CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION 21 



fellow, the class champion, not to say bully, who had 

 already had frequent experience in the use of his fists, 

 while the little Jagadis had never yet clenched his fist at 

 all. Heavily pounded accordingly, with bleeding nose and 

 dazed and watery eyes he seemed defeated and the fight 

 practically at an end ; but then came a burst of war- 

 fury, a memory perhaps of the old heroes, at any rate 

 an onslaught so furious as to surprise the other, and knock 

 him down, wellnigh stunned, and unwilling or unable to 

 rise at call. So the youngster was hailed victor, and 

 acquired full rights of freemanship ; yet hardly of comrade- 

 ship, for the respective backgrounds of town and country, 

 of East Bengal and England, remained too different. A 

 further disadvantage was that Jagadis had been placed in 

 a hostel in which the others were not schoolboys, but students 

 of different colleges, who took little or no notice of the little 

 chap, and whose world was also too far away. Though not 

 wholly isolated from games of his schoolfellows, he found 

 his main interest through return to his home pursuits. His 

 pocket money was spent on animal, pets, and to their 

 housing and tending his spare time was devoted. In the 

 corner of the compound too he laid out a little garden and 

 spent much ingenuity upon its water-supply, winding about 

 some pipes which he managed to lay hands on, and making 

 a little stream with a little bridge, evidently based on those 

 of home. It is amusing to note the renewal of this piping 

 and stream in later years in Bose's Darjeeling garden, and 

 to find stream, bridge and all in the little garden of his 

 Calcutta home, next the Bose Institute. Indeed the writer, 

 as veracious chronicler and would-be interpretative critic, 

 cannot but see in this old child-interest the explanation 

 of an otherwise unintelligibly strong, even emphatic, longing 

 for a stream and bridge in the recent lay-out of his enlarged 

 garden at the Bose Institute last year. The writer's argu- 

 ment of impracticability, joined to those of the architect, 

 at the time discouraged them ; yet we see that the mature 

 Director of the Bose Institute may still be constrained, by 



