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A NATION IN MAKING

of Sir Henry Harrison and Sir Henry Cotton. I had known Sir Henry Cotton for a period of over forty years, and Sir Henry Harrison for nearly twenty years, since he became Chairman of the Calcutta Corporation, of which I was at the time a member. The relations between English officials and our countrymen are for the most part formal, though I must say they are improving; but both Sir Henry Cotton and Sir Henry Harrison occupied a large place in my esteem and my affcctions, and they were to me as good friends as any I ever knew. Both were indefatigable in their efforts to save the Ripon College; and it was chiefly through their influence that Sir Coomer Petheram, the then Chief Justice, was persuaded to interest himself in the matter. The presence and support of the Chief Justice at a meeting of the Senate, especially in those days, meant a great deal. The vote of the legal clement in the Senate was largely in favour of accepting the guarantees offered and rescinding the order of temporary disaffiliation.

The strain and worry through which I had to pass in connexion with the Ripon College controversy, coupled with the work for the Congress, which was to meet in Calcutta in December, 1890, brought on an attack of pneumonia. It was so sudden and I was so little prepared for what was coming that I had actually ordered my carriage to be got ready to take me to a dinner-party, to which I had been invited by Mrs. Sarala Ghosal, the gifted wife of the late Mr. Janokinath Ghosal, and a well-known authoress. Just as I was about to start for the dinner, I felt feverish. A local doctor was brought in. He felt my pulse and said that I had fever. Within half an hour I experienced a sense of difficulty in breathing. My friend, Dr. Debendranath Roy was sent for. He came and examined me and said it was a case of acute bronchitis. I was ordered to bed; and for over a month I lay there, a helpless patient, suffering from pneumonia, while my colleagues were working hard to ensure the success of the approaching session of the Congress. To the physical pain and weakness from which I suffered was superadded the agony of a bitter disappointment, that I should be shut out from the joy of work that was so congenial to me. They held a Town Hall meeting, but I was not there. There was another fellow-sufferer whose absence was severely felt by Congress-workers. That was Mr. W. C. Bonnerjea, who, too, was confined to a sick-bed, prostrated with rheumatic fever.

I recovered sufficiently to be able to attend a meeting of the Congress and to make, under the peremptory mandate of the