results to follow in their own time. This talent for details is almost the first thing that strikes a visitor and has enabled Sir Sashiah, more perhaps than anything else, to succeed so thoroughly in all he undertook and wherever he has been he has left behind him a tradition for order and mastery of details.

For nearly a quarter of a century, during the best part of his life, Sir Sashiah lived and worked in native states and the circumscribed sphere of his activities has kept from him the not unmixed advantage of looming more largely in the public eye or taking a more noticeable part in directing the destinies of Southern India. But within the province of his work he has always used his opportunities for the amelioration of the material well-being of those around him. He has made roads and bridges; he has brought into existence new tanks and renovated old ones and supplied people with unfailing sources of wholesome water; he has placed food within the reach of thousands of starving men and women; he has helped hundreds of deserving men to means of honourable living; he has added to the revenues of states and developed their resources; he has taken with him, wherever he went, the blessings of education and the comforts of modern civilisation;

and his distinctive personality, his geniality and charm of manner, his conversational powers and intellectual endowments have left an abiding influence on the more immediate circle of those, among the rulers and the ruled, who have had the pleasure or the privilege of close acquaintance.

All these form a record of which any one may be proud; and Sir Sashiah has not obtained it without difficulties. Often has he been maligned and traduced by evil tongues; often have his motives and actions been misconstrued and misinterpreted; often has he had to face vehement and sometimes unscrupulous opposition. But he looked upon these troubles as the perquisites of his position and, steadily keeping his eye on the goal, calmly and cheerfully worked his way to it.

Sir Sashiah is one of the very few remaining links, in this part of India, between the dead and the living, between the old order of ideas and the

With a reverent and grateful appreciation of the institutions of the past he combines a trustful confidence in the progressive development of human destinies. His mode of life is

itself an embodiment of this happy combination. His halls are furnished with all the luxuries of modern life; but he himself lives the rigidly simple life of the Rishis of old. Simple in dress,

tastes and style of living, liberal and even indulgent to those about him he preserves all that is lovable in the traditions of the land with at the same time a genuine admiration for the sturdy virtues of the Englishman, the manliness, the moral strength and the spirit of enterprise which have created for him an empire on which the

sun never sets.

INDEX.