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

chooses; but the first and foremost consideration of a young lady should be her health. It is a trust she holds for others, a debt she owes to generations not yet born. Every atom of health that a young lady dissipates is so much that is taken away from the strength of souls that are yet to rise. She is a golden link that joins the yesterday to tomorrow; a promise that holds in it the possibilities of her race. Therefore, the first care of a wife should be her health that would harmonise the beauties of her body and mind and soul. So neither study nor pleasure should entice her away so as to tax her energy too much, but both should be indulged in only so far as to render that health perfect and that beauty transparently pure. Now something about me; and yet I wonder what that something is! For there am I, as you left me after you finished the last letter you got from me. Change is a word that is not found in prisoner’s dictionary—especially in its Port Blair edition. The great war that you say has shaken your hemisphere has left totally untouched me and my Port Blair. This, our little kingdom here, is about the only state that can with a justifiable touch of egoism claim in its yearly speech from the Throne of having maintained its interests intact in this world-earthquake. Our imports and exports are unchanged. We keep our lights all night up. While our international communications are as peaceful as they had been ever since this little kingdom rose out of its Oceanic Night! Mr. Asquith has every reason to be jealous of us. Our citizens have not been forced to subsist only on a reduced scale of meal and potatoes as the Germans are said to die for the simple reason that we never ate any! Whatever we eat, we grow—grass and such other edibles, while these solid and aspiring walls of my jail have reduced the very walls of China to a mere heap of debris. Those walls could, and that too not very effectively, stop the outsiders from rushing in but these walls while doing that can also effectively prevent anyone inside from going out. No! On pain of death, no! Thus we, like a little world organized to serve as a prototype and a foretaste of the hope of the Humanitarians, when the war shall have been banished from the realms of man, live—I beg your pardon—exist—as peacefully and quietly as to put to shame the very realm of death. As to the interview, I think it is best to wait till this war be over. For, to a certain extent, we can understand the hesitation of the Government in granting it now. And even after the war, the letters that you may write to them for the interview should be only on the ground that every other prisoner is allowed a visit, so should I after five years and not on the ground