But when I was in Eastern Bengal, the time for that kind of boycott had passed. Even the remotest villages knew the principle of Swadeshi then, and the chief importance of the preaching movement among the young men was the stimulus it gave to the so-called “Volunteers.” In the previous summer (1907), the phrase “National Volunteers” had roused alarm among sensationalists at home; but it was unknown in Eastern Bengal, and I believe it to have been the sole invention of a correspondent in Calcutta, who had at that time set himself to make the flesh of the British public creep. The Volunteers were originally organized in the ’eighties to act as stewards at the National Indian Congress, but under the enthusiasm of the Swadeshi and national movement, they have developed along many other lines. I met them first in Orissa, relieving the distress from famine and flood there, though Eastern Bengal was still their proper sphere. In Barisal, the centre of the Bakerganj district, which was then the only part of India proclaimed under the Seditious Meetings Act, I first met one of the “captains,” a mere boy, who explained to me the peculiar mixture of politics and philanthropy in their duties. In the Barisal Braja Mohun Institution, whose Principal, Mr. Aswini Kumar Dutt, is a notable Nationalist, the students had formed a society of Volunteers called “The Little Brothers of the Poor,” for nursing among the villages, especially in the commonest and most deadly plagues of cholera and small-pox. The Oxford Brethren, who have a strong settlement in that unruly place and, I think, the only beautiful Anglican church in India, spoke of the movement as not unworthy of its famous name, though they themselves refused to take any part in the political controversies around them. [Illustration: A TEMPLE TANK.] [Illustration: A TEMPLE OF SHIVA. [_Face p. 186._ ]