AULD LANG SYNE _SECOND SERIES_ MY INDIAN FRIENDS BY THE RIGHT HON. PROFESSOR F. MAX MÜLLER AUTHOR OF “THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE”, ETC. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON AND BOMBAY 1899 PREFACE. Here follows the second volume of my _Auld Lang Syne_. In some cases my recollections go back very far, and, after a lapse of nearly seventy years, they may not always be so fresh as they ought to be. It is very strange, on looking back to the various stations through which we have passed in our journey through this life, to find how much our own fate has depended on our surroundings and on circumstances over which we ourselves could not possibly have had any control. Our friends, nay even our enemies, seem to form part of our life, and thus it has come to pass that instead of writing my own life, I have almost unconsciously come to write about my friends rather than about myself. As to enemies, if indeed I ever had any, I prefer to be silent, for it is difficult to be quite fair in speaking of them, and we seldom know, till it is too late, what real benefactors they have been to us. Scholars, who on questions of scholarship differ from us as we differ from them, should never be counted as personal enemies, if only they are truthful and straightforward, and if otherwise, is it not best here also to follow the old rule, _De mortuis nihil nisi bonum_? But with regard to my friends and acquaintances, the older I grow, the more I feel how much I have owed and still owe to them, nay, how often the whole stream of my life has been turned East or West by a word or two spoken by a friend at the right moment, just as a whole train may be turned by the mere touch of a handle by the pointsman.