Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/33

Rh ing one of the poet’s songs, left me to spend a quiet evening with the master who had met me at the station. He helped me to realise the true spirit of the place, for he had been one of the five boys who had read in the School when it was first started. After a College course in America he had come back to devote his life to the service of the School to which he owed so much. We talked on about the ideals with which the poet had started the School. The sound of the boys’ voices, as they came back from their evening meal to their dormitories, had ceased, when in the stillness there arose the sound of singing. It was a group of boys who, every evening before they retire to bed, sing one of the poet’s songs. Gradually they approached the house where we were sitting, and as they turned away, the sound receded, getting fainter and fainter until it died out altogether. Then silence descended like shadows on a starlit hill, and I realised why the name “Shantiniketan” had been given to the place. A House of Peace it certainly was.

In the morning, before sunrise, the band of young choristers wakened the sleeping schoolboys to the work of the day by another song.

After an early walk to a neighbouring village,