Whatever blame lay with the authorities seemed to arise from the usual official tendency to make light of distress for fear of increasing difficulties, and to temper benevolence with bad manners. I think both tendencies were interestingly combined in a Bengali Deputy Magistrate, who was superintending the relief in one of the larger villages. I was myself travelling with Mr. Madhu Sudan Das, a resident of Cuttack, highly educated on European lines, the only Uriya graduate of Calcutta, and a man well known throughout India for his unlimited generosity and devotion to his own people, whose rights he had often vindicated against aggression. From early manhood he had been a Christian, though perhaps not a very dogmatic and ecclesiastical Christian, his faith being founded entirely upon his heartfelt admiration of Christ’s prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” “The man who could utter that prayer while dying under torture was divine,” he often said to me. “The moment I heard the prayer, I recognized that truth, and I have never doubted it since.” But Christian though he was, and though his daughter had studied in Cambridge, and now lived in Cuttack like an English lady without a shade of “purdah,” he was almost worshipped as the saint of Orissa by the poor among his countrymen. I have seen a man with a frightful running sore entreat Mr. Das to lend him the eighth of a penny that he might touch the sore with it and be healed. Another came with a brass bowl and implored Mr. Das to dip his finger into the water that his wife might be delivered from her dangerous labour, and the moment he dipped his finger into the water, the child was safely born. Unhappily, in spite of his Christianity and saintly reputation, Mr. Das appeared to act on official minds much as a hedgehog would on a naked man who found one rolled up in his bed. On arriving one night at a dak-bungalow or rest-house, we found that two of the three rooms were occupied by a Bengali magistrate and a colleague. So having arranged that Mr. Das, who was oldish and invalid, should have the other room while I slept in the free air like the elephant, we sent in our names to the Deputy Magistrate and were invited to enter. Knowing Mr. Das well by reputation, he had evidently determined not to fall below the standard of European dignity. Consequently he received us with his legs on the long arms of his deck-chair—an attitude which, I suppose, he had observed as customary among English officials when they receive “natives,” and I could not correct his impression.