How far a sharp contrast will carry the mind! I never shake a root in these our limited conditions without thinking of the long loamy stretches of the Canadian woods where there was leaf-mould enough for a continent of gardens, and of the plank “sidewalk” that half-heartedly wandered out to them from the centre of what was a country town in my day, adorned perhaps at some remote and unfenced corner by a small grocery shop where hickory nuts in a half-pint measure were exposed for sale in the window. I am no longer passionately addicted to hickory nuts--you got the meat out with infinite difficulty and a pin, and if it was obstinate you sucked it--but nothing else, except perhaps the smell in the cars of the train-boy’s oranges, will ever typify to me so completely the liberal and stimulating opportunities of a new country. The town when I was there last had grown into a prosperous city, and there were no hickory nuts in its principal stores, but at the furthest point of a suburban sidewalk I found the little grocery still tempting the school children of the neighbourhood with this unsophisticated product and the half-pint measure in the window. I resisted the temptation to buy any, but I stood and looked so long that the proprietress came curious to the door. And along that sidewalk you might have taken a ton of leaf-mould before anybody made it his business to stop you. We must acknowledge our compensations. Over there they certainly get their leaf-mould cheaper than fourpence a basket, but they have nobody to make things grow in it under a dollar a day. Here Atma, the invaluable Atma, labours for ten rupees a month--about fourteen shillings--and cooks his own meal cakes. The man who works for a dollar a day does it in the earnest hope, if we are to believe his later biographer, of a place in ward politics and the easier situation of a local boss. It would be hard to infect Atma with such vulgar ambitions. He is so lately from the hands of his Creator that he has not even yet conceived the idea of accumulation. The other day I told him that he might take a quantity of seed and surplus plants, and sell them, and he would not. “I, how shall I sell?” he said, “I am a gardener. This thing is done by Johnson-sahib,” and he looked at me with amusement. I called him by a foolish name and told him that he should surely sell, and get money; but he shook his head still smiling. “By your honour’s favour,” he said, “month by month I find ten rupees. From this there is food twice a day and clothes, and two or three rupees to go by the hand of an old man who comes from my people. It is enough. What more?” I mentioned the future. “Old?” he cried, “God knows if I will be old. At this time I am a work-doing wallah. When I am old and your honours are gone to _Belaat_,[2] I also will go, and live with my people.” “And they will, without doubt, give you food and clothes?” I asked.