भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

Cellular Jail 15-2-1914 Port Blair My beloved Bal, And now come along. A year has rolled by and the happy day has come back again! Only those who had been in a jail can fully appreciate what a soul-entrancing blessing it is to hear from home, to write to home!! Sweet- sweet something like the sweetness of conversation in the moonlight, by the sea-beach, with one whom one loves and adores! But wait, the bell is gone and I must go to take my food—it is 10 A. M. ...yes, now I have come back again, after having taken my food in the general file of the denizens of the jail. Yes I said it was sweet; in fact the day of a letter to home is to me always the real पाडवा, my new year’s day; I count my year from that day; for I get a stock of energy and enthusiasm from the communion with my chosen few, which enables me to breathe and live and laugh a year further on. I was sorry not to write earlier and to compel you to undergo the troubles of sending a telegram. The authorities had kindly informed me of it. But you see, brother, though a year was past and I was entitled to send a letter, yet the antediluvian spirit of our postal system here does not carry a letter to Calcutta from this place unless some five or six weeks after it is written, so I am told. That is why a letter cannot be sent unless some fourteen months go by. But then any letter that you send reaches here almost as soon as in this twentieth century it ought to. From your letter, I am so glad to learn that you are in sound health and passed the examination with credit. Examination or no examination, you must not neglect your health. No. I long to see you robust, bubbling with health and freshness and vigour. The dawn of youth, that is just breaking upon you, is the very fountain of life and energy. So do not waste it by overwork of any one member in excess of the rest. But grow in harmony, brain and body. You are a Doctor yourself and it is a bit of presumption on a layman’s part to insist on good health. But then youth is blind and forgets to lay by, a fund of energy and life, while the vital forces are still welling up from within, and the organism is growing so that when the winter age comes, they may have abundant fund of vitality to draw on. Otherwise, if your eyesight is weakened, if you look like the willow of a man—I will shout out: ‘Physician, heal thyself! (Don’t laugh in the sleeves—for I am not a physician and so I can afford to have a bad eyesight! For, all lawyers have