INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
My wife asks me to write a preface to her book, and I have agreed to do it; but I find very little to say that is not better said in the book itself. We have many works on India, but not many written by women. This one, it is hoped, may accordingly help to fill up a blank. On several subjects, especially those connected with family life in the East, women are much better qualified to speak than men.
The book refers to Southern India, the Presidency of Madras. It is always well to remember that there is as much diversity between two parts of India as between two parts of Europe; that, for example, a native of Travancore is as different from a Bengali, as a Spaniard from a Swede. Missionary work, too, has a peculiar aspect in the south of India, inasmuch as it began nearly a century earlier than in Bengal, and more than a century before its commencement in Bombay. Hence, in some respects, it has a different character in the Madras Presidency.
It will not detract from the value of these pages that the writer was able to compare one part of India with another. Missionary work, however, is by no means the only topic referred to in this little book. Mrs. Mitchell took a lively interest in nearly everything she
