পাতা:চিঠিপত্র (ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড)-রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর.pdf/২১৬

him. If I may be permitted to use that bold expression from the place where I stood. They from outside talked of him in those days as a man of the fast and jolly set. His age, his wealth, his position in life, his personal charms and his sentimental leanings as reflected in his poems— the age of oscow had not yet come— gave a plausible colour to such gossips. In fact on my first visit to Santiniketan before I met the Poet I was told by a grown-up young man of Raipur family that on Hat-days when men and women came in large numbers to the Bolpur Hat, the Poet sat in a niche carved on the side of a hummock on the road side near the Santiniketan temple and played on his flute You may know a man for years but still you may know very little of him. But you live with him in intimate association day and night except the sleeping hours, in a month's or two months' time you know him through and through. That is at the root, I believe, of the English expression “No man is hero to his own valet.” I had that chance and when within a short time I came back to the society of the senseless gossipers I could offer to swear with my person dipped into the Ganges to my 2 ΦC 疊