Page:The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose.djvu/22

8 nowadays so regularised and formalised in their procedure, something to learn from such old-fashioned predecessors—of whom there have always been a few, but too few in every land?

The innate gentleness of this vigorous magistrate becomes increasingly manifested throughout our too scanty records of a career which plainly in itself might have made a volume. For despite unusually active duties, he found time alike for advancing material interests and cultural ones; and these both separately and together. Thus year by year he organised one of the Melas which were even then beginning to fall into desuetude, but which he effectively revived. He encouraged their old elements of religious festivals, public holiday, and fair, with dramatic and athletic performances; and he was wont to organise along with them an exhibition of local manufactures and agricultural products—much, in fact, as if in European villages we could revive the old 'Holy Fair' with its sports and miracle plays, arranging along with them an exhibition of home industries and an agricultural and horticultural show.

One of his son's vivid recollections is of the joys of a Mela to which his father had brought an excellent troupe of Jaira players, whose performance was as great and amazing a joy to the Bose children as to the people. This appreciation is evidenced not only by an enduring memory of the vivid scenes, the breathless and crowded audience, but by a quaint and pleasing recollection of the English chief magistrate who was in the audience, and who not only emptied his pocket of the substantial handful of rupees he had brought for the players after their performance, but—stirred and shaken altogether out of usual official decorum and reserve—bade them wait while he ran hastily back to his house for more; and with many added compliments, sent the delighted players on their homeward way.

In 1869 (when Jagadis was ten years old) his father became Assistant-Commissioner of Burdwan, where he remained four or five years, till 1874. Here the duties were