set up in an out- 
 house, to the other deities that they propitiated at 
 various stages of the cultivation. On the death 
 of his uncle the whole concern came under his 
 pastoral sway. His people willingly paid him the 
 little compliment of bringing their babies to be 
 baptized, the more gladly as he tied a small silver 
 coin round the neck of each infant Christian. He 
 attempted no flights in orthodoxy, but was quietly 
 happy to see, on the annual festivals of the 
 Church, an increasing throng of devotees arrayed 
 in their holiday garments, streaming in from the 
 hamlets to lay their rosemary garlands before his 
 tinsel shrine.
 
 48 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 He in his turn passed away at a ripe age, and 
 the Calcutta firm who next bought the Factory 
 found to their surprise that they had a Christian 
 population on their hands. The Scottish gentle- 
 man at the head of the business engaged an elderly 
 disciple from the Serampur Mission to look after 
 the villagers, and, having thus satisfied his con- 
 science, troubled himself no further in the matter. 
 The elderly disciple settled down in sleek and 
 friendly comfort among his isolated flock: his 
 Baptist theology but little interfering with the 
 careless Romanism left behind by the Italian 
 priest. 
 
 When the Company of Jesus assumed active 
 charge of the Catholic communities in Lower 
 Bengal, they sent an agent to report on this 
 lapsed settlement. Their missioner found the 
 villagers in contented enjoyment of a union of 
 Christian and Hindu rites, of proved efficacy for 
 bringing seasonable rain, for preventing blight 
 among the silk-worms, and for propitiating the 
 many local deities who concern themselves with 
 the mulberry cultivation. The chief sign of their 
 Catholic faith was the firing of the three old
 
 49 
 
 Factory cannon, named the Father, the Mother, 
 and the Son, on Easter morning and Trinity 
 Sunday. The acute Jesuit also thought he de- 
 tected a relic of apostolic teaching in a sort of 
 spell used over the sick when administering medi- 
 cine, Patan Noshtan Keshan Shelas apparently 
 a diversion for pathological purposes of the Pater 
 noster qui es in ccelis, as pronounced by the 
 Italian peasant-priest. 
 
 By one of those seeming misapplications of force 
 which occur from time to time in the history of 
 the Jesuit Missions, a man of high culture was 
 sent to revive the faith in the little silk-weaving 
 settlement. After earning fame as a mathematical 
 professor in the seminaries of the Order in Bel- 
 gium and at Rome, Father Jerome had been 
 brought out to India to fill a similar post in 
 Saint Xavier's College at Calcutta. Whether 
 as a discipline in humility, or as a period of 
 sequestered self-preparation for the great office 
 afterwards laid upon him, or for what other reason 
 I know not, he was suddenly deputed to the petty 
 colony of jungle Christians on the river-bank. 
 But if the Company of Jesus sometimes appears 
 
 E
 
 50 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 to the careless onlooker to misdirect force, its 
 sons seldom fail to justify its action. In six years 
 Father Jerome changed the whole spiritual life of 
 that isolated community. 
 
 He had given shelter during a famine to a couple 
 of hundred orphans, baptizing them promptly, 
 and feeding them, educating them, and bringing 
 them up to husbandry or handicrafts, with the 
 help of the modest rupee a month which the 
 Government allowed per head for their main- 
 tenance. By the labour of their willing boyish 
 hands he built a church. The Factory granted 
 a plot of arid ground on the high river-bank: 
 one part of which he turned into a brickfield, while 
 the other served as a site. The hill Raja, with 
 Hindu benevolence to religious men of whatever 
 faith, allowed as much timber from the forest as 
 was wanted for the rafters and porch. At the 
 head of his juvenile band the Jesuit Father ex- 
 plored the torrent beds and gullies, and collected 
 a store of the nodular limestone which makes 
 such capital mortar. In five years, unaided by 
 a single grown-up artisan, he had erected a church 
 of no mean proportions, with a Virgin in blue
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 51 
 
 and gold in the niche of the belfry, conspicuous 
 for miles up and down the long river reach. The 
 brickfield had been turned into the Priest's Tank, 
 well stocked with fish, and yielding enough water 
 to keep green a little graveyard. 
 
 But with his prosperity came sorrow. For 
 the Scottish firm in Calcutta, scandalized at its 
 villagers being turned again into Papists, sought 
 the help of the Old Missionary of the District, 
 and persuaded him to send a more active Pro- 
 testant pastor to take charge of the strayed flock. 
 ' Trafalgar ' Douglas interfered unwillingly, for he 
 privately believed that the change had been on 
 the whole for good. But having consented, he 
 gave his best man to the work the young Brah- 
 man preacher whose eloquence had struck me at 
 the missionary encampment in the forest glade. 
 
 For a time his fresh enthusiasm carried every- 
 thing before it, and when the failing health of Mr. 
 Douglas led to the youth's recall to headquarters, 
 he left the weaving settlement on the river-bank 
 divided into two religious parties. His successor, 
 a native preacher of lower caste, quarrelled with 
 the Jesuit priest. The result was a series of petty 
 E 2
 
 52 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 disturbances, ending 1 in a bloody affray on Easter 
 morning when both factions asserted with clubs 
 and rusty spears their claim of priority to fire off 
 the three old cannon. 
 
 On our first evening at the Factory the Catholic 
 clergyman, as the only other European in the 
 place, was duly invited to dinner. During our 
 progress through the preserved salmon and tinned 
 entrees, the gram-fed mutton, and the fattened 
 turkey and Yorkshire ham, which the hospitable 
 planter lavished on the long-drawn-out repast, 
 Father Jerome attracted us by an extreme gentle- 
 ness of manner, and by his varied and interesting 
 talk. One felt in Europe again, notwithstand- 
 ing the punka waving overhead. He gave the 
 impression of a penetrating intelligence, but of 
 a diffident nature a self-contained observer who 
 had come in contact with historical personages 
 of our day, but who seemed stranded in middle 
 life, a resigned and lonely man. 
 
 The little girl, who now emerged from her 
 evening sleep, hungry and very wide awake, 
 was quickly won by his half-shy friendliness 
 and worn, delicate face. The Old Missionary
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 53 
 
 watched him with grave Scottish courtesy from 
 under his sagacious white eyebrows, but was too 
 tired at first to take part in the conversation. 
 After dinner the clergymen retired with their 
 cheroots to the veranda, where the child fell 
 fast asleep again on her father's shoulder, until 
 her nurse carried her off. The planter, perhaps 
 thinking that his reverend guests might learn 
 to know each other more easily without the 
 presence of third parties, engaged me in a game 
 of Nap. Somewhat to my surprise, the two 
 padres were still in deep converse in the moon- 
 lit veranda overhanging the river when I went 
 to bed. 
 
 Next morning the police inspector came to 
 me at daybreak, with his official entries of what 
 had been going on in the village during the 
 past month. They showed that things were worse 
 than I supposed, and that the religious affray 
 was the outcome of deeper causes of disturb- 
 ance. The truth is that the people had outgrown 
 the village lands. As long as the silk Factory 
 prospered, the high profits of the mulberry 
 cultivation kept them all in tolerable comfort.
 
 54 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 But the keener competition of Italy and France 
 was beginning to tell on the silk production of 
 Bengal, and many of the mulberry fields had 
 been ploughed up for the less lucrative rice-crop. 
 The old families of the hamlet, who still clung 
 to their mulberry cultivation, were for the most 
 part Roman Catholics the descendants of the 
 original weaving settlement in the days of the 
 East India Company. The poorer rice-growers 
 were generally Protestants, and they bitterly 
 complained that the mulberry enclosures, on the 
 plea of the former village custom, monopolized 
 the water-supply of the hamlet. 
 
 Before the Easter riot over the three old guns, 
 there had been a dozen fights about cutting the 
 irrigation channels. The planter, a keen sports- 
 man and a capital fellow but withal a cautious 
 Edinburgh man, who represented the Calcutta 
 firm, had done his best to keep things quiet. 
 He prudently stood aloof, however, as soon as 
 the quarrel took a religious turn. 
 
 I was sitting in a puzzled mood, with the 
 police day-book and village map before me, when 
 the Missionary tapped on the open door and
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 55 
 
 asked if I could spare a few minutes. I gladly 
 begged him to come in, as a man in perplexity 
 welcomes any diversion which postpones the 
 process of making up his mind. But instead of 
 accepting the proffered chair, my old friend stood 
 erect on the other side of the writing-table, and 
 without preface said: 
 
 ' Mr. Ormiston, I am come to make a request. 
 I communed long with Mr. Jerome last night, and 
 I found him a righteous man. And this morning 
 in my prayers the words were borne upon me : 
 " Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me 
 and thee, and between my herdmen and thy 
 herdmen ; for we be brethren. Is not the whole 
 land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, 
 from me. If thou wilt take the left hand, then 
 I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the 
 right hand, then I will go to the left." I ask you, 
 Mr. Ormiston, not to deal with this matter, but 
 to leave it to him and me.' 
 
 I felt rather sceptical about settling a case, 
 clearly provided for by the Code of Criminal 
 Procedure, on the basis of texts out of Genesis ; 
 so I replied:
 
 56 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 4 But, Mr. Douglas, what if you cannot agree ? ' 
 
 1 Then, sir, God's will be done. But I ask you 
 to remember that for forty years my people have 
 never been seen in the police courts, and I trust, 
 with God's help, that they will not be seen there 
 in my old age.' 
 
 I reflected for a minute, with a growing sense 
 of the unlikelihood of his success but also with 
 a growing respect and pity for the brave old man, 
 before answering : 
 
 ' Very well, Mr. Douglas. I can take no cogni- 
 zance of your private arrangements with Father 
 Jerome; but I have some business in the hill- 
 country, and I shall go away for three days. 
 When I come back, if everything is settled, well 
 and good. If not, I must do what seems needful.' 
 
 The Old Missionary bowed in silence, although 
 his lips moved. I only realized by the trembling 
 of his thin long fingers, which had unconsciously 
 clasped the edge of the table, that an interview 
 which was to me merely an ordinary matter 
 of business, had been to him a great strain and 
 a great relief. 
 
 I went out at once into the Factory enclosure,
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 57 
 
 where the villagers were sitting under trees waiting 
 to pay their respects to the newly arrived magis- 
 trate. After the customary civilities, I told them 
 that I had heard of their misdeeds, and called on 
 each faction to point out five ringleaders on the 
 other side. When the ten stood before me, and 
 I had learned from the police inspector that they 
 were really the chief disturbers, I briefly told 
 them that I was going for three days into the 
 hill-country, and on my return would listen to 
 their complaints on the spot. Meanwhile, if any 
 affray took place, the police would march those 
 ten men, together with any others engaged, across 
 the District to be tried at my headquarters' Court. 
 Needless to say, they assured me that nothing 
 would happen to bring such shame on the village. 
 So with a doubtful mind, yet not without a half 
 hope that I had done a fair morning's work, 
 I came in out of the sun for a hasty bath before 
 breakfast at eleven o'clock. 
 
 During that ample meal, which the Bengal 
 planter knows how to augment into a high 
 function of his hospitable day, my host offered 
 to ride an afternoon's march with me into the
 
 58 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 forest. Within an hour his trackers had started 
 to see if they could get news of game, and 
 a joyful posse comitatus of the low castes in the 
 village was assembling on the chance of sport 
 a score of miles off next morning. I sent on 
 a mounted orderly to warn the hill Raja that 
 I would reach his fort the following evening, to 
 look into the quarrel between him and his fief- 
 holders. We rode five-and-twenty miles in the cool 
 of the afternoon, slept a few hours under a tree, 
 and were lucky enough to cut off a tiger in a gully 
 on his way back from his drink before sunrise to 
 his higher retreats. Then we drew the jungle, 
 and the beaters returned home rejoicing in four 
 deer, a leopardess, and a motley bag of small 
 game. The planter galloped home to the Factory 
 in time for his midday breakfast, and I went on 
 with some of my people to the Raja's fort. 
 
 The business there easily arranged itself. The 
 planter, finding the silk Factory growing less pro- 
 fitable, had invented a trade in sal-wood sleepers 
 which he floated down the river to the railway 
 during the rains. The feud between the Raja 
 and his under- holders, although complicated by
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 59 
 
 armed encounters between their retainers and 
 by mutual reprisals in forest-burning", was really 
 a question of the fair division among them of 
 the new and unforeseen value of their woods. 
 As the tract lay on the Non-Regulation frontier 
 of the District and the disputants were simple 
 hill-chiefs, they had a long day's inconsequential 
 wrangle and, when well tired out, harmoniously 
 accepted my award. Their return to friendship 
 was celebrated by a big shoot in the jungle, with 
 much pomp of elephants in tinsel trappings and 
 of albino-eyed horses with pink tails, but too 
 noisy for serious sport. On the evening of the 
 third day I returned to the Factory. 
 
 'Glad to see you back,' said the planter, as 
 I dismounted. ' But you have missed a curious 
 sight. Since you left they have been holding 
 a sort of General Assembly of the Kirk, with the 
 villagers swarming about in their best clothes, 
 like the country ministers and elders on the Edin- 
 burgh Mound in the fourth week of May. The 
 upshot of it all was that either the Protestants 
 or the Catholics must hive off; but which were 
 to go ? The Catholics had their mulberry gardens
 
 60 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 and their new church; the Protestants had their 
 rice-fields and most of the village cattle. Father 
 Jerome came out strong. He got his people into 
 the church and kept them there till he worked 
 them up to the pitch of buying out the others. 
 The fat grain merchant brought a bag of rupees, 
 the mulberry-growers dug up their hordes of coin, 
 and the women threw their ornaments in a heap 
 before the altar. I had no idea there was such 
 a weight of bangles in the village. Then they 
 held a council of five, the padres sitting with them, 
 and valued the rice-growers' holdings. They were 
 at it pretty well for two days and two nights, and 
 this morning everything was settled, and the sealed 
 bags of silver were locked up for safe-keeping in 
 my treasury until your arrival.' 
 
 ' How did Mr. Douglas manage to get the 
 Protestants to agree to move ? ' 
 
 ' That old man is marvellous ! Jerome's word 
 was law with his own people. But Douglas is 
 almost a stranger here, and when the Protestant 
 rice-growers saw their way to a good bargain they 
 stood out for higher terms. The women, too, 
 raised a lamentation at quitting their old homes,
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 6 1 
 
 where they have not had one full meal a day 
 during the last three years. Yesterday everything 
 seemed hopeless. But I never saw a man like 
 Mr. Douglas, for quietly putting down his will. 
 He seemed to speak with an authority they 
 dared not resist. I myself, when passing the 
 open door of their conventicle, felt half afraid 
 of the rigid old prophet, with his set face, and 
 white hair, and lean uplifted arm, as he stood 
 haranguing them.' 
 
 ' Still, they were within their rights to refuse 
 to move.' 
 
 ' That may be. All I know is, that by yester- 
 day afternoon he had won the best of the Pro- 
 testants to his views. They gradually showed the 
 rest what fools they would be to lose what is really 
 a very good chance. To the jungle herdsmen 
 with cattle but no holdings, and to the landless 
 labourers, Mr. Douglas promised a sum for each 
 family, enough to set up a hut and buy a plough. 
 I hope the old gentleman can afford it, for he 
 seems to have no ready cash, and has given me 
 a power of attorney to sell out his Government 
 paper in Calcutta. In the end the malcontents
 
 62 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 had to give in their breath fairly squeezed out 
 of them between the sensible people who were 
 satisfied with a fair offer, and the herdsmen and 
 landless families who saw their chance of bettering 
 themselves in life.' 
 
 ' But where are they to get the land ? It needs 
 a long purse to break up old forest.' 
 
 1 That's true, and if they had to take in the 
 jungle on this side of the river, they would make 
 a poor thing of it. But we have three villages 
 on the western bank, within the old Factory grant, 
 which were demolished by wild elephants fifty 
 years ago. The elephants have disappeared off 
 the face of the earth since the road was made 
 through the hill - country . But as long as the 
 mulberries and silk-worms paid well, it was not 
 worth our while to resettle those outlying villages. 
 When the people had used up the pasture-lands 
 on this side of the river for growing rice, they 
 began to resort to the other bank for feeding 
 their buffaloes. The Factory took care however 
 to prevent any grazing rights accruing, so that 
 the land is still waiting to be settled for cultivation. 
 Now is my chance to re- people the deserted
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 63 
 
 villages, and of course the Factory gives the seed 
 gratis for the first year, and the land during the 
 next two years free of rent.' 
 
 ' And how about the dispute and the three 
 cannon ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, that was the least part of the business. 
 Luckily neither side had lodged a complaint, so 
 the police need not take notice of a few broken 
 heads which are now mended, unless they get 
 orders to do so. Last night the two factions 
 joined in a village feast of friendship and farewell. 
 Poor Jerome, who has never had a rupee beyond 
 his daily food since he came here, somehow pro- 
 duced two goats. Mr. Douglas asked me for 
 a sheep, and the row and drum-beating went on 
 to the small hours. This morning the headmen 
 of both sides came and begged the old cannon 
 from me. One, they set up as a pillar on this 
 bank ; another they have buried in the sand 
 halfway across ; and the third is to be posted 
 on the opposite bank at the spot where the new 
 village will be built. Some mat huts have already 
 been put up, and Mr. Douglas started with his 
 people an hour ago to mark out the land, so that
 
 64 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 they may begin ploughing as soon as the first 
 rain comes.' 
 
 As he was speaking, we reached the veranda 
 looking down on the river. Father Jerome was 
 leaning over the balustrade at the further corner, 
 apparently too rapt in his own thoughts to observe 
 our arrival. Halfway across, a long line of men 
 and women and cattle were moving slowly westward 
 through the heavy sand : the tall form of the Old 
 Missionary in front, hand in hand with his little 
 girl. When they came to the shallow channel, we 
 saw a group run forward and try to raise him up, 
 in order to carry him over. But he refused, and 
 lifting his child in his arms, stepped into the 
 stream. As he reached the middle, the rays of 
 the setting sun flashed across the water to us, 
 throwing a glory around the grand gaunt figure 
 erect under its burden. The pilgrim band slowly 
 filed through what seemed a river of light. 
 
 When their feet touched the dry expanse of sand 
 on the other side, they raised the Evening Hymn 
 to a plaintive Bengali air. Then a little later the 
 whole multitude burst forth with the triumphant 
 thanksgiving of the Old Hundredth Psalm, as they
 
 THE PARTING OF THE PEOPLE 65 
 
 began to ascend the steep distant bank. We 
 silently watched the last of them disappear under 
 the jungle which fringed its high ridge, already 
 fading into the night. On turning round I saw 
 Father Jerome rising from his knees at the further 
 end of the veranda. His eyes were filled with 
 tears.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 
 
 THAT hot weather was one of the hottest and 
 happiest which I spent in India. It was my first 
 year in independent charge of a District, with the 
 endless interests of the position intensified by 
 youth, and still unblunted by wont. It was passed 
 too in close intimacy with a man marked out by 
 his talents for a brilliant career, and by the sweet- 
 ness of his nature for intimate and enduring friend- 
 ship. 
 
 Arthur Ayliffe had held his treasury and jail in 
 1857 with eighty policemen and the half-dozen 
 sporting rifles of his District staff against three 
 successive bands of mutineers, each of whom out- 
 numbered his little force tenfold. A Companion- 
 ship of the Bath and quick promotion were his well- 
 earned rewards. While still a young magistrate 
 he found himself appointed Commissioner of the
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 67 
 
 six western Districts of the Lower Ganges, stretch- 
 ing from the swamps of the Hugli to the forests 
 and mountains which separate Bengal from the 
 Central Provinces. The population of this wide 
 tract amounted to about seven millions a great 
 diversity of races, with the astute Hindu at the 
 one end and the primitive aboriginal tribes at 
 the other. 
 
 During several years Ayliffe won golden opinions 
 by calming down the excitement which a local 
 rising of the hill-people in 1855 had left behind. 
 But on the passing of the famous series of Codes, 
 the Calcutta Secretariat worked itself into a fer- 
 vour for legal symmetry against which he set 
 his face. In one of his protests against applying 
 a uniform procedure to races in widely different 
 stages of human society, he was held to have gone 
 beyond the decorous limits of official remonstrance. 
 No public scandal followed. The too outspoken 
 Commissioner merely found it expedient to take 
 furlough. On his return he was gazetted to the 
 judgeship of the District in which I was then 
 serving one of the six formerly in his charge. 
 
 He swallowed the pill in silence. In those days 
 F 2
 
 68 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 a District judgeship, which is now rightly recog- 
 nized as an important post demanding a special 
 training and no mean capacity, was held in small 
 esteem. The District judges were for the most 
 part heavy elderly gentlemen, who had not made 
 their mark in the more active branches of the 
 administration. To this rule there were indeed 
 brilliant exceptions. But generally speaking, the 
 abler men regarded the office as an unavoidable 
 halt in their promotion from Magistrate of a Dis- 
 trict to Commissioner of a Division ; or as a locus 
 pentfentiae for a Commissioner who had had 
 a difference with the Government, or made a 
 mistake. In Ayliffe's case the Service felt some 
 indignation, as the Government soon afterwards 
 found itself constrained to relax the uniformity 
 of the Codes to which he was sacrificed. But 
 the sympathy of his brother officers fell flat, 
 Ayliffe himself seeming quite content with the 
 change. He went to work on his judicial duties 
 as keenly as if he had given up any thought of 
 higher advancement, save the humdrum promotion 
 by seniority to the Supreme Court. 
 
 The judge's house was an imposing white edifice,
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 69 
 
 with Doric pillared verandas and a flat roof, in the 
 middle of an extensive park dotted with ancient 
 trees. A long avenue led across the parched sward 
 to the judge's garden, which was separated from 
 the main park by a public road. This garden, the 
 work of a line of judges during a hundred years, 
 was the one spot always green in our arid station. 
 In the good old days of John Company, 
 when the District officers freely used jail labour, 
 gangs of prisoners had excavated in the judge's 
 garden a broad winding piece of water which 
 expanded almost to the dignity of a lake. Its 
 cool depths and shady margin formed a rustic 
 swimming-bath of singular beauty. Artificial hol- 
 lows supplied moist beds for a luxuriance of gay 
 flowers, which were screened from the hot winds 
 by blossoming shrubs and forest trees. The mud 
 delved out for the lake eighty years ago had been 
 erected into a little hill, now clothed with an 
 orange-grove known as The Mount, and somewhat 
 suggesting the mound in New College garden 
 at Oxford. From the arbour on its summit one 
 looked across the undulating country to where 
 the sun set among the western hills. The further
 
 70 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 end of the spacious garden was walled off for 
 the station grave-yard the first English grave 
 having been dug for the little daughter of a judge 
 at the end of the last century. 
 
 In our small station each officer had a house 
 assigned to him by custom. The judge's house, 
 the magistrate's house, and the assistant's bungalow, 
 were from time immemorial rented by a succession 
 of the officers whose names they bore. Indeed, 
 they appear even in the survey maps under 
 those unchangeable designations. My dwelling, 
 the magistrate's house, had fallen into disrepair; 
 and that year the landlord, on commencing the 
 annual patching up, found the beams which sup- 
 ported the heavy flat roof completely tunnelled 
 out by white ants. This meant four months in 
 the hands of workmen, and the judge kindly 
 offered me quarters during the slow process of 
 re-roofing. It was not considered quite regular 
 for the judge and magistrate to live together, as 
 the executive and judicial powers in a District at 
 that time often came into collision. But no one 
 else had a house with sufficient spare room to take 
 me in, so my hens and ducks and guinea-fowls
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 71 
 
 were driven over to Ayliffe's poultry-yard, and 
 I took up my abode with my friend. 
 
 It was altogether a bachelor station. Not one of 
 the three civilians was a married man, the doctor 
 was a widower, and the wife of the district super- 
 intendent of police had gone to England with her 
 children. The hot winds set in like a consuming 
 fire. The large double doors which form the 
 windows of an Anglo-Indian house stood open all 
 night, and were shut up tight in the early morning ; 
 the heavy Venetian frames outside the glass doors 
 trying in vain to hermetically seal the interior 
 from the glare and heat. We had to start for our 
 gallop by 5 A.M., or not get it at all except at the 
 risk of sunstroke. The public offices opened at 
 seven, and closed for the day at noon. Then 
 each man drove swiftly through the furnace of 
 shimmering air to his darkened and silent home. 
 
 A lingering bath and a languid breakfast 
 brought the hot hours to one o'clock. The slow 
 combustion of the suffocating afternoon was endured 
 somehow under the punka, with the help of the 
 endless bundles of papers in one's office-box, read 
 by chance rays which fiercely forced an entrance
 
 72 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 through every chink in the double doors of 
 glass and wood. About six, we all met at the 
 racket-court, whose high wall by that time cast 
 a sufficient shadow. A couple of four-handed 
 games (the doctor was grown too stout to play) 
 left us streaming at every pore, and marking at 
 each step a damp foot-print through our white 
 canvas shoes on the pavement. Then the deli- 
 cious plunge in the swimming-bath in the judge's 
 garden ! the one moment of freshness looked 
 forward to throughout the exhausting day. A 
 cheroot and an iced drink, as we lay fanned 
 by the servants on long chairs at the top of The 
 Mount and presently, almost in a minute, the 
 sun had once more hidden his malignant face, and 
 the blinding glare of day gave place to the stifling 
 stillness of night. 
 
 Our house entertained on two evenings a week 
 and we usually dined out two other evenings, with 
 whist afterwards, and a modest pool at loo on 
 Saturday nights to afford vent to the doctor's Irish 
 energies. Sometimes we passed a domestic edict 
 not to dine till the thermometer fell to ninety-five 
 degrees, and waited till past nine o'clock without
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 73 
 
 seeing the mercury sink to that point. But the 
 life was full of compensations. In the first place, 
 an Englishman enjoys capital health in the hot 
 weather, if still young and not afraid of exercise, 
 and with plenty of work. I was living, more- 
 over, with perhaps the most charming and accom- 
 plished man in the Service. Ayliffe's resources of 
 companionship were inexhaustible. His unfailing 
 cheerfulness and sweet courtesy of manner were 
 in themselves sufficiently pleasant. But it was 
 rather his quick and genuine sympathy with one's 
 own small efforts and interests that endeared him 
 in daily life. One. somehow felt, also, in the 
 presence of a reserve of force. 
 
 His many-coloured but pithy talk made the 
 breakfast cheroot a delightful episode in the long 
 hot day. After dinner, when we were alone and 
 not reading or playing chess, we had our cane 
 chairs taken up to the flat roof. There, in the 
 starlight, he would pour forth those stores of 
 incisive observation which have since earned for 
 him a foremost place among Indian Governors 
 and thinkers of our day. On one evening he 
 was the experienced and sagacious administrator,
 
 74 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 full of the problems of Indian rule. On another, 
 he was the philosopher sitting reflective on the 
 river-bank, and watching with calm but friendly 
 eyes the stream of ancient races and religions as 
 it flowed past. 
 
 The story of the Missionary's new peasant 
 settlement interested Ayliffe, and led to an intimacy 
 between the two men. Indeed, the character of 
 ' Trafalgar ' Douglas appealed alike to the prac- 
 tical and the speculative side of Ayliffe's nature. 
 The Old Missionary had reached a serene region 
 beyond the perturbations of dogma. We were 
 to find, too, during that hot weather, that his was 
 a calm of soul which no earthly agitation could 
 ruffle neither the frustration of long-cherished 
 hopes, nor the bitterness of desertion, nor sharp 
 physical pain. For, as the scorching end of April 
 melted into a fiery May, a great calamity befell 
 our aged friend. The glare and hot winds which 
 he faced while portioning out the new village 
 lands must have hastened the failure of eyesight 
 that had been going on for several years. The 
 first day I looked in at his cottage after his return, 
 I found him at his library table, the manuscript
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 75 
 
 of his beloved dictionary spread before him, and 
 his hand resting on the head of his little daughter 
 who was sitting on a low stool by his side. 
 
 ' It all seems very faint to me,' he said, with an 
 air of pained perplexity ; ' can the ink have faded 
 so soon ? ' 
 
 I glanced at the written slips, neatly pasted by 
 the zealous girlish fingers on the sheets of yellow 
 paper. They read as clear as before. The little 
 daughter looked up wistfully at me for a moment, 
 then threw her arms round her father's neck, con- 
 vulsively kissing his dimmed eyes, and choking 
 with pent-up sobs. 
 
 Our good doctor attended him with an anxious 
 kindness that tried, perhaps not altogether in vain, 
 to make up for his lack of ophthalmic science. He 
 told us from the first, however, that, so far as he 
 understood the case, it was a hopeless one 
 atrophy of the nerves of vision. The judge, on 
 the pretext of a rather stubborn ear-ache caught 
 while sleeping close under the punka, sent for a 
 specialist from Calcutta. The famous surgeon, 
 after doing what was needful for Ayliffe, made a 
 careful examination of the Missionary's eyes. His
 
 76 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 report confirmed our worst fears. By that time 
 Mr. Douglas could only distinguish day from night, 
 or a bright moving flame, and the professor in- 
 formed us that no change for the better must be 
 hoped for. Next morning Ayliffe gently told the 
 truth to the old man. 
 
 In the afternoon I went to sit with our stricken 
 friend. A dust storm, bringing its torrents of rain, 
 had cooled the air, but the sun had broken out 
 again with an insufferable radiance. The Old 
 Missionary was sitting as before at his table, 
 which, however, had been drawn close to the 
 window. One of his hands played in his little 
 girl's hair, with the other he turned from time 
 to time the written sheets before him, which he 
 was never again to see. But on his face rested 
 a perfect serenity, and his eyes, in which no out- 
 ward change could be discerned, turned to me with 
 their old beam of benevolent welcome. As I looked 
 at him there, surrounded by the great unfinished 
 work of his life, the work which no man but him- 
 self could complete, and from which he was now 
 shut out for ever, I felt as if any commonplace of 
 consolation that I could offer would strangle me
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 77 
 
 in the utterance. The double windows, strangely 
 enough on such a glaring afternoon, had been 
 thrown wide open. I sat for some moments in 
 silence with a heart too full for speech, while he 
 looked mildly out into the intolerable sunshine. 
 
 I could only press his hand and stammer some 
 words of deepest sorrow. 
 
 ' Ah, my dear young friend,' he said with a 
 gentle smile, ' you do not know how much remains 
 to me. I thank my merciful Maker,' he continued, 
 unconsciously raising his sightless eyes to heaven, 
 ' since He has been pleased to hide from me the 
 face of man, and all His lesser creatures, that He 
 has graciously left me His first work of creation, 
 His beautiful gift of light.' 
 
 We soon found that this was no momentary 
 exaltation of the mind, but a fixed and calm con- 
 tent. At first we hoped that, with the willing help 
 of Ayton the assistant magistrate (and a Boden 
 Scholar, as I have mentioned, in his Oxford days), 
 the dictionary might go on. Indeed, Ayliffe had 
 a few sheets put in type in Calcutta. On their 
 arrival it was pathetic to see the delight with which 
 the venerable scholar passed his finger-tips across
 
 78 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 their smooth surface, and then across the rumpled 
 coarse pages of yellow country paper on which the 
 slips of the separate words were pasted. But a fort- 
 night of disappointing effort made it clear that their 
 revision involved a knowledge of the hill-language 
 which the Old Missionary alone possessed. It was 
 a labour altogether beyond the rare hours of leisure 
 which the daily grinding at the official mill-stones 
 allowed to any of us. The Missionary was the first 
 to come to this conclusion, and he begged Ayliffe 
 to go to no further expense in printing. 
 
 Then, for a time, we tried to avoid all reference 
 to the matter. But evening after evening we found 
 the blind white-haired scholar at his writing-table, 
 in the fierce glare of the sinking sun, with his long 
 silky fingers travelling alternately over the smooth 
 proof-sheets and the uneven yellow manuscript. 
 
 By degrees he made it easy for his friends to 
 talk on the subject. He had peacefully accepted 
 the fact that the finishing of his beloved work was 
 not for him in this world. But he seemed to look 
 on its completion as merely delayed. He never 
 suggested any means for carrying it out, although 
 every now and then there came to the surface a
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 79 
 
 still expectation and quiet trust that the work 
 would be done. One evening he said with a 
 smile : ' After all, I have but ploughed up a new 
 field, and put the seed in the furrows. When the 
 harvest is ready, the Lord will send the reaper into 
 the harvest.' 
 
 As Ayliffe and I rode home afterwards, I hap- 
 pened to comment on this curious confidence in 
 a fruition which now seemed so hopeless. 
 
 ' Leave Now,' Ayliffe quietly answered 
 
 ' Leave Now for dogs and apes, 
 Man has For-ever.' 
 
 ' I wonder,' I went on, ' if that clever young 
 Brahman whom I heard preaching in the forest 
 will be of any use. I hear he is coming in from the 
 new village to headquarters, to help the Missionary 
 in his current duties.' 
 
 ' If the Brahman has fibre in him,' replied Ayliffe, 
 ' he may be the prop of this man's old age. Yet 
 who knows ? A youth who starts life with such a 
 wrench away from the order of things around him 
 as is implied by conversion, may have strange 
 oscillations before he reaches true equilibrium or 
 poise. He will help no doubt in the school and
 
 8o THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 religious services, and in giving out medicines to 
 the sick. But a task like the dictionary is not 
 to be accomplished by any impulse of emotion : 
 only by long and steadfast labour.' 
 
 I am afraid that the sympathy which we felt for 
 the venerable scholar, on the break-down of his 
 magnum opus when so near completion, has some- 
 what obscured in this narrative the daily routine 
 of his life. It was not the tradition of the Service 
 in Lower Bengal to take too vivid an interest in 
 details of mission work. A friendly subscription 
 which compromised no one, and a few kindly 
 words when presiding at the annual distribution of 
 prizes in the mission school, represented our con- 
 nexion with proselytizing enterprise. The judge, 
 as the senior civilian, read prayers officially in the 
 Circuit House on Sunday afternoons : to have 
 attended the mission church would have struck us 
 as an odd, and indeed almost as an irregular pro- 
 ceeding. But the things of which we knew so little 
 still formed, as they had formed for forty years, 
 the staple work of the Old Missionary's day. 
 
 In the early morning his daughter led him round 
 the dilapidated fish-pond to the little chapel on the
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 8l 
 
 opposite side; and there the white head, erect 
 above the desk, repeated from memory the familiar 
 Morning 1 Prayers in Bengali to a small gathering 
 of the mission catechists, a few women, and some of 
 the school children. From the chapel he went 
 direct to the adjoining school-house. The pupils, 
 of whom the majority were non-Christians, had 
 already assembled, a hundred and thirty strong, in 
 three long rooms opening one into the other. 
 When Mr. Douglas stood up at his table they all 
 joined in a Bengah' hymn, followed by a short 
 prayer from him and a chapter of the Gospels. The 
 secular work of the day then began. Mr. Douglas 
 had always aimed, not at ambitious standards of 
 instruction, but to give a really useful training 
 to his people, and to make his schools inde- 
 pendent of outside aid. Children of every faith 
 were welcome : the clever ones rose to be pupil- 
 teachers ; and the best of these were in due time 
 drafted into a normal class, in which they went 
 through a practical course as schoolmasters. 
 
 In this way he obtained a highly qualified staff 
 for his own central school. He was also enabled 
 to send out a constant stream of men on whose 
 
 G
 
 82 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 moral character and intellectual ability he could 
 thoroughly rely, to about thirty village schools 
 which he had set up among the Christian popu- 
 lation throughout the District and in the hill- 
 country. The system was self-supporting. The 
 fees in the central school, together with the Govern- 
 ment grant, more than defrayed its expenses. 
 The elders of the outlying Christian villages, in 
 which a teacher had been established, levied 
 a monthly dole in money and rice for his main- 
 tenance. The surplus fees from the central station 
 school supplemented these allowances in the 
 poorer hamlets. 
 
 The Old Missionary's custom was to plant out 
 a teacher who was usually although not always 
 a catechist as well in a backward tract, and to 
 maintain him until he gathered together a group 
 of pupils, often under no better shelter than 
 a spreading banian-tree. By degrees the villagers 
 began to take a pride in watching their children 
 being taught, set up a mat hut for a school-house, 
 and provided for the subsistence of the master. 
 The Missionary then withdrew his grant, and 
 applied the money to planting out a new school
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 83 
 
 elsewhere. He held that education should not 
 be expected to pay its way, at starting, among 
 people who have never known its value, and 
 that this was a case in which the supply must 
 create the demand. I believe that some such 
 words of his, in a conversation which he held 
 a quarter of a century before with the Governor- 
 General on his Excellency's progress through 
 the District, were the origin of Lord Auckland's 
 similar schools for backward tracts. 
 
 Notwithstanding his blindness, the venerable 
 instructor still gave two hours in the early 
 morning to his training class of teachers, each 
 youth, in which was to him not only a chosen 
 pupil but a beloved young friend. He also kept 
 what seemed, for so gentle a nature, a marvel- 
 lously firm hand on the general discipline. 
 Indeed, under his sanction, the head-master used 
 the rod with a freedom unknown in the neigh- 
 bouring Government school. 
 
 One morning, as he paced slowly round the 
 shaded margin of the fish-pond for a little exer- 
 cise, leaning on my arm, with the hum from his 
 school-house filling the still air, I asked why he 
 G 2
 
 84 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 laid so much stress on teaching, as compared 
 with the preaching which formed the popular 
 idea of a missionary's work. 
 
 ' I hope,' he said, quietly, * that while I do 
 the one I have not left the other undone. In 
 the days of my strength I spoke daily to the 
 people, and now the catechists strive faithfully 
 with them in the bazaars and villages. But I have 
 never forgotten John Lawrence's parting words 
 to me when he passed through Calcutta on sick- 
 leave, in 1840: "The only way that will bring 
 the natives to truer and more enlightened ideas is 
 the gradual progress of education. The attempts 
 to change the faith of the adult population have 
 hitherto failed, and will, I am afraid, continue to 
 fail." ' 
 
 ' But,' I interposed, ' is not our State education 
 doing the needed work on a far larger scale ? ' 
 
 ' I greatly fear,' he replied, l that it is not. 
 Your State education is producing a revolt 
 against three principles which, although they 
 were pushed too far in ancient India, represent 
 the deepest wants of human nature the prin- 
 ciple of discipline, the principle of religion, the
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 85 
 
 principle of contentment. The old indigenous 
 schools carried punishment to the verge of torture. 
 Your Government schools pride themselves in 
 having almost done away with the rod, and in 
 due time you will have on your hands a race of 
 young men who have grown up without discipline. 
 The indigenous schools made the native religions 
 too much the staple of instruction ; opening the 
 day's work by chanting a long invocation to the 
 Sun or some other deity, while each boy began 
 his exercise by writing the name of a divinity 
 at the top. Your Government schools take credit 
 for abstaining from religious teaching of any sort, 
 and in due time you will have on your hands 
 a race of young men who have grown up in the 
 public non- recognition of a God. The indigenous 
 schools educated the working and trading classes 
 for the natural business of their lives. Your Govern- 
 ment schools spur on every clever small boy with 
 scholarships and money allowances, to try to get 
 into a bigger school, and so through many bigger 
 schools, with the stimulus of bigger scholarships, to 
 a University degree. In due time you will have on 
 your hands an overgrown clerkly generation, whom
 
 86 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 you have trained in their youth to depend on 
 Government allowances and to look to Govern- 
 ment service, but whose adult ambitions not all the 
 offices of the Government would satisfy. What 
 are you to do with this great clever class, forced up 
 under a foreign system, without discipline, without 
 contentment, and without a God?' 
 
 The old man had disengaged his arm from 
 mine and was standing motionless, erect, with 
 his sightless eyes looking forth from their deep 
 sockets into space. At that moment it flashed 
 upon me what ' Trafalgar ' Douglas must once 
 have been. Twenty years afterwards, when we 
 expanded Indian education on a more national 
 basis, I remembered his words. 
 
 * The day will come,' he went on, as in a reverie, 
 'when your State educators will be face to face 
 with the results. They will be forced back on 
 the old indigenous schools as the sure foundation 
 of public instruction in India. They will find 
 out that races who for ages have borne a heavy 
 yoke throughout life, cannot be trained up without 
 discipline in their youth. They will also discover 
 that the end of national education is not to create
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 87 
 
 one vast clerkly class, but to fit all classes for 
 their natural work. You will then, I suppose, 
 set up technical schools, to do in some manner 
 what the old native system of the hedge-school 
 and the hereditary handicraft did in perhaps an ex- 
 cessive measure. The Government will discern the 
 danger of millions of men growing up in a dis- 
 credited faith, and it will piece together a moral 
 text-book to take the place of a God. I shall 
 not see that day, I know not how its difficulties 
 will be met, nor how the great changes which it 
 must bring may affect our missionary schools. 
 But night and morning I pray that wisdom may 
 be given to our rulers to know the times and the 
 seasons, and to do righteousness to this wandering 
 people.' 
 
 After an eloquent outburst of this kind and 
 such outbursts became more frequent as his blind- 
 ness more and more pent up his nature within 
 itself the old man would have a period of 
 profound calm. On that particular morning, as 
 it was the festival of a Hindu goddess and the 
 Courts were closed, I went in with him to his 
 dispensary a little room in his bungalow where
 
 88 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 he daily prescribed to the sick at the close of 
 his school work. I believe that at one time the 
 people flocked in numbers to him, and that he even 
 conducted surgical operations. But the growing 
 popularity of the station hospital, supported by 
 local subscriptions and a Government grant, had 
 for several years made its wards the centre of 
 medical relief. Of the score of very poor women 
 and children who sat weariedly on the floor of 
 the Missionary's veranda, only two or three were 
 new cases. Most of the others had come with 
 bottles to be refilled with fever mixture for their 
 sick folk at home. The aged practitioner was 
 very slow and gentle with them, and, notwith- 
 standing his blindness, managed to get a clear 
 knowledge of each applicant's needs. A native 
 compounder made up the prescriptions under his 
 orders, or replenished the phials and ointment 
 boxes from big blue bottles and delf jars. When 
 the last of his patients had departed, the old 
 man sat silent for some time. 
 
 4 1 find,' he at length said with a sigh, 4 that 
 my ministrations are not so acceptable as they 
 once were. At first, when prescribing medicine,
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 89 
 
 I offered up in each case a short prayer, in which 
 the patient joined. This gave great confidence 
 in the remedies. Before coming back to India 
 to start doctoring, I held commune with Edward 
 Irving, and for years I used the Benediction 
 of Oil and the beautiful order for Anointing 
 the Sick in the liturgy of the Catholic Apostolic 
 Church. But I found that the sorcerers in the 
 hill- country and the old native practitioners of 
 the border employed somewhat similar ceremonies, 
 especially in the application of oil. Or rather, 
 the people did not distinguish between their 
 incantations and my prayers. If I lost a man 
 from fever, the widow would bitterly complain that 
 her husband had died because I had only spoken 
 words, instead of administering the quinine-powder 
 wrapped up in a paper with the prayer written 
 on it. 
 
 'When the hill sorcerers asked me for my 
 secrets, and I gave them a few common remedies, 
 they thanked me politely. But they went away 
 and told the villagers that I was very deep, as 
 I kept to myself the spells, without which the 
 drugs were merely dead earths. The old Hindu
 
 90 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 practitioners of the border country were worse. 
 For they said that, if they had as good medicines 
 as mine, their gods would never let their sick 
 people die at all. So that whenever a man 
 recovered, the Christian drugs got the credit ; 
 and whenever a man died, the Christian God was 
 reviled. I could not go on with prayers which 
 to the hearers were only a more cunning magic. 
 It would not have been honest. But since I gave 
 them up, the people have not had the same con- 
 fidence in my practice, and go to the Government 
 hospital instead. They say that the medicines 
 there are administered by order of the Queen, 
 and so do not require divine aid or spells of 
 any sort.' 
 
 ' I can well understand these notions among 
 the hill-people,' I remarked; 'but surely your 
 Christian converts know better.' 
 
 ' Christian converts,' he answered sadly, ' remain, 
 like other people, pretty much what their early 
 training has made them. Indeed, some of the 
 catechists are anxious to again use the prayers 
 when giving medicine. It so happens that the 
 very first Christian hymn composed in the Bengali
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 91 
 
 language was a sick-bed supplication. Only yester- 
 day the Brahman preacher, whom you saw in our 
 cold-weather encampment, was urging me as their 
 spokesman in this matter. He is a godly youth, 
 and but for the work of the new village I had 
 hoped to send him to Calcutta to be ordained 
 priest on this coming Trinity Sunday. He has 
 held deacon's orders for two years. I pointed 
 out to him that our Anglican liturgy does not 
 provide for the use of prayers in the administration 
 of medicine. He respectfully pleaded the precept 
 of St. James, and I refrained from further speech, 
 lest I should be a disturber of his faith. His 
 mind is working in many directions, and in my 
 weakness I can only trust the end to God.' 
 
 Just then we heard a light step in the veranda, 
 and his little daughter ran round from another 
 room, saying, with a laugh, ' Have you forgotten 
 my lessons to-day, dear papa ? I am quite ready.* 
 The old man's face lost its look of care in a moment 
 as he took her hand in his, and we went into the 
 library. 
 
 Only a short time remained till their breakfast 
 the Missionary kept earlier hours than the rest
 
 92 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 of the station, finishing his long morning work 
 by nine in the cold weather, and its still more 
 numerous duties in the summer months by ten. 
 The child sat down on a low seat at her father's 
 knee, and gravely went through her tasks. She 
 first repeated a psalm in the vigorous Scotch 
 metrical version, which she had committed to 
 memory. Then she did her geography, pointing 
 out the towns of Europe on a map. Her sweet 
 gratitude and quick tact made the old man feel, 
 notwithstanding his blindness, that he was taking 
 an effective part in the proceedings. He listened 
 with pride as she read out her chapter of history, 
 asking her from time to time to spell the more 
 difficult words. Before doing so she would 
 solemnly each time place the book on his knees, 
 face downwards, so that she could not see the 
 page. At the end he questioned her on the 
 whole lessons of the day. The anxious child had 
 learned everything so perfectly that her blind 
 preceptor was not allowed for a moment to feel 
 his infirmity a hindrance in examining her in 
 books which he could not see. 
 Unlike most elderly people in India, the Missionary
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 93 
 
 took no afternoon sleep. As long- as his sight 
 lasted, he devoted that pause in the tropical day 
 to his dictionary. Now that this work had been 
 withdrawn from him, he calmly rearranged his 
 hours to the new conditions imposed. 
 
 Instead of taking the current work of the 
 mission after breakfast, as his practice had been, 
 he gave the forenoon to his daughter, telling her 
 old stories of the Solway and Scottish border, 
 while she sat beside him and sewed ; or listening 
 to her reading aloud whatever girlish book she 
 was engaged on ; and occasionally dictating to 
 her letters for his friends. It was a very little 
 hand that slowly traced those epistles, in which 
 the mild benevolence and experience of age con- 
 trasted quaintly with the large unformed writing 
 of childhood. After a two o'clock dinner he made 
 his daughter retire to rest, and the young Brahman 
 preacher came to him with the reports from the 
 outlying schools and Christian hamlets, and all 
 the miscellaneous work of the mission. 
 
 Much of the old man's business consisted in 
 settling disputes of the Christian villagers, and 
 the veranda gradually filled with the litigants
 
 94 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 and their witnesses as the afternoon wore on. 
 Frequently, too, the headmen of one of the non- 
 Christian hill tribes would arrive in the mission 
 enclosure to seek his advice, or to ask him to 
 decide their differences. Groups of them might be 
 seen smoking patiently under his mango-trees, or 
 filling their pitchers at his lotus-covered fish-pond, 
 which they had named rather prettily in their 
 hill-language, ' The Waters of Reconciliation.' The 
 calamity lately fallen upon him increased rather 
 than lessened this branch of his work. His age 
 and blindness seemed to have given an additional 
 sanctity to his decisions. 
 
 The circumstance, also, that his doors now stood 
 wide open all afternoon in spite of the outside 
 glare, enabled the whole body of onlookers and 
 petitioners to watch each successive case till their 
 own turn came. It was indeed a striking sight, 
 as I witnessed it late one afternoon. The tall 
 venerable figure, with its white hair and the deep- 
 set eyes that looked forth into the brightness with 
 the glance of a grand old eagle, sat just inside the 
 open door, and listened with an immoveable face to 
 the loud disputants in the veranda. His very slow-
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 95 
 
 ness and silence, which had grown painfully on 
 him since his loss of sight, appeared to make the 
 people attach greater weight to every word 
 which at length came reluctantly from his lips. 
 Worried as we officials were by petty cases 
 dragged upwards from one tribunal to another, 
 I could not help telling him when his litigants 
 had gone, that the Missionary's Court was the 
 only judgement-seat in the district from which 
 there seemed to be no appeal. 
 
 Having settled their disputes, he went back to 
 the chair at his writing-table, on which lay the 
 specimen proof-sheets and the coarse yellow 
 manuscript of his dictionary the usual position 
 in which I found him when his day's work was 
 done. We had by this time persuaded him to 
 occasionally take a drive in the evening a con- 
 cession which he only made to his daughter's 
 health, and because she firmly refused to come 
 without him. As there was no barouche nor any 
 feminine vehicle in the station, and my Australian 
 Stanhope had the only seat wide enough for three 
 persons, Ayliffe would sometimes put his fine 
 stud-breds into it, and spin them a swift dozen
 
 96 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 miles through the cooling air. He was, however, 
 much more missed in the racket-court than my- 
 self, so it usually fell to me to take the father and 
 child for their evening drive. The old man sat 
 silent and sightless, but I think quite happy, his 
 hat off, and his white hair blown about by our 
 rapid motion, listening to his little daughter as 
 she chattered about my horses, now old friends 
 of hers, or discoursed on the small incidents of 
 her isolated life. It was funny to hear her, in 
 prim mission-house fashion, always speak of the 
 natives quite kindly as 'the heathen.' 
 
 She had just made acquaintance with Pilgrim's 
 Progress, the assistant magistrate having given her 
 the beautiful Edinburgh edition, with David Scott's 
 illustrations, on her tenth birthday. Its forty mar- 
 vellous designs were all realities to her. We used 
 to be on the look-out for the various characters 
 as we whirled along the road. One evening we 
 met Timorous and Mistrust they were a couple 
 of post-runners with jingling bells at the end of 
 their bamboo staves fleeing from the lions. On 
 another, we were quite sure that we saw Simple, 
 Sloth, and Presumption (three fat grain merchants)
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 97 
 
 encamped for the hot-weather night under a tree. 
 Her father was always valorous Christian, and 
 a certain bazaar of sweetmeat-sellers and bright 
 printed calicos was Vanity Fair. The hillock in 
 the judge's garden became the top of the Delect- 
 able Mountains, from which she would gaze to 
 the western hills: half persuaded that amid their 
 heights and buttresses standing out in the brief 
 glory of the sunset, she might discern, if she had 
 but the Shepherds' perspective glass, the gates of 
 the Celestial City. The only thing wanting to her 
 father's happiness on these drives was the sound 
 of the evening bell which the young Brahman had 
 presented to the mission church. When at home 
 the venerable pastor, often too fatigued to walk 
 across to the vesper service, used to sit in his 
 veranda and listen to the soft tinkle in the belfry 
 with a look of rapt calm, as if repeating the Nunc 
 Dimittis in his heart. 
 
 I found by degrees, however, that the Brahman 
 preacher had become to the old man a subject of 
 anxious thought. Whether it was the result of the 
 youth's independent position when in charge of 
 the new village, or of his studies for priestly 
 
 H
 
 98 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 ordination, or merely the natural development of 
 an earnest young mind, the Brahman had ceased 
 to be the trusting disciple, and was working out 
 conclusions for himself. Mr. Douglas, like most 
 men born in a Scottish episcopal family, had 
 started life with traditions which we should now 
 briefly label as High Church. On his return to 
 Scotland in 1828 to qualify himself as a medical 
 missionary, his views had taken a mystical turn, 
 under the spell of the apocalyptic eloquence with 
 which Edward Irving thrilled for a moment the 
 University youth in the northern capital. 
 
 A third of a century of solitary mission work 
 since then had sobered his opinions. As already 
 mentioned, his doctrinal beliefs were softened 
 down into a great daily desire to do good for 
 his people. The young postulant for priest's 
 orders began to find many things wanting in the 
 theology of his old master. I subsequently heard 
 that the Brahman deacon, having now the prac- 
 tical conduct of the mission chapel, had protested 
 against the shortened services which the Old 
 Missionary thought were as much as the people 
 could bear. He also complained of the omission
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 99 
 
 of the Athanasian Creed on the appointed feasts 
 of the Church. 
 
 It appears that on Whitsunday he remonstrated 
 about that omission so earnestly with Mr. Douglas 
 as almost to forget his habitual respect. Several 
 of the catechists afterwards called at the mission- 
 house to urge the same view on their pastor. 
 A number of lesser differences, indeed, would 
 seem to have concentrated themselves on this 
 point. The stout-hearted old Scotchman, not- 
 withstanding his sightless eyes and feeble limbs, 
 refused to yield to the pressure. 
 
 Revival meetings were held by the dissentients 
 during the Ember days of the following week. 
 One youthful enthusiast went so far as to publicly 
 offer up a prayer that the old man might be 
 brought to a knowledge of the truth. As the 
 mission had been maintained by Mr. Douglas with- 
 out any definite connexion with either of the great 
 Church societies in Calcutta, there was practically 
 no superior authority to whom to appeal. Some- 
 thing like a schism was threatened. The Old 
 Missionary said not a word to us about his new 
 troubles, and the religious perturbations of native 
 H 2
 
 100 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 Christians were little likely to reach our ears. 
 But we could see that a sadness, deeper than the 
 sorrow of blindness, had settled on his face. 
 
 It was the custom of Ayton, the assistant magis- 
 trate, to spend Sunday morning 1 before breakfast 
 with the venerable scholar, chatting about the 
 linguistic studies to which that young officer then 
 devoted his leisure. The little girl was absent 
 during those hours, keeping quiet the baby-class 
 in the Sunday school with picture stories from 
 the Bible. In these morning talks with Ayton 
 the old man's love of learning would reassert itself. 
 He seemed for the moment to forget his infirmity 
 and whatever other distresses lay hidden in his 
 heart. One topic on which he delighted to descant 
 was the deeply religious and benevolent character 
 of ancient Indian literature. Ayton humoured this 
 vein, and used to turn into English metre any 
 striking passage that he came across in his Sanskrit 
 reading during the week. On the Sunday after 
 the events mentioned in the last paragraph he 
 had brought a few chance verses of the sort, 
 and was just beginning to read them, when I 
 happened to look in. ' They don't come together,'
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN IOI 
 
 he was saying to Mr. Douglas, 'and I fear you 
 will find them a poor paraphrase rather than 
 a translation. But the mingled feeling of transi- 
 toriness and trust is characteristic.' 
 
 A SANSKRIT PSALM OF LIFE. 
 
 Like driftwood on the sea's wild breast, 
 We meet and cling with fond endeavour 
 
 A moment on the same wave's crest ; 
 The wave divides, we part for ever. 
 
 We have no lasting resting here, 
 
 To-day's best friend is dead to-morrow: 
 
 We only learn to hold things dear, 
 
 To pierce our hearts with future sorrow. 
 
 Be not too careful for the morn, 
 
 God will thy daily bread bestow : 
 The same eve that the babe is born, 
 
 The mother's breast begins to flow. 
 
 Will He who robes the swan in white, 
 Who dyes the parrot's bright green hue, 
 
 Who paints the peacock's glancing light, 
 Will He less kindly deal with you? 
 
 As he was commencing the next verse, an un- 
 expected interruption broke in on these scholarly 
 nugae. A step hurried over from the chapel.
 
 102 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 Ayton and I were sitting out in the veranda on 
 the other side of the house, so that we could not 
 see the new-comer, nor he us. The Missionary sat 
 between us in his customary chair, but just within 
 the door of the room, and the young Brahman 
 (for it was he), on entering, must have thought 
 Mr. Douglas was alone. The deacon walked 
 quickly across the room, raised the old man's 
 hand to his lips, and then, with a haste which 
 perhaps may have been designed to preclude re- 
 flection, burst out in agitated words: 
 
 ' My master, my dear master ! I have a message 
 to thee. " Whosoever will be saved, before all 
 things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic 
 Faith. Which Faith, except every one do keep 
 whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall 
 perish everlastingly." Forgive me, my father,' 
 he went on, in a voice quivering from the re- 
 ligious excitements of the week, and his intense 
 Indian nature now strung up to the verge of 
 weeping, ' but the words have been in my heart 
 day and night, and I have striven not to utter 
 them. And on my knees this Trinity Sunday 
 morning I could not hear the sound of my own
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 103 
 
 prayers by reason of a terrible ringing in my 
 ears, "without doubt he shall perish everlastingly, 
 he shall perish everlastingly." ' 
 
 A dead silence followed. The young Brahman, 
 still unconscious of any presence except that of 
 his blind master, seemed to have exhausted his 
 powers of utterance. At length the Old Mis- 
 sionary said, very gently: 
 
 'My son, let us pray together.' 
 
 It is not for me to repeat that tender and 
 pathetic outpouring of a well-nigh broken heart, 
 intended alone for its Maker in heaven, and for 
 the wandering disciple on earth. At its close, 
 the aged man remained kneeling for some time. 
 Then, after another long pause, he reseated him- 
 self in his chair, and reasoned calmly with his 
 pupil. We could not help overhearing what took 
 place. The young Brahman gradually grew ex- 
 cited again, and in the end declared that the 
 people were being starved of the truth. 
 
 We gathered, from his high-pitched remon- 
 strances, that he and the native catechists had 
 worked themselves, by revival meetings, into 
 one of those Eastern religious enthusiasms which
 
 104 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 drove forth Patriarchs of Alexandria and Con- 
 stantinople into exile, and which, but for the 
 firm British rule, would every year redden the 
 streets of Agra with Hindu or Muhamraadan 
 blood. It had never occurred to us that any 
 similar wave of religious feeling could surge over 
 a quiet little community of Christian converts. 
 The truth seems to be that the younger of the 
 catechists had for some time desired a warmer 
 ritual and a more tropical form of faith than the 
 calm theology of their aged pastor. 
 
 A High Church young parson of the Society 
 for the Propagation of the Gospel, who acted 
 for the Old Missionary during an illness in the 
 previous autumn, unconsciously sowed the seeds 
 of discord. The fervour of the Brahman deacon 
 merely hastened a crisis which had become in- 
 evitable in the spiritual life of the mission. One 
 of the deep chagrins of the Old Missionary, which 
 he buried out of sight from us, was this feeling 
 that the most earnest of his people were silently 
 arraying themselves against him. Amid the re- 
 ligious excitements of the Whitsun week, with its 
 Ember days, the mission had fairly got out of
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 105 
 
 hand. At the last revival meeting the catechists 
 resolved, among other things, to insist on the 
 Athanasian Creed being read on the following 
 Trinity Sunday, and deputed the deacon to report 
 their ultimatum. 
 
 ' So long as I live,' replied the Old Missionary 
 slowly, and with a solemn emphasis on each word, 
 ' the church in which I have preached Christ's 
 message of mercy shall never be profaned by 
 man's dogma of damnation.' 
 
 4 My father, my father,' the young Brahman 
 answered, almost breaking into sobs, ' do not 
 speak so. For unless you consent to have the 
 full Trinity service, as laid down in the Prayer 
 Book, we have bound ourselves not to enter the 
 chapel.' 
 
 4 God's will be done,' said the old man sadly, 
 but firmly. 
 
 In another minute the deacon had left the 
 room, and we listeners in the veranda, not know- 
 ing what consolation to offer, departed in silence 
 to our homes. 
 
 Indeed, I had at that time a trouble of my own, 
 which might have inclined me to seek counsel
 
 106 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 rather than to tender it. Scarcely eight weeks 
 had passed since I returned to the judge's house, 
 after the Easter riot at the silk Factory. During 
 the last three of them a cloud had come over 
 my relations with Ayliffe. It is not needful, after 
 this lapse of time, to apportion the blame. I 
 suspect, on looking back, that we were both 
 right, and both too keen. 
 
 Having been made a judge malgre tut, Ayliffe 
 set himself not the less strictly and conscientiously 
 to discharge the duties of his office. The sub- 
 ordinate native magistrates found an exactitude 
 enforced from them in their judicial work to 
 which they had never been accustomed. Some 
 of them were men of the dignified old type, and 
 their unacquaintance with English made it difficult 
 for them to master the hard-and-fast chapters of 
 the new Penal and Procedure Codes. Their sen- 
 tences were now constantly reversed on appeal 
 to the judge owing to flaws in the proceedings, 
 and notorious offenders got off. 
 
 My difficulties, as the officer responsible for 
 keeping down crime in the District, were increased 
 by the circumstance that the Bengal police had
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 107 
 
 also been reorganized by law on an entirely fresh 
 basis. The system was full of novelties both to 
 officers and men, and they found their efforts 
 checkmated by technicalities which they imper- 
 fectly understood. Two fraternities of gang- 
 robbers, whom we had tracked down with much 
 difficulty, escaped on their trial before Ayliffe as 
 sessions judge. A sense of discouragement began 
 to pervade the whole executive of the District. 
 
 The native magistrates came to me with their 
 grievances ; the English superintendent of police 
 less discreetly lamented his wrongs to a friend at 
 the seat of Government. Even Ayton, the assistant 
 magistrate, who had the law at his finger-ends, 
 felt it his duty to urge on me the detriment 
 which was being done to the peace and order of 
 the District. ' It is very well,' he said, ' for the 
 legislature to launch forth new Codes. But unless 
 it can give new men to administer them, or until 
 the old native magistrates have time to master 
 them, a judge defeats the purposes of justice by 
 treating irregularities of procedure as fatal flaws 
 in a case.' 
 
 Living as Ayliffe and I were on the most
 
 108 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 intimate terms, under the same roof, it was 
 scarcely possible that we should avoid this sub- 
 ject. I pressed for the allowances which might 
 fairly be granted to our half-instructed subordin- 
 ates during a transition stage. He alleged the 
 express provisions of the law. His sweetness of 
 temper made anything like a quarrel impossible. 
 But underneath his considerate courtesy of speech 
 lay an immovable firmness of purpose. We both 
 felt it growing dangerous to approach a subject 
 which we knew was on each other's mind. A sense 
 of separation arose. We kept more to our respec- 
 tive wings of the building during the day, and 
 our chairs were no longer carried up to the roof 
 for the old pleasant talks after dinner. I hurried 
 on the work-people at my own house, and as soon 
 as a few rooms could be made weather-tight I 
 moved over. 
 
 One result of the change was that I more fre- 
 quently found a spare half-hour to look in on 
 the Old Missionary. I thought it right to tell 
 him that we had overheard what took place 
 between him and the young Brahman. The 
 venerable man, on learning that I was become
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 109 
 
 aware of his hidden trouble, freely opened his 
 heart. But he altogether refused to share in my 
 perhaps too freely expressed indignation at the 
 deacon's ingratitude. Since the schism on Trinity 
 Sunday neither the deacon nor the catechists 
 had entered the chapel. 
 
 'You cannot call ingratitude,' he said, 'a line 
 of action that proceeds from a sense of duty. 
 This affliction has fallen not less heavily on the 
 youth than on myself. I trust in God that He 
 will find a way for both of us through the trial. 
 Meanwhile I have been marvellously renewed for 
 the work laid upon me. The older and simpler 
 among the people cleave to me ; and I feel 
 a strength not my own for the whole religious 
 services of the week.' 
 
 It became clear, however, as the hot weather 
 dragged on its remorseless length, that the old 
 man was overtaxing both mind and body. He 
 had strange fits of lassitude, from which some- 
 times the only thing that roused him was the 
 tinkle in the belfry calling him and his faithful 
 few to prayer. The other business of the mission 
 seemed to lose interest for him, while this single
 
 110 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 duty grew into an absorbing anxiety. A great 
 unacknowledged fear took possession of him lest 
 he should find himself one day unable for the 
 work. The pupil-teacher who read the Psalms 
 and other parts of the Bengali service which the 
 blind pastor did not repeat from memory, com- 
 plained to the Missionary's little daughter of un- 
 wonted omissions and transposals in the Liturgy, 
 which sometimes made it difficult for him to 
 know when his own parts came in. Her small 
 anxious face grew paler day by day, and occasion- 
 ally I fancied that one caught something like a sob 
 in her voice. 
 
 With the pathetic half- perceptions of childhood, 
 she felt the presence of a trouble which she could not 
 alleviate, and a growing sense of calamity around 
 her which she could not understand. For the first 
 time, too, she seemed to divine the solitude of her 
 poor little life. All she could do was to suffer in 
 fear and silence. Even the small distractions of 
 her lonely existence were one by one curtailed. 
 Her father was now too wearied before evening 
 to rouse himself for the slight exertion of a drive. 
 I learned also, by accident, that the child had
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN ill 
 
 given up bringing her lessons to him in the morn- 
 ing. She seems to have spent the long stifling 
 hours of the day in wistfully waiting on his 
 slightest wishes : always watching, watching, with 
 a child's keen sense of a great, undefined sorrow 
 in the house. 
 
 It was in vain that we remonstrated with the 
 venerable pastor against his persisting in duties 
 which were evidently beyond his powers. ' As 
 my day is, so shall my strength be,' was all we 
 could get from him in reply. Indeed it became 
 clear that, if he had not taken on himself the whole 
 religious services of the mission, the revivalists 
 would have left him without any adherents what- 
 ever. They had formed a temporary congregation 
 under the eloquent ministrations of the young 
 deacon. The Brahman appeared, however, to hold 
 back rather than lead on the more fervid spirits 
 among the rank and file of converts from the 
 low-castes. I afterwards heard that he rebuked 
 from the pulpit certain of the catechists, who 
 wished to widen the separation and make it per- 
 manent by applying for a new English missionary 
 to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
 
 112 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 Calcutta. All this, and probably much more, 
 must have been known to our old friend, and 
 explains his intense anxiety to maintain the 
 services and so tide the mission over its time of 
 trial. The chapel bell at morning and evening 
 seemed to have grown dearer to him as the sole 
 remaining symbol of peace. 
 
 One forenoon, just before the courts closed for 
 the rest of the flaming day, I received a note from 
 the doctor asking me to look in at the mission - 
 house on my way home. He himself met me in 
 the veranda, and whispered that the painful com- 
 plaint from which the Missionary suffered the 
 previous year at the end of the rains had broken 
 out again. He did not, however, think the attack 
 more serious than the last one, although the hot 
 weather was very much against him. On entering 
 I found the library turned into a sick-room. The 
 bed on which the patient lay, a common country 
 charpoy strung with coarse fibre, had been brought 
 in from his sleeping chamber, and placed in the 
 middle of the floor under the punka. For the 
 first time since his blindness all the double doors 
 and windows were shut up, and it took some
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 113 
 
 moments before my vision accustomed itself to 
 the darkness. The tight-drawn face was flushed 
 and red in its setting of white hair, the lips 
 muttered in high fever, the eyes from time to 
 time moved with a restless brightness which made 
 it difficult to believe they did not see. 
 
 One hand twitched ceaselessly at the sheet, the 
 other was clasped by his little daughter who 
 sat on her low cane stool by the bedside. She 
 had arranged the accessories of a sick-room on 
 a small round table within her reach the phials, 
 and moist sponge, and cool porous earthen 
 pitcher of water. Every few minutes she gently 
 removed the hot handkerchief from her father's 
 forehead, and replaced a newly-wetted one on 
 his brow. The appealing, wearied look that had 
 pained us during the past weeks had gone out 
 of her small face, and she watched every move- 
 ment of the sufferer with a solemn and silent 
 earnestness which was entirely unconscious of her 
 own anxieties and deep trouble. 
 
 ' He must have been struggling with illness 
 for some time,' said the doctor, when half an 
 hour afterwards we went back into the veranda. 
 
 I
 
 114 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 4 1 suspect, too, that he got touched by the sun 
 this morning as he walked across to the chapel, 
 and so brought matters to a crisis. About seven 
 o'clock a man came running to me in the hospital, 
 crying that the Padre Saheb was in a fit. It 
 appears that on kneeling down, after giving the 
 Benediction at the close of the service, he remained 
 motionless for some time and then fell forward on 
 the pavement. I found him lying there uncon- 
 scious, with his daughter holding up his head 
 in her arms. The fever, I hope, is chiefly the 
 result of the sun, and should pass off. But his 
 former malady has been doing mischief again. 
 
 4 The poor old man must have been in great 
 pain for several days without telling any one. I 
 shall camp here for the afternoon, and as soon as 
 my servant brings over my breakfast I hope to 
 persuade the little girl to eat something, and get 
 her off to bed for a couple of hours. It will be 
 time enough to relieve me for my evening round 
 at five o'clock, and you can arrange with the 
 others for the night.' 
 
 The division of duties was easily made. Ayliffe 
 took the first watch, and meanwhile sent off a
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 115 
 
 servant to Calcutta to fetch up a block of Wenham 
 ice in a thick new horse -blanket. For, although 
 the railway had brought the capital within eight 
 hours of us by train and relays of horses, ice 
 was still only an occasional luxury in our small 
 station, and local ice-making machines were then 
 scarcely used in India. The assistant magistrate 
 and district superintendent of police shared the 
 night between them, and I came on at daybreak. 
 The distant jail gong was striking five in the 
 still air, with the first dim pink just tinging the 
 eastern sky, as I walked over to the Old Mission- 
 ary's cottage. But I found the little girl already 
 dressed and sitting on her cane stool watching 
 the sleeper. Ayton told me that she had heard 
 the runners come in with the ice an hour 
 earlier, and at once presented herself to see it 
 chopped up, and to fold it in the handkerchief 
 on her father's forehead. The old man quickly 
 felt the relief, and after a restless night sank into 
 a profound slumber. The doctor called soon 
 after six and, without disturbing the sleeper, gave 
 a good account of his condition. The improve- 
 ment was maintained during the day, and we 
 
 I 2
 
 Il6 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 hoped that the attack was a mere touch of the 
 sun, which would run its course and leave the 
 patient none the worse. Our small bachelor 
 community at once fell into the routine of nursing 
 him in watches of four hours, leaving him to his 
 daughter for the afternoon. 
 
 But in a day or two the doctor told us that 
 the former complaint had reasserted itself in 
 a dangerous form, and that a small operation 
 would be needful. Before the week was out we 
 were compelled to accept the fact that our old 
 friend was struggling for his life against prostration 
 and pain, and an exhausting fever which he could 
 not shake off. His servant, a hard-working devout 
 old Musalman, who represented in that modest 
 household the joint train of Hindu and Muham- 
 madan domestics in ordinary Anglo-Indian estab- 
 lishments, never quitted the door of the sick-room 
 except to prepare his master's food in the kitchen, 
 or to pray with his face towards Mecca five times 
 each twenty-four hours. Day and night he was 
 ready at the slightest call: always calm, always 
 helpful, always in spotless white garments, and 
 apparently needing no sleep, save what he could
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 117 
 
 snatch sitting on his heels, with a rocking move- 
 ment, in the veranda. 
 
 The poor little girl broke down on the day 
 after the operation, chiefly, I think, owing to the 
 moans which the sufferer unconsciously uttered 
 while in his fever. She was taken over to 
 Ayliffe's house. But she pined there so silently 
 and piteously, that the doctor brought her back 
 to her father, on condition that she should only 
 attend on him during the latter part of the day, 
 when he was at his brightest. He usually rallied 
 in the afternoons, and talked quite cheerfully of 
 the future. The heavy anxiety about the work 
 of the mission, which had pressed on him with 
 a morbid consuming apprehension just before his 
 illness, seemed to have disappeared. Nor from 
 first to last, except during the delirium of the re- 
 curring fever, did he utter a complaint, or allow 
 himself to give one outward symptom of pain. 
 
 It was only from the doctor that we learned 
 how much he suffered. He would not allow 
 any of us to move him in his bed, lest the mere 
 change of position should extort a groan. And, 
 indeed, his old servant had an almost feminine
 
 Il8 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 tenderness of touch, and a slow gentleness of hand 
 that made us feel him to be a better nurse than 
 any of us. 
 
 The little girl also rallied, now that she was 
 restored to her father. The old man and the child 
 spent the hours of each afternoon together, scarcely 
 speaking, but quite happy as long as they felt the 
 clasp of one another's hand. Only towards sunset, 
 at the hour when the chapel bell had formerly 
 rung for evening prayer, he became restless and 
 watchful. Sometimes he would half raise his head 
 in a listening attitude, and then, having waited in 
 vain for the beloved sound in the now silent belfry, 
 the white hair would sink back on the pillow, 
 while a look of pained perplexity settled on his 
 face. During the night, when the fever was on 
 him, he would ask again and again in a weary 
 tone, ' Why did I not hear the bell ? why do they 
 not ring the bell?' 
 
 Meanwhile the news had reached the jungle 
 country that the Old Missionary lay sick. Groups 
 of short thick-built hillmen began to encamp on 
 the outskirts of his orchard. When it became 
 known that his life was in danger, their women
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 119 
 
 also arrived. In the early morning we saw them 
 silently drawing water from the fish-pond; all 
 through the burning day they sat smoking and 
 waiting under the trees ; the dying embers of their 
 cooking fires glowed with a dull red throughout 
 the night. The doctor wanted to send them away, 
 so as to keep the sick house as clear as possible 
 of human beings. But the Old Missionary pleaded 
 for them, and, indeed, the space was large enough 
 if they would only be quiet. It was marvellous 
 to see that gathering of hillmen, accustomed to the 
 incessant chatter of their forest hamlets, stealing 
 noiselessly about or sitting in silent circles. 
 
 One afternoon the headmen of the Christian 
 clans were allowed to come into the veranda, but 
 the sight of their blind and prostrate leader and 
 the presence of unknown Europeans (the doctor 
 and myself) seemed to take away their powers of 
 speech. The Old Missionary talked kindly but 
 feebly to them, while they stood shy and restrained, 
 almost without a word. The interview threatened 
 to end in awkward silence, when an aged grey- 
 haired hill- woman, the mother of one of the 
 prisoners whose release the Missionary had ob-
 
 120 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 tained, pushed through the men and, throwing her- 
 self on her knees at the bottom of the bed, kissed 
 the old man's feet with sobs and blessings. 
 
 Next week the hillmen and people from the out- 
 lying jungle-hamlets flocked into the station in 
 such numbers that they had to be removed from 
 the mission enclosure. The judge gave them leave 
 to camp at the lower end of his park, where there 
 was a large tank; and only their headmen were 
 allowed to come and sit in silence under the 
 Missionary's trees. The old Musalman servant 
 went out to them five times a day, at his appointed 
 prayer-times, to report how his master fared. 
 
 I had not met the Brahman deacon since the 
 rupture between him and the Old Missionary ; but 
 I heard that Ayton, the assistant magistrate, had 
 spoken to him in such unsparing terms as pre- 
 vented him from coming near the mission -house. 
 Their interview was a painful one. The young 
 Brahman, confident that he was acting under divine 
 guidance, yet very unhappy about the human 
 results of his action, sought counsel of Ayton, 
 as the only one of us who had previously come 
 much in contact with him or shown him kindness.
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 121 
 
 Ayton, nerved by the harsh justice of youth, 
 listened in silence until the deacon reached the 
 point in regard to which the schism had actually 
 taken place the Athanasian Creed. Then he 
 coldly observed: 
 
 ' You are an educated man and a University 
 graduate. Before you quarrelled with your bene- 
 factor on such a question, you would have done 
 well to have read your Gibbon.' 
 
 ' I came to you, sir,' replied the Brahman, 
 ' seeking counsel, and willing to bear reproof ; 
 and you refer me to a scoffer.' 
 
 ' On a man who can act as you have acted,' 
 Ayton sternly answered, ' counsel would be thrown 
 away, and I have no authority to administer reproof. 
 Nor am I aware that Gibbon, in his account of 
 Athanasius, errs in anything unless on the side 
 of a too enthusiastic admiration. But, although 
 I have neither counsel nor reproof for you, I may 
 plainly tell you that your conduct seems to me 
 the basest ingratitude.' 
 
 ' I have but followed my lights.' 
 
 ' Followed your lights ! Split up a community, 
 and brought sorrow on your benefactor in his
 
 122 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 blindness and old age, for the sake of a creed com- 
 piled centuries after the death of the man whose 
 name it bears a creed passed over in silence by 
 most of the Christian sects, and by the majority of 
 our own Church in America and in Ireland. How 
 can you look around you at the good lives and 
 patient endurance of millions of your countrymen, 
 and dare to assert they will perish everlastingly ? 
 You say you have come to me for advice; but 
 what advice can avail you as long as you are in 
 mutiny against the man to whom, by every tie 
 of personal gratitude and constituted authority, 
 you owe obedience?' 
 
 When the Old Missionary grew worse, I heard 
 that the deacon used to steal into the kitchen (an 
 outhouse at a little distance from the cottage) after 
 dark, and tremulously question the old Musalman 
 servant about his master. In his deep dejection 
 the youth even went to Ayton's pandit, a fine old 
 Brahman of the straitest sect of Hinduism ; but 
 with whom the convert now felt a new bond from 
 their common anxiety about their sick friend. 
 Each morning the pandit, arrayed in delicate 
 white muslin, came to make his salaam at the
 
 1 'HE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 123 
 
 door of his venerable fellow-student; and some- 
 times he was allowed a short talk with our patient 
 in the afternoon. He kept the deacon informed 
 of what was going on inside the cottage, with 
 the quiet urbanity due to his own sacred character 
 as a pandit of high caste, but without any pretence 
 of sympathy for the convert. 
 
 One evening the unfortunate young man was 
 tempted in his desolation to try to get within the 
 barrier of politeness which the courteous native 
 scholar habitually interposed. He poured forth the 
 successive episodes of the inward struggle which 
 made up the story of his short life ; a struggle which 
 had cut him off from all he held dearest in boy- 
 hood, and which now separated him from the sorely 
 stricken master whom he reverenced and loved. 
 
 ' Tell me, Pandit,' he concluded, ' you who have 
 lived long, and who seem to have attained to so 
 perfect a peace, what is my duty? How shall 
 I find rest?' 
 
 ' Poor youth,' replied the Pandit, with calm 
 compassion, ' what rest can there be for one who 
 was born a Brahman and has fallen away from 
 Brahmanhood ? During thousands of years your
 
 124 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 Brahman fathers in each generation have sought 
 after divine knowledge, and the same burden was 
 laid upon you by your birth. In your boyish im- 
 patience you listened to teachers who thought they 
 could suddenly impart to you the truth the truth 
 which you are compelled by your Brahman's nature 
 to search out for yourself as long as you shall live.' 
 
 * But, sir, you forget that the truth which they 
 gave me was given not of themselves, but was 
 revealed by God.' 
 
 ' A revealed religion,' continued the Brahman 
 impassively, ' is a short cut to a false sense of 
 certainty in regard to divine things. It is useful 
 for the lower castes, whose lives of toil do not 
 leave them leisure for severe thought. Therefore 
 our fathers provided incarnations for the common 
 people, and so shadowed forth in visible forms 
 the conceptions which they themselves had worked 
 out regarding God. But they never set fetters 
 on religious thought by confining it within the 
 limits of a final revelation, well knowing that, from 
 the first, man has made God in his own image 
 and continues to thus remake Him in each suc- 
 ceeding age. A mind like yours, compelled by
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 125 
 
 its nature to go on inquiring throughout life 
 after truth, yet shut up within the prison-walls 
 of an ancient and a final revelation, can neither 
 dwell in peace with its fellow-captives nor find 
 peace for itself. In such a religion a Brahman, 
 if he is to obtain rest, must stifle his Brahman's 
 spirit of inquiry by eating beef, and drinking beer, 
 and by absorbing himself, as the European gentle- 
 men do, in worldly anxieties and successes.' 
 
 ' Sir,' interposed the deacon reverently, ' my 
 peace of mind in the future I leave to God; but 
 what is my present duty ? ' 
 
 ' You have been born a Brahman, and, although 
 fallen, you cannot divest yourself of your birth. 
 Your duty is not to disgrace it. Your new re- 
 ligion allows you, a young man, to set up your 
 immature ideas of divine things against the ripe 
 knowledge of your teacher, and leads you to 
 desert him in his blindness and old age. In such 
 a religion I can find for you no rule of conduct. 
 But as a Brahman you are bound by the first 
 rule of your Brahmanhood to obey your spiritual 
 guide. You have chosen your spiritual guide for 
 yourself. Submit yourself to him.'
 
 126 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 Meanwhile the rains were due in our District 
 in ten days, and if our old friend could only last 
 till the great climatic change, the doctor gave 
 us good hopes of him. A second operation, of 
 a painful although not serious nature, had been 
 found necessary ; but the perfect peace of mind 
 of the patient helped him through the crisis. He 
 passed the long 1 hot hours with his hand clasped 
 in his little daughter's, very placid, and apparently 
 without any burden of outward care, except when 
 the silence of the chapel bell at sunset awakened 
 some painful memory. The good Jesuit had 
 journeyed into the station to visit his sick friend, 
 and stayed to take his share of the nursing. 
 
 Indeed, what between this kindly priest, and the 
 old Musalman servant, and the little daughter, 
 our turn for attendance now came only every 
 second night, and the strain on the few Europeans 
 in the station passed off. The stream of life 
 flowed feebly in our old friend, yet without per- 
 ceptible abatement. Each morning, too, the 
 telegrams in the Calcutta newspaper announced 
 stage by stage the approach of the rains, with 
 their majestic cloud-procession northwards across
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 127 
 
 India, bringing nearer by so many hundred miles 
 a day the promise of relief. 
 
 The Jesuit father had his quarters in my half- 
 repaired house, and late one Saturday night, as he 
 was pacing up and down the veranda in medita- 
 tion, I heard a voice address him in a low 
 appealing tone. It was the unhappy deacon, 
 tempest-tossed with internal conflicts and agonies, 
 who had come to him in the darkness. 
 
 'Reverend sir,' he said, in short, agitated sen- 
 tences, ' take pity on me. I am in great misery. 
 My conscience tells me I am acting right, but my 
 heart accuses me of acting wrong. Oh, help me 
 to the truth! There is no one else to whom 
 I can go. Those with whom I am joined feel 
 no doubts. They reproach me with mine. I come 
 to you as a priest, to tell me what to do.' 
 
 4 My son,' replied the Jesuit father, ' you cannot 
 come to me as a priest. For you have halted 
 halfway between the darkness of heathendom and 
 the light of the Church. But although you cannot 
 come to me as priest, you may come to me as a 
 friend. And as a friend I earnestly counsel you to 
 seek forgiveness for the wrong you have done.'
 
 128 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 ' But how can I go against my conscience, and 
 sacrifice to my human affection the appointed 
 order of my Church ? ' 
 
 ' Your conscience,' rejoined the Seminarist, ' is 
 in this case only a name for your private judge- 
 ment. You and your aged teacher have equally 
 applied your private judgements to what you call 
 the appointed order of your Church. The question 
 is whether you will submit your private judgement 
 to his, or set up your private judgement above his. 
 He is your master and your benefactor. Again 
 I say, seek his forgiveness for the wrong you have 
 done.' 
 
 No words followed, and the deacon disappeared 
 into the darkness out of which he had emerged. 
 Years afterwards, he told me that he wandered in 
 desolation throughout that night, finding himself 
 unconsciously circling round and round the mis- 
 sion enclosure. The thought took possession of 
 his mind that each of the very different counsellors 
 to whom he had gone had enjoined on him the 
 same course. Obey your superior officer, the 
 assistant magistrate had practically said. Submit 
 yourself to your spiritual guide, repeated the
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 129 
 
 Brahman sage. Ask forgiveness, commanded the 
 Jesuit priest. His confidence gave way under the 
 self-questionings of the slow solemn hours of dark- 
 ness and solitude. But his duty to those who looked 
 to him as their leader and guide filled his mind with 
 an obscurity deeper than that of the night. 
 
 Only as the sun rose was his resolve taken. 
 Worn out, haggard, his cotton clothes dripping 
 with dew, and stained a muddy red from the 
 iron clay-stone of which the roads in our District 
 were made, he went round to each of the 
 catechists and their chief followers, and summoned 
 them to the room which they used as a place 
 of worship. It was Sunday morning, and they 
 came expecting some new revival excitement. 
 After an earnest prayer he made a public con- 
 fession before them. He told them in a few 
 humble and touching words that he felt he had 
 wronged his master. Without judging others, 
 he declared his own resolve to seek forgiveness 
 of the Old Missionary. Then, commending 
 himself to their prayers, he left the room amid 
 a dead silence. 
 
 The Old Missionary got his best sleep in the 
 K
 
 130 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 cool of the morning, and on that Sunday he 
 awakened rather later than usual. He had finished 
 his light invalid's breakfast, and was listening to 
 his little daughter reading the ' Let not your 
 heart be troubled ' chapter of St. John's Gospel, 
 when a familiar voice, not heard in the cottage for 
 many days, asked through the heavy Venetians, 
 4 May I come in, sir ? ' In another minute the 
 young deacon was kneeling by his bedside sobbing 
 out his repentance, and covering the wasted silky 
 hands with tears and kisses. 4 My son, my dear, 
 dear son,' was all the old man could say. 
 
 For some hours he remained in an ecstatic 
 state of joy and peace, until, wearied out by 
 excess of happiness, he sank in the afternoon 
 into a profound slumber. Before he woke it was 
 evening, and the chapel bell, after weeks of silence, 
 was giving out its gentle sound on the other 
 side of the fish-pond. During some moments 
 a smile played over the face of the sleeper. Then, 
 completely awakening, he raised his head on his 
 arm, and listened with a look of beatified repose. 
 The Brahman deacon, who was still by his bedside, 
 kissed his worn hand, and rose to go to the chapel.
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 131 
 
 'My father,' he said, 'once more give me your 
 forgiveness and blessing.' The old man stretched 
 out both hands on the youth's head, offered up 
 an almost inaudible thanksgiving, and added, ' Let 
 them sing " For ever with the Lord." ' 
 
 It was one of his favourite hymns, and he 
 had translated it with rare felicity both into the 
 Bengali and the hill language. The highland 
 people thronged the chapel from their camping- 
 ground at the lower end of the judge's park. 
 The catechists and their followers were also there. 
 The schism was at an end. The congregation, 
 for the first time in the history of the mission, 
 overflowed the chapel and stood crowding under 
 the trees between its porch and the lotus-pond. 
 
 The deacon's voice, as he read the service, 
 came clear and soft in the still Sabbath evening 
 across the small piece of water. When they 
 raised the hymn, the Old Missionary listened 
 with a rapt look, but at first almost in awe 
 at the unwonted volume of sound, and clasped 
 tighter his little girl's hand. Each cadence rolled 
 slowly forth from the mixed multitude of low- 
 landers and hillmen, to that air in which pathos 
 K 2
 
 132 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 mingles so tenderly with triumph. As they came 
 to the beautiful lines, ' Yet nightly pitch my moving 
 tent A day's march nearer home,' the old man 
 suddenly sat up erect, and ejaculated, 4 Lord, now 
 lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according 
 to Thy word. For mine eyes have seen Thy 
 salvation.' Then, folding his little daughter, who 
 was sitting on the edge of the bed, in his long thin 
 arms, he whispered, ' My darling, my darling ! ' and 
 pressedjier^close to his breast. There was silence 
 for a minute. Presently the little girl gave a 
 frightened cry. The Old Missionary was dead. 
 
 Next evening we buried him. Amid the cease- 
 less changes of Anglo-Indian life there is one spot 
 only one that is always quiet. Let a man re- 
 visit even a large Bengal station after a few years, 
 and which of the familiar faces remain ? He finds 
 new civilians in the courts, a new uniform on the 
 parade ground, strange voices at the mess-table, 
 new assistants in the indigo factories. The ladies 
 who bowed languidly from their carriages are 
 bowing languidly elsewhere: as for the groups 
 of children who played round the band-stand,
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 133 
 
 one or two tiny graves are all that is left of them 
 in the station. The Englishman in India has no 
 home, and he leaves no memory. 
 
 In a little station like ours the grave-yard was 
 very solitary. Of the sleepers beneath the tombs 
 not one had a friend among the living. Some 
 of them had fallen with sword in hand, some 
 had been cut off in the first flush of youthful 
 promise, some had died full of years and honour. 
 One fate awaited all. No spring flowers were 
 ever left on their far-off graves, no tear was ever 
 dropped, no prayer ever breathed, beside their 
 resting-place. At the beginning of each cold 
 season the magistrate entered the walled en- 
 closure with the public works officer to see what 
 repairs were needful : at the end of the cold season 
 he inspected it again, to see that the repairs had 
 been carried out. During the rest of the year 
 the dead lay alone, through the scorching blaze 
 of summer and under the drenching deluge of 
 the rains, alone, unvisited, forgotten. 
 
 Yet the solitary place in our small station had 
 a beauty of its own. In its centre rose an aged 
 tamarind-tree, which spread out its great arms
 
 134 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 and clouds of feathery foliage wide enough to 
 overshadow all the graves. The oldest sleeper 
 in that sequestered spot was a little girl. A judge 
 of the last century lost his only daughter, and, 
 in the absence of any consecrated plot of ground, 
 buried her under the tamarind at the foot of his 
 garden. On its lowest arm the father had put 
 up a swing for his child. The branch yet faintly 
 showed the swollen rings where the ropes cut 
 into the once tender bark. Beneath might be read 
 the inscription on her tomb : ' Arabella Brooke, 
 obiit 6 November, 1797.' 
 
 Soon another father had to lay his child under 
 the shade of the tamarind-tree ; and the spot was 
 decently walled off from the rest of the garden. 
 Less than seventy years added about thirty Eng- 
 lish tombstones ; but the graves of little children 
 still lay thickest. More than one young mother 
 sleeps there with her baby on her breast. A 
 headstone, without name or date, to a Lieutenant 
 killed while leading his detachment against the 
 hillmen, had been set up by hasty comrades who 
 passed on before it was ready for the inscrip- 
 tion. Beneath another lies a youthful Civilian
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 135 
 
 who had reached his first station in India only 
 to die. 
 
 They lay so close to us, those lonely dead 
 people, and yet were so far away ! As we chatted 
 evening after evening in our long chairs on the 
 top of The Mount, after our swim in the judge's 
 lake, we could have thrown a pebble among the 
 tombs. Yet, except for my brief official inspec- 
 tions to see to the repairs, none of us had ever set 
 foot within those high walls. One feature of the 
 place spoke plaintively of the sense of exile and 
 longing for home : all the graves looked wistfully 
 towards the West. 
 
 Never had the little enclosure witnessed such 
 a gathering as that which convoyed the Old Mis- 
 sionary to his resting-place. The wild grief of 
 the hill-people, and the wailing with which the 
 lowland women rent the preceding night, had 
 settled down into a sense of loss too deep for 
 utterance. The bereaved Israel followed their 
 father and leader in silence, broken only by an 
 occasional low sobbing, to his grave. The re- 
 pentant deacon and catechists and the headmen 
 of the hill Christians carried the coffin. Ayliffe
 
 136 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 and I, with the little girl between us, came next. 
 By a short Will, written with the last rays of 
 his fading eyesight, her father had appointed us 
 joint guardians of his child. The three other 
 English officials and Father Jerome followed ; 
 then the great stricken multitude. 
 
 Nor were the mourners only those of his own 
 people. The news had spread with Indian swift- 
 ness into the hills, and the non-Christian tribesmen 
 hurried in under their chiefs, forty miles without 
 a pause for food or water, to do honour to their 
 White Father and Friend. The last time that the 
 clans marched into the District they had come 
 with weapons in their hands and a line of blazing 
 hamlets on their track. Crowds of Musalmans of 
 all ranks, from the senior native magistrate and 
 the officiants at the mosque to the shopkeepers 
 from the closed bazaar, lined the wayside and 
 salaamed as the coffin passed. Further off a 
 group of Hindus and pandits of high caste stood 
 apart, in respectful silence. As we reached the 
 gate of the enclosure, Father Jerome withdrew 
 from the procession and knelt down by himself 
 outside the wall.
 
 THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN 137 
 
 The little girl stood, weeping noiselessly, between 
 Ayliffe and myself beside the open grave. One 
 small hand trembled in mine, the other clasped 
 Ayliffe's left, while in his right he held the Prayer 
 Book from which he read the burial service. As 
 the final words of consolation melted into silence, 
 and the jungle-villagers began to fill up the grave, 
 the deacon raised in Bengali the hymn which had 
 been so suddenly broken off the previous evening 
 by the summons of death. Again the song of 
 blended tenderness and triumph soared aloft from 
 the multitude of hill-people and men of the plains 
 its refrain now sounding as a psalm of assured 
 victory ' For ever with the Lord.' 
 
 When it ended, Ayliffe said to me softly, ' Come 
 home to me again. The differences between us 
 are over, for I leave immediately to take our little 
 ward to England. He would have wished her to 
 be with us both, during her remaining days 
 here.' The last act of the Old Missionary had 
 been an act of forgiveness and blessing : the first 
 influence of his memory was an influence of recon- 
 ciliation and peace. 
 
 At a sign from Ayliffe the crowd quietly dis-
 
 138 THE OLD MISSIONARY 
 
 persed, leaving us three for a few minutes beside 
 the newly-filled grave. When at length we turned 
 slowly away, the sun was sinking behind the 
 distant ranges, with two isolated flat- topped hills 
 standing out in front like guardian fortresses on 
 the plain. It was the sunset-land of brief splendour, 
 towards which the little girl had so often strained 
 her eyes on the wooded height in the judge's 
 garden, when she wished for the Shepherds' 
 perspective glass through which Pilgrim looked 
 from the Delectable Mountains. She now gazed 
 through her tears on the far-off glory for a moment 
 in silence, and then whispered, ' At last, at last 
 I see the gates of the Celestial City.'
 
 WORKS BY SIR WILLIAM WILSON HUNTER continued. 
 
 THE INDIAN EMPIHE : 
 
 ITS HISTORY, PEOPLE, AND PRODUCTS. 
 
 THIRD EDITION, 800 PAGES, WITH MAP. SEVENTH THOUSAND. 18*. 
 
 ' Never before has the whole subject of Indian history been so adequately and so 
 intelligibly treated.' Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 'A compact body of information, arranged and classified on correct principles.' 
 Academy. 
 
 'A model of combined lucidity, conciseness, and comprehensiveness.' Economist. 
 
 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INDIAN PEOPLES. 
 
 2isT EDITION, EIGHTY-SECOND THOUSAND. 3J. 6d. 
 
 ' Within the compass of some 250 pages we know of no history of the people of India so 
 concise, so interesting, and so useful for educational purposes as this. London School 
 Board Chronicle. 
 
 ' By far the best manual of Indian History that has hitherto been published, and quite 
 equal to any of the Historical Series for Schools edited by Dr. Freeman.' Times of India, 
 
 ' The publication of the Hon. Sir W. W. Hunter's School History of India is an event 
 in literary history.' Reis fy Rayyet. 
 
 A LIFE OF THE EARL OF MAYO, 
 
 FOURTH VICEROY OF INDIA. 
 
 SECOND EDITION, Two VOLS. 24?. 
 
 * The picture presented to us of the late Lord Mayo is a fair and noble one, and worthy 
 of the much lamented original.' Edinburgh Review. 
 
 ' This masterly work has two great recommendations : it is the vividly and faithfully 
 told narrative of the life of a man ; and it contains a lucid and comprehensive history of 
 recent administration in India.' World. 
 
 A SHORTER LIFE OF LORD MAYO. 
 
 FOURTH THOUSAND, ONE VOL. is. 6d. 
 
 ' A brief but admirable biography.' Times. 
 
 'The world is indebted to the author for a fit and attractive record of what was 
 eminently a noble life.' Academy. 
 
 FAMINE ASPECTS OF BENGAL DISTRICTS. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. "js. 6d. 
 
 ' One of the boldest efforts yet made by statistical science. ... In this work he has 
 laid down the basis of a system, by which he may fairly claim that scarcity in Bengal has 
 been reduced to an affair of calm administrative calculation.' Daily News. 
 
 BOMBAY, 1885 TO 1890. 
 
 A STUD Y IN INDIAN ADMINISTRA TION. 
 
 ONE VOLUME : CLARENDON PRESS. 15*. 
 
 1 Few living writers have done so much as Sir William Hunter to make British India 
 and its government intelligible to English readers.' Times. 
 
 THE OLD MISSIONARY. TWENTY-FIRST THOUSAND. 
 SMALL PAPER, is. EDITION DE I/CTXE, ILLUSTRATED, is. 6d. 
 
 ' A tale of tender pathos which it is difficult to read without tears.' Spectator. 
 
 Just Published. 
 A LIFE OF BRIAN HOUGHTON HODGSON, 
 
 FORMERLY BRITISH RESIDENT AT THE COURT OF NEPAL. 
 
 THE THACKERAYS IN INDIA, 
 
 AND SOME CALCUTTA GRAVES.
 
 TKflorfes b Sir TWUUiam Milson twnter. 
 
 THE ANNALS OF BUBAL BENGAL. SIXTH EDITION. i6s. 
 
 ' It is hard to over-estimate the importance of a work whose author succeeds in fasci- 
 Dating _us with a subject so generally regarded as unattractive, and who, on questions of 
 grave importance to_ the future destiny of India, gives the results of wide research and 
 exceptional opportunities of personal study, in a bright, lucid, forcible narrative, rising on 
 occasion to eloquence.' '/ 'tines. 
 
 ' Mr. Hunter, in a word, has applied the philosophic method of writing history to a new 
 field. . . The grace, and ease, and steady flow of the writing almost makes us forget, when 
 reading, the surpassing severity and value of the author's labours.' Fortnightly Review, 
 
 OBISSA : 
 
 THE VICISSITUDES OF AN INDIAN PROVINCE UNDER 
 
 NATIVE AND BRITISH RULE. 
 Two VOLS., MAP AND STEEL ENGRAVINGS. 32*. 
 
 ' The mature and laborious work of a man who has devoted the whole power of his mind, 
 first to the practical duties of his profession as an Indian civilian, and next to the study of 
 all that relates to or can illustrate it. As long as Indian civilians write books like this as 
 long as they interest themselves so passionately in their work, and feel so keenly its con- 
 nexion with nearly every subject whicn can occupy serious thought the English rule will 
 not only last, but will prosper, and make its subjects prosper too.' Pall Mall Gazette(iSj2). 
 
 ' A great subject worthily handled He writes with great knowledge, great sympathy 
 with the Indian people, a keen and quick appreciation of all that is striking and romantic 
 in their history and character, and with a flowing and picturesque style, which carries the 
 reader lightly over ground which, in less skilful hands, might seem tedious beyond 
 endurance. 'Saturday Review. 
 
 THE INDIAN MTJSALMANS. THIRD EDITION. ios. (>d. 
 
 'A masterly Essay.' Daily News, 
 
 A STATISTICAL ACCOUNT OF BENGAL AND ASSAM. 
 IN TWENTY-TWO VOLS., HALF MOROCCO, s-r. EACH, WITH MAPS. 
 
 ' Un ensemble d'efforts digne d'une grande nation, et comme aucune autre n'en a fait 
 jusqu'ici de semblable pour son empire colonial.' Revue Critique. 
 
 ' Twenty volumes of material, collected under the most favourable auspices, are built 
 up under his hands into a vast but accessible storehouse of invaluable facts. Invaluable 
 to the statesman, the administrator, and the historian, they are no less interesting to the 
 general reader. Mr. Hunter undoubtedly has the faculty of making the dry bones of 
 statistics live. But they also contain matter which may be regarded as the fountain of 
 the yet unwritten history of Bengal. 1'hey are a guide for administrative action now. 
 They also seem to be the point of a new departure for the future." Nineteenth Century. 
 
 THE IMPEBIAL GAZETTEEB OF INDIA. 
 
 SECOND EDITION, FOURTEEN VOLS., HALF MOROCCO. ^3 5*. 
 
 'The publication of the Imperial Gazetteer of India marks the completion of the largest 
 national enterprise in statistics which has ever been undertaken. . . . The volumes before 
 us form a complete account of the country, its geography, topography, ethnology, com- 
 merce, and products. ... It is one of the grandest works of administrative statistics 
 which have ever been issued by any nation.' Times. (Two notices.) 
 
 'Dr. Hunter has rendered to the Indian Government and to English people generally 
 the highest service a public servant could achieve.' Athenaeum. 
 
 A LIFE OF THE MABQUESS OF DALHOUSIE. 
 
 SEVENTH THOUSAND, aj. 6d. 
 
 'An interesting and exceedingly readable volume. 1 Times. 
 
 ' It can be read at a sitting, yet its references expressed or implied suggest the study 
 and observation of half a life-time.' Daily News, 
 
 'A brilliantly written account of the life and work of that able ruler of men, the Marquis 
 of Dalhousie.' Asiatic Quarterly Rernew. 
 
 ' Never have we been so much impressed by the great literary abilities of Sir William 
 Hunter as we have been by the perusal of "The Marquess of Ualhousie." ' Evening 
 News.
 
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