THe Lire HisToRY oF AN EAST INDIAN. 148 
down to the rest and quiet he thinks will be welcome to 
his old heart and mind. Many thoughts chase each other 
through his brain, when the rest are at work and he has 
the mites brought in to cheer him with their half English 
and half Hindee prattle. He tries to dandle them but 
soon gets tired, and then, as he rests, he is a boy again 
listening to SOFEE and LUCHMAN. Scraps of their talk of _ 
Benares and Calcutta recur to him, and then his wander- 
ing faculties return and he remembers the doleful tales 
returned immigrants have told him, and gets very confused. 
Under all this runs the current of hope; that unquestion- 
ably divine hope of life and beauty, of cities and gardens 
and rivers of water unpolluted by the corruptions of earth. 
Babbling more or less of these things he quietly passes 
away. He too now has gone to his “country,” He has 
done much; how much I am too feeble to say; but what 
problems his life’s history suggests! What confli€ting 
evidences _he—affords_us _ofhereditar\ itaryinfluences, | indeed 
of the doétrine of (ARSC agom er of the potency of 
environment! — As I talk to him and watch him I feel 
that he offers a wonderful opportunity to the truth-seeking 
philosopher to i impress upon himself his own ‘littleness and 
uncertainty. For a while in everything, environment has 
it; instance after instance confirms one’s pet theories, 
and then in the most unexpected places and at most _ 
critical times _up comes heredity and brighes asi aside what’ 
then seems the feeble effet of surroundings, and you or 
I, poor little philosophical onlookers, retire staggered and 
puzzled to ponder again over these many life problems 
we cannot solve and are equally unable to leave unsolved. 
Then crops up the question, what shall be the future 
of this se€tion of our community? Will the Creole East 
T 
