In the cool and quiet of the editor’s room, among bookshelves mildewing like most Indian libraries, I was listening to the history of the papers when I observed a crowd of brown printers, deferential but eager, at the door. In their hands they bore strange objects, such as I had never before seen, but at a glance I knew the moment had arrived. Advancing to my chair they hung around my neck a thick festoon of orange marigolds, picked out with the silvery tinsel which decorators of our Christmas trees identify with fairy rain. They encircled both my wrists with orange bracelets to match, and in my right hand they placed an arrangement of variegated flowers and spangles, stiff and formal as the sceptre of the Tsar. So I sat enthroned, and if only a correspondent from Calcutta had been present, the broadsheets of London that evening might have screamed with scare-heads of “Sedition!” Even in the midst of my friendly embarrassment, I could not but regret a journalistic opportunity lost. Embarrassing, certainly it was, but only to my British ignorance and shyness. To complete the Imperial ceremony, my dusky subjects sprinkled me with delicate odours from silvern vessels; they soused my handkerchief in scent; they rubbed spikenard and aloes on the back of my hands. Then, standing at a distance, they contemplated their handiwork with kindly satisfaction, while I laboured to express my august gratification in an Imperial tongue they could not understand. Every one present knew, and I knew myself, that they would have honoured in the same way any visitor who had come to their works in a benignant spirit. Even when, hung with fillets like a sacrificial victim and bearing the floral sceptre upright in my hand, I issued from the front door into the full blaze of the public street, the passers-by looked at me with admiring interest, but without a trace of laughter. These things are merely habit, and before I left India I lived to dread garlands as little as my bed. But that first time—with what shamefaced horror the consciousness of my British trousers and khaki helmet filled me! Suddenly, with an inexplicable pang, I remembered that I had once rowed two in the Christ Church torpid, and if any of my own countrymen had gone down the street at that moment, I think I should have got under my cart instead of into it.[15] [Illustration: MR. TILAK. [_Face p. 64._ ]