Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/39

 and began with his marriage at the age of twenty-three. Then came the question of facing real life. His father, the Maharshi, had designed he should go to the country to manage the family estate at Shilaida on the banks of the Ganges. Much against his first inclination, he went to his task there; but it proved of direct service to him in the way of human experience. For there he came into touch with the real life of the people, and wrote down, hot from the life, tales and parables dealing with their everyday affairs. There, too, he wrote some of his greater plays, among them "Chitvargada," "Visayan," and "Raja-o-Rani."

His familiar surroundings, and the kind of existence they helped to colour at this time, may be found reflected in pages of, and in some of the stories outlined or retold in a succeeding chapter, "The Tale-Teller." This Shilaida period lasted in all some seventeen years.

Then came a break—what he learnt to look upon as his, or "fall of the year." It was indeed the end of his mid-summer. Death came and looked him in the face: he lost first his beloved wife; then, within a very few months, from consumption, the daughter who took her place;