During the Rains there are only dark clouds and showers. And in the Autumn there is the play of light and shade in the sky, but that is not all-absorbing; for there is also the promise of corn in the fields. So in my poetical career, when the rainy season was in the ascendant there were only my vaporous fancies which stormed and showered; my utterance was misty, my verses were wild. And with the _Sharps and Flats_ of my Autumn, not only was there the play of cloud-effects in the sky, but out of the ground crops were to be seen rising. Then, in the commerce with the world of reality, both language and metre attempted definiteness and variety of form. Thus ends another Book. The days of coming together of inside and outside, kin and stranger, are closing in upon my life. My life's journey has now to be completed through the dwelling places of men. And the good and evil, joy and sorrow, which it thus encountered, are not to be lightly viewed as pictures. What makings and breakings, victories and defeats, clashings and minglings, are here going on! I have not the power to disclose and display the supreme art with which the Guide of my life is joyfully leading me through all its obstacles, antagonisms and crookednesses towards the fulfilment of its innermost meaning. And if I cannot make clear all the mystery of this design, whatever else I may try to show is sure to prove misleading at every step. To analyse the image is only to get at its dust, not at the joy of the artist. So having escorted them to the door of the inner sanctuary I take leave of my readers. Printed in the United States of America FOOTNOTES: [1] A jingling sentence in the Bengali Child's Primer. [2] Exercises in two-syllables. [3] Roofed colonnade or balcony. The writer's family house is an irregular three-storied mass of buildings, which had grown with the joint family it sheltered, built round several courtyards or quadrangles, with long colonnades along the outer faces, and narrower galleries running round each quadrangle, giving access to the single rows of rooms. [4] The men's portion of the house is the outer; and the women's the inner. [5] These Bustees or settlements consisting of tumbledown hovels, existing side by side with palatial buildings, are still one of the anomalies of Calcutta. _Tr._ [6] Corresponding to "Wonderland." [7] There are innumerable renderings of the Ramayana in the Indian languages. [8] A kind of crisp unsweetened pancake taken like bread along with the other courses. [9] Food while being eaten, and utensils or anything else touched by the hand engaged in conveying food to the mouth, are considered ceremonially unclean. [10] The writer is the youngest of seven brothers. The sixth brother is here meant. [11] Obsolete word meaning bee. [12] The lane, a blind one, leads, at right angles to the front verandah, from the public main road to the grounds round the house. [13] God of Death. [14] Goddess of Learning.