SRIKANTA
WHAT memories and thoughts crowd into my mind, as, at the threshold of the afternoon of my wandering life, I sit down to write the story of its morning hours!
From my childhood to the present day it has always been the same. My friends and kinsmen with one accord have kept up a running comment on my life, summed up in an invariable 'Fie!' or 'Shame!' Nor has my mind ever had the hardihood to challenge this estimate as anything but just and fair. But to-day, as I sit down to unravel the memories of long ago and investigate how even the morning of my life came to have a prefacing 'Shame!' affixed to it, I am suddenly assailed by an unwonted doubt. I feel that perhaps this degradation into which, by universal report, my life has sunk, may not after all have been necessarily so low as my contemporaries have always thought. May it not be, so the question shapes itself in my mind, that those whom God summons to the heart of His wonderful creation, are not the people who have had the opportunity to shine as the best boys at school and pass examinations, nor those gentlemen who sweep grandly through life in a coach and pair with pomp and retinue, finishing up with the publication of their
