In educational matters he had very definite ideas which is now becoming more fully appreciated. English schools were at that time not only regarded as the only efficient medium for instruction. While my father's subordinates sent their children to the English schools intended for gentle folks, I was sent to the vernacular school where my comrades were hardy sons of toilers and of others who, it is now the fashion to regard, were belonging to the depressed classes. From these who tilled the ground and made the land blossom with green verdure and ripening corn, and the sons of the fisher folk, who told stories of the strange creatures that frequented the unknown depths of mighty rivers and stagnant pools, I first derived the lesson of that which constitutes true manhood. From them too I drew my love of nature. When I came home accompanied by my comrades I found my mother waiting for us. She was an orthodox Hindu, yet the "untouchableness" of some of my school fellows did not produce any misgivings in her. She welcomed and fed all these as her own children; for it is only true of the mother heart to go out and enfold in her protecting care all those who needed succour and a mother's affection. I now realise the object of my being sent at the most plastic period of my life to the vernacular school, where I was to learn my own language, to think my own thoughts and to receive the heritage of our national culture through the medium of our own literature. I was thus to consider myself one with the people and never to place myself in an equivocal position of assumed superiority. This I realised more particularly when later I wished to go to Europe and to compete for the Indian Civil Service, his refusal as regards that particular career was absolute. I was to rule nobody but myself, I was to be a scholar not an administrator. THE HISTORY OF A FAILURE THAT WAS GREAT