“I tell you,” said he, “you might as well petition Sri Krishna as the Viceroy,” when Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty reverted to this method of obtaining redress. Mohendra, who was a Hindoo of orthodoxy, may well have found this flippant, but he only smiled, and assented, and went away and signed the petition. He yielded to the natural necessity of the pathetic temperament of his countrymen—even when they were university graduates and political agitators—to implore before they did anything else. An appeal was distilled and forwarded. The Viceroy promptly indicated the nature of his opinions by refusing to receive this document unless it reached him through the proper channel—which was the Bengal Government. The prayer of humility then became a shriek of defiance, a transition accomplished with remarkable rapidity in Bengal. In one night Calcutta flowered mysteriously into coloured cartoons, depicting the Lieutenant-Governor in the prisoner’s dock, charged by the Secretary of State, on the bench, with the theft of bags of gold marked “College Grants”; while the Director of Education, weeping bitterly, gave evidence against him. The Lieutenant-Governor was represented in a green frock-coat and the Secretary of State in a coronet, which made society laugh, and started a wave of interest in the College Grants Notification. John Church saw it in people’s faces at his garden parties, and it added to the discomfort with which he read advertisements of various mass meetings, in protest, to be held throughout the province, and noticed among the speakers invariably the unaccustomed names of the Rev. Professor Porter of the Exeter Hall Institute, the Rev. Dr. MacInnes of the Caledonian Mission, and Father Ambrose, who ruled St. Dominic’s College, and who certainly insisted, as part of _his_ curriculum, upon the lives of the Saints. The afternoon of the first mass meeting in Calcutta closed into the evening of the last ball of the season at Government House. A petty royalty from Southern Europe, doing the grand tour, had trailed his clouds of glory rather indolently late into Calcutta; and, as society anxiously emphasized, there was practically only a single date available before Lent for a dance in his honour. When it was understood that Their Excellencies would avail themselves of this somewhat contracted opportunity, society beamed upon itself, and said it knew they would—they were the essence of hospitality.