PREFACE.

I went home in 1875 for a few months, after some twelve years' residence
in India. What first suggested the writing of such a book as this, was
the amazing ignorance of ordinary Indian life betrayed by people at
home. The questions asked me about India, and our daily life there,
showed in many cases such an utter want of knowledge, that I thought,
surely there is room here for a chatty, familiar, unpretentious book
for friends at home, giving an account of our every-day life in India,
our labours and amusements, our toils and relaxations, and a few
pictures of our ordinary daily surroundings in the far, far East.

Such then is the design of my book. I want to picture to my readers
Planter Life in the Mofussil, or country districts of India; to tell
them of our hunting, shooting, fishing, and other amusements; to
describe our work, our play, and matter-of-fact incidents in our daily
life; to describe the natives as they appear to us in our intimate
every-day dealings with them; to illustrate their manners, customs,
dispositions, observances and sayings, so far as these bear on our own
social life.

I am no politician, no learned ethnologist, no sage theorist. I simply
try to describe what I have seen, and hope to enlist the attention and
interest of my readers, in my reminiscences of sport and labour, in the
villages and jungles on the far off frontier of Nepaul.

I have tried to express my meaning as far as possible without Anglo-Indian
and Hindustani words; where these have been used, as at times they could
not but be, I have given a synonymous word or phrase in English, so that