On the Indian Hills

I COMMEND these sketches of adventurous life in a little-known corner of India with more confidence because they bring out in a simple but picturesque fashion the natural variety and woodland features of a great region, whose immense resources for forestry, plantations, and hunting are even now hardly comprehended by Indian authorities. My son, who has put these pages together from long-ago-collected material of notes made in all the novelty and rough experiences of pioneering in the southern jungles of Hindustan, has, happily I think for his book, nothing to say of the beaten tracks of Indian travel; and it is for this reason, because he breaks fresh ground, and because he describes with the pleasant simplicity of letters written for home reading strange and curious phases of jungle-life in these vast and half-explored woodlands of the Madras peninsula, that I am emboldened to express my own pleasure in repressing his book, and glad to commend it to all who love the East and enjoy plain tales of the Asiatic hills excellently told.

EDWIN ARNOLD.