If the assistant will open his eyes and look round him thoughtfully, he will soon come to observe the gravity and importance of the official position which he now holds. The district contains more than a million inhabitants. The assistant will be surprised to find that he holds the fourth place in the official hierarchy of the district. There are the judge, the collector-magistrate, and the joint-magistrate ranking above him, but his official place is fourth on the list. What a difference this is from his position in his native land, where he was probably next to nobody, and certainly exercised no sort of authority. Now he has become the fourth in rank amongst a million of people. Many young men are rather slow to perceive this. Very probably a becoming sense of modesty restrains them from attempting to assert the position. But the fact remains, and the official responsibility positively exists. Many an assistant, owing to the casual illness or temporary absence of his official superiors, has suddenly found himself actually the first official among a million of people. In no other part of the world, in no other condition of society, does official responsibility so suddenly thrust itself on a young man about twenty years of age. In the ordinary routine of social life at a small civil station, the assistant at first holds a comparatively humble position. A civil station is the capital of a district. The society consists principally of members of the Civil Service; there is the judge, who is usually between thirty and forty years of age; the collector-magistrate is now sometimes senior, sometimes junior, to the judge; next comes the joint-magistrate and deputy-collector, a sort of second in command to the collector-magistrate; and next comes the assistant. Outside this nucleus of the Civil Service there come the police officers, the doctor, the clergyman, and one or two other minor English officials, and perhaps a few independent men employed in mercantile business or owning landed estates. If there is a railway running through the district, it may contribute an engineer to the little society, or there may be an officer of the Public Works Department located there. In Bengal, military detachments very seldom help to swell the numbers of a civil station. In fact, with the ladies of the several families, a party of twenty can seldom be assembled, except on the most important festive occasions. In a very small world such as this, it is not surprising that the assistant, to some extent, acquiesces in his native designation as the “chota saheb,” or little saheb, of the community. He is treated as a newcomer, willing to learn and to be pleased at acquiring experience from the older folks around him. If he is a sensible man, he really feels how very much of practical life he has yet to learn.