_21st June 1892._
Pictures in an endless variety, of sand-banks, fields and their crops, and
villages, glide into view on either hand--of clouds floating in the sky,
of colours blossoming when day meets night. Boats steal by, fishermen
catch fish; the waters make liquid, caressing sounds throughout the
livelong day; their broad expanse calms down in the evening stillness,
like a child lulled to sleep, over whom all the stars in the boundless sky
keep watch--then, as I sit up on wakeful nights, with sleeping banks on
either side, the silence is broken only by an occasional cry of a jackal
in the woods near some village, or by fragments undermined by the keen
current of the Padma, that tumble from the high cliff-like bank into the
water.
Not that the prospect is always of particular interest--a yellowish
sandbank, innocent of grass or tree, stretches away; an empty boat is tied
to its edge; the bluish water, of the same shade as the hazy sky, flows
past; yet I cannot tell how it moves me. I suspect that the old desires
and longings of my servant-ridden childhood--when in the solitary
imprisonment of my room I pored over the _Arabian Nights_, and shared
with Sinbad the Sailor his adventures in many a strange land--are not yet
dead within me, but are roused at the sight of any empty boat tied to a
sand-bank.
If I had not heard fairy tales and read the _Arabian Nights_ and
_Robinson Crusoe_ in childhood, I am sure views of distant banks, or
the farther side of wide fields, would not have stirred me so--the whole
world, in fact, would have had for me a different appeal.
What a maze of fancy and fact becomes tangled up within the mind of man!
The different strands--petty and great--of story and event and picture,
how they get knotted together!