Page:The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose.djvu/24

10 painful overwork between, with only a few handfuls of powdered wheat, taken with water as chance allowed. With broken health—apparently a slight stroke of paralysis—he was thus compelled to take two years of medical leave, which he spent mainly in Calcutta, where his son was by this time at College. Here too his busy brain could not rest. He had always seen the need of promoting Indian agriculture and industry; and as for such a man thought is inseparable from action, he more and more invested in active enterprise the considerable savings of his career, supplemented as these were from home property and by family inheritance. He acquired land in the Terai and set about clearing and stock farming; but despite the excellence of some of the produce, it lay too far from markets, and the land was unhealthy as well. The enterprise therefore ended with loss. Tea-planting was also then beginning: he saw its possibilities and argued—'If Scotsmen can face such enterprises and such climate, why should not Indians do the same? So he acquired a couple of thousand acres in Assam. Large expenditure was needed for clearing and planting, and this again in unhealthy conditions; additional capital had to be borrowed at high interest, far more than the slowly beginning returns of tea could meet: thus anxieties, losses, disappointments, year after year. At length, though unhappily not in his time, this pioneering has prospered, and the plantation has for a good many years been increasingly successful; first in the hands of an Indian manager, and now of sons of his daughters, effective in their turn.

The final disaster was that of a weaving company in Bombay which Mr. Bose had been persuaded by high and patriotic promises, anticipating those of the later Swadeshi movement; to support with his remaining capital. With this the directors then absconded, leaving no trace.

Still the sufferer was not embittered by his disasters; and at the expiry of his long sick leave he resumed his official duties, this time at Pabna, where he worked on for four or five years longer, till the age of retirement. We