evenings she would carry the lamp round the cow-house, and then come and sit by me to tell me tales of Champa and his six brothers." The two voices of the elders that repress or enlarge the child's mind, and give him the idea that the day holds its gifts for the smallest pensioner of time, are represented by the Village Headman and the Gaffer. The one sneers at the boy: the other dilates on the pleasures—the flowers, the open road, the fakir's free path by sea or forest or mountain, the wonders of the Post Office—that wait to be discovered.
However, in taking up the chronicle at the point where The Post Office was written—its exact date is not mentioned in our miniature biography—we are neglecting the early work which serves to define its author's position in the neo-romantic movement of Bengal. This is the remarkable play, Nature's Revenge, whose Indian title is Prakritira Pratisodha, a notable outcome of the revival whose stormy hopes and fears it helps to explain. While in advance of the negative criticism of life expressed in that Bengali Werther—the Udvranta Prema—it is in itself another confession-book of egoism. The protagonist of the play is a Sanyasi—master
