This pleased him too, but when we reached his long room upstairs we turned from idols to the main interest of his life. On bookshelves round the walls, and heaped upon the floor and tables, were hundreds of volumes and pamphlets crammed with figures. It seemed as if the owner had collected every book and essay ever written upon the economics of India, and year by year had filtered them into his mind. He had the instinct for averages which I take to be the economist’s instinct. He thought of women and children in terms of addition; he saw men as columns walking. He watched the rising and falling curves of revenue, expenditure, and population as others watch the curves of beauty. Any line of figures was welcome to his spirit, and though he had made his living by teaching little Indians to read “Robinson Crusoe,” his chief study seemed to lie in the scripture called the “Statistical Abstract relating to British India.” Upon this careful piece of literature he meditated day and night; or, if his mind required a change, he relaxed it on theology. I have called the “Statistical Abstract” literature, and to him it was so. To him it was as pleasing as a poem to know that under the heading of “Priests and others engaged in religion,” the number of “total supported” was 2,728,812, among whom 178,656 females were classified as “actual workers”; or that the total supported by “indefinite and disreputable occupations” was 737,033, and in this class alone the male and female “actual workers” were approximately equal. He liked to meditate on the daily average of prisoners in the various provinces, and on the infirmities of population according to residence and according to age. It was good to know that there were about 6,000,000 more males than females in the country, but 18,000,000 more widows than widowers, and 391,000 widows under fifteen. These were the lyrics or realistic ballads of his reading, but he took higher interest in the figures that move with something of epic grandeur. To him there was a splendour and æsthetic satisfaction in knowing that the total of India’s population, including the Native States, was 294,361,056 in 1901, and that of this number 207,050,557 were Hindus like himself; while agriculture supported 191,691,731—close upon two-thirds, or 65·16 per cent., as he put it—and 15,686,421 (including nearly 1,000,000 females) could write and read, a total of 1,125,231 being “literate in English.”