When the meeting began their dark and eager faces could still be seen in the sunset light. The faces disappeared, and only the brilliant white turbans and white draperies were visible by the flicker of a big lamp they had fitted upon the platform. The waning moon rose late and shapeless among heavy clouds, and the dark faces reappeared, outlined in silver; but still the crowd sat on. All were men, and most of them were young. They had assembled to show their joy at the release of Ajit Singh and Lajpat Rai—both inhabitants of the far-off Punjab, one till lately an unknown youth, the other till lately hardly known to any one in Madras, and only known anywhere as a reformer of Hindu superstitions, a man of austere private life and inexhaustible liberality to his own people.[33] Now both had been raised by their deportation and imprisonment without trial to the position of heroes and martyrs, and their recent release (Nov. 11, 1907) had been greeted with joy throughout the country, though not with gratitude; for there is no great cause for gratitude when a wrong-doer undoes the wrong. Through the middle of the crowd came a line of white-robed students carrying a yellow banner with a strange device. “Bande Mataram! Bande Mataram! Hail to the Motherland! we bow before our mother!” rose the familiar cry from the thousands seated there. But there was no wild gesticulation, no frantic excess, such as we might imagine in a fanatical East. A Trafalgar Square crowd is more demonstrative and unrestrained. Nor was a single soldier or policeman visible, though the occasion had been publicly announced as a meeting of the Extremists. In the audience I was of course the only European present. A little boy with head half shaven and a long tuft of black hair at the back stood up before the platform, and amid complete silence sang in his native Tamil the Bengali song of “Bande Mataram,” which has now become the national song of India. The music is of that queer Eastern kind, nasal, quavering, full of turns and twists, such as one may hear from the Adriatic to Burma, and very likely beyond. In origin I believe it to be Persian; at all events I have heard it in highest perfection on the Persian frontier and sung by Persian musicians. Usually—in Greek for instance—the words are rendered difficult to distinguish owing to the twists and long-drawn phrases, but in this boy’s singing the words were fairly distinct, and the repeated cadence gave a certain solemnity.