and the pains of growth, when the old is merging in the new. The student
generation of India is passing through that phase to-day, and no one who
fails to grasp that fact can hope to understand the psychology of the
present day student.

In Pushpam's story it is possible to see something of that clash of old
and new, of that standing "between two worlds" that makes India's life
to-day adventurous--too adventurous at times for the comfort of the
young discoverer.

Pushpam's home was in the jungle--by which is meant not the luxuriant
forests of your imagination, but the primitive country unbroken by the
long ribbon of the railway, where traffic proceeds at the rate of the
lumbering, bamboo-roofed bullock cart, and the unseemliness of Western
haste is yet unknown. Twice a week the postbag comes in on the shoulders
of the loping _tappal_ runner. Otherwise news travels only through the
wireless telegraphy of bazaar gossip. The village struggles out toward
the irrigation tank and the white road, banyan-shaded, whose dusty
length ties its life loosely to that of the town thirty miles off to the
eastward. On the other side are palmyra-covered uplands, and then the
Hills.

The Good News sometimes runs faster than railway and telegraph. Here it
is so, for the village has been solidly Christian for fifty years. Its
people are not outcastes, but substantial landowners, conservative in
their indigenous ways, yet sending out their sons and daughters to
school and college and professional life.

Of that village Pushpam's father is the teacher-catechist, a gentle,
white-haired man, who long ago set up his rule of benevolent autocracy,