Wild Races of North Eastern India

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Novelty is as attractive now as ever it was, even in the days when the Athenians went about hearing or telling of some new thing. I think, therefore, that no apology is needed in introducing to English readers races of people of whom but little is known, and whose habits and customs have never before been described.

The mighty empire of Hindoostan is now bound up by a hundred ties of interest with the present and future of England. Many are the hearths by which is kept sacred the empty place of some dear member of the family circle, who is absent in those torrid climes; and books relating anything new of this far-off but no longer strange land of the East, are studied by all classes of English people with sentiments of growing attention and admiration, for the great but unfinished work we are carrying on there.

These pages were written day by day among the people of whom they treat, during a three years' sojourn among them, sometimes under the shelter of a straw-thatched bungalow on a remote hill top, with the pathless junge undulating in vast sweeps of hill and dale beneath the gaze; at other times in boats, poling along the hill streams, or by the firesides of the people in their bamboo-houses, perched securely in some hillside nook. The work was commenced at first with no fixed plan as to a detailed account of these races of men; indeed, as one of their many proverbs says, 'Unlaid eggs cannot be counted; but I sim- ply noted down as I heard them any tales, traditions, or striking customs that fell under my observation in the course of my wanderings among them.