Mr. Rama Deva, the young and highly educated head-master of the school, and the other masters as well, met my scruples by urging that in India the home influence is almost invariably dangerous or softening. They said their only hope of preserving the boys from child-marriage, maternal ignorance, and the evil of cities lay in this monastic seclusion. In place of parents they have a few Superintendents—about one to every twenty-five of the 220 boys then in the school—who live with each class day and night, except during school hours. The greatest difficulty of the school is to find Superintendents worthy and willing, and I should have thought it impossible. The three oldest boys in the top form have rooms to themselves and no Superintendent. All sleep on plank beds, but are allowed a warm covering in winter. All dress in yellow “dhotis” (long cotton cloths) for schooltime, and in white “dhotis” for play. They are allowed wooden sandals, held on by a peg between the toes, but nearly all go barefoot, and with feet and legs bare they ride bareback and play cricket, football, and an Indian form of prisoners’ base. The school belongs to the Culture Section of the Arya Samaj, and is so violently vegetarian that I was not allowed to approach the buildings in boots of murdered leather. The boys get up at four in the morning, and attend Divine service round the symbolic fire. Having taken the vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity for sixteen years at their entrance, when two of those vows can mean very little to them, they are further taught to speak the truth, to practise concentrated contemplation for a period of every day, and to subdue passion by the “yoga” of deep breathing and holding the breath. They bathe in cold water before sunrise, they climb the steep jungle mountains near, and all learn swimming in the Ganges. Almost the only form of punishment is exclusion from the games. The school hours run to about seven, divided into two parts, and the chief subject taught is Sanscrit. There are the other ordinary subjects—arithmetic and mathematics, history, science, and English—and, unlike the Government schools, all teaching is given in the vernacular Hindi, so that the boys understand the subjects better, and can cover more ground, whereas in ordinary schools the learning is continually hampered by the foreign tongue. But the chief means of education is Sanscrit, just as in my old school it was Greek. At least seven years are spent in getting that amazing Sanscrit grammar off by heart, and in learning to read the Vedas. Whether the Sanscrit literature is worth all that, I cannot say; we spent much the same time over Greek, and it was well worth it to about one in twenty. But in all the upper forms, though none of the boys had yet approached the full age, they could already read and write Sanscrit as fluently as a mother tongue, and that is more than any of us ever did with Greek.