Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/596

524 by the young men who were arranged in rows on both sides of the speaker. After prayers, the janitor struck his bell, and the classes formed.

We first visited the youngest class. It was assembled in the open room, facing the court which has been before described as the room appropriated to idolatrous worship. Here I found two hundred and fifty-five bright little fellows composing the twenty-first class! This is the nursery from which the other classes are supplied. From it, I was taken to the next highest—that is, the twentieth class—and thence to the nineteenth, and the eighteenth, and so on to the first class, asking a few questions to see the progress made from grade to grade. Here you will suppose it ends; but no! this is the school department, and above these there are five classes higher still in the collegiate department, embracing a hundred and thirty young men, some of whom have been for ten or twelve years under instruction. Of the pupils, at least one-fifth are Brahmins, and many of them from the most influential and even the most bigoted families in Calcutta. Intelligence, deep interest in their studies, and admiration of their teachers, show unmistakably in their