Page:Ramtanu Lahiri, Brahman and Reformer - A History of the Renaissance in Bengal.djvu/88

 Khan Babu lived with his family. The mistress of the house, the Babu’s wife, was very kind to Ramtanu, who received every attention from her. Kesava had to pay only for his tiffin and milk; while the kind lady supplied him with everything else. He fared as one of the children of the family. He had another advantage here. Digambar Mitter (the future Raja Digambar), who had been admitted into the Hare School on the same day as our hero, and belonged to the same class as he did, lived close by in his maternal uncle’s house. Here would young Lahiri often go to see his friend, and in a short time he so ingratiated himself with the latter’s mother, that she looked upon him as her own child, and was lavish in her presents to him. The lady’s kind treatment was ever remembered by him, and years afterwards he would talk of it with a grateful heart.

Fellow-students then loved one another with a love which is rare now. Boys who, leaving the joys of home, came to Calcutta to prosecute their studies, received so much kindness from the mothers, aunts, and other female relations of their classmates, as to be able to bear without repining their separation from home and its dear associations. These ladies shed a benign influence around them, and with their advice and instruction they saved many a lad, far from home, from pit-falls of temptation and danger. Frequently it happened that a boy, transplanted from his native soil, found in the houses of his friends an atmosphere congenial to his spiritual growth, though he had no claims of consanguinity.

The mothers and sisters of his friends regarded him as their son or brother. We have some experience in this matter. The comfort these ladies administered to the heart smarting under the pangs of separation from its kith and kin, the moral strength that was given by them in the