If I may add a word from my own experience, it is this--Let my fellow-countrymen and countrywomen in India give their countenance to the Missionaries labouring around them. They well deserve it, but too often are allowed to stand alone. The loss is theirs who keep aloof, and neglect the man and his work. While our people are running to and fro in the busy whirl of Indian life--some hasting to be rich, others engrossed in the labours of administration--higher things are too frequently forgotten. The spiritual life is prone to fade and droop. Many men--and women as well as men--who would at home be cultivating some corner of the Master's vineyard, begin to forget that similar obligations follow after them in their private walk and life abroad. Against these deteriorating tendencies, to mingle with the missionary band affords a wholesome antidote. For myself, I can never be thankful enough that in my early Indian life I found valued friends in the missionary circle, not only of the highest mental culture, but of a devoted Christian heart; and was privileged with their intimacy to the end. Among them I cannot refrain from naming such noble Missionaries as Perkins, Smith, and Leupolt, French, Stuart, Welland, and Shackell, Owen, Humphrey, Budden and Watt, Hoernle, and Pfander--that grand apologist to the Mahometans--all of whose friendship I enjoyed, as well as that of the Author himself. If some of these were men the like of whom we may not soon look upon again--a galaxy of rare appearance--yet, as we may learn from these pages, the field is in the present day stocked even more plentifully than ever it was before. Opportunities of cultivating in this field Christian friendship--and may I not add Christian work, and that for Ladies also--are happily multiplying all around; and I can promise an ample reward to such as make a faithful use of them. In conclusion, I will only say that I am much mistaken if this work fails to take its place as a standard book of reference in every library of missionary labour and Christian work abroad. W. MUIR. 16th September, 1884. CHAPTER I. VOYAGE TO INDIA. In 1837 I was accepted by the London Missionary Society as one of its agents. On September 15, 1838, I embarked at Portsmouth with thirty other passengers on the _Duke of Buccleugh_, a vessel of 650 tons burthen, and landed in Calcutta on January 19, 1839, _en route_ to Benares, to which I had been appointed. The only land we sighted from Portsmouth to Saugar Island was a rock in the Indian Ocean. The time we thus spent at sea was four months and five days. Every now and then speedier voyages were made, but a few years previously this voyage would have been deemed rapid. The _Duke of Buccleugh_, on her next voyage to India, went to pieces on a sandbank at the mouth of the Hoogly, but happily the weather was moderate, and passengers and crew were saved.