Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/26

 expression. He cared more for knowledge than for words, more for thoughts than for the expression. But the traditional cast of the teachers' mind could not reahse that the brain is more often a better register than the copy-book and that what goes to the copy-book generally misses the memory. Bal however stuck to his methods. When at work in Mathematics, he solved all the examples orally and put down only the answer. "Where is your method" asked the precise pedagogue. "It is here" said our hero, pointing to his head.

Such an "unmethodical" and rebellious child was never likely to be popular with the teachers, who on occasions took complaints to his father. Bal cared little for their good opinion and less for their "time-honoured" methods. His father was intensely proud of him and presaged for him a great career. The promising son of the Assistant Deputy Inspector, could not, in those days of early marriages, long escape the fetters of wedlock. A suitable bride was found in Tapibai, daughter of Ballal Bal of Ladghar (Dist. Ratnagiri), to whom he was married in 1871. Soon after this event happened two others, the one favourable and the other extremely unfortunate. Bal passed his Matriculation in December 1872; but only a few months before his success in the examination his father died, leaving him quite an. orphan. "It is the bitterest element in the vast irony of human life that the time-worn eyes, to which a son's success would have brought the purest gladness are so often closed for ever even before success has come." *

When Bal joined (1873) the Deccan College as a resi-