weeks before the meeting of Oct. 16th), Baba gave a rough indication of those areas of India that he wished to visit. Pendu, Eruch and Baidul were told to work out the tour program in detail, a job that kept them busy with calendars, maps and railway timetables for one to two weeks. You would probably not gather much from a written list of every place Baba went to, and a very rough sketch map has therefore been hitched on to this letter showing the chief places of this long and arduous tour.

"Baba left Mahabaleshwar on the morning of Oct. 21st, accompanied by Pendu, Eruch, Baidul and Gustadji, and went first to Patna and certain districts of Bihar. The river Kosi flows through these parts, a river that has a reputation similar to that of the Yellow and Mississippi rivers, of causing destructive floods from time to time. During the last few weeks of the monsoon this year the Kosi had flooded certain districts of Bihar, and many villages had been laid waste. Destitution and misery was therefore the lot of thousands of peasants, and the cry for help was urgent.

"The Government and a few relief organizations were, of course, taking steps to help the flood victims, but Government compensation is slow, and even the best official relief measures leave gaps of privation and misery that can only be filled by voluntary workers.

"Although Baba had decided, as I shall explain shortly, to help the poor in a special way, he made an exception here in Bihar and gave small sums of money to nearly two hundred people in three villages which had been swept by the flood more than others. You might, perhaps, like to hear something of how this work was done.

"It began, like scores of incidents in Baba's life, what would seem, on the face of it, to have been a chance meeting at a railway station. A Congress worker, or so he appeared by his dress and by a certain look of authority about him, was seen talking to two or three people on Janjapur station, and Baba told one of his men to address this stranger and ask him what evidently urgent and grave matters he had been discussing with his subordinates. The man then gave a frank and moving account of the recent floods in certain villages not far from this station, and said that he was charged by the Government with the organization of relief work. Baba asked whether he could go to a few of these villages and offered to help some of the victims by small gifts of money. The outcome of the