Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
In a letter accompanying the manuscript of the followingbook were these paragraphs:
“Some years ago, while traveling in Southern France, Imet with an accident that nearly ended my life. I wastenderly nursed to health in a family for which I formedthe highest respect and a lasting friendship. Some yearslater I met the widow with her beautiful grown up children.One of the sons was devoted to science, the other to literature,and both becoming known in the world, while thedaughter was engaged in landscape painting, ‘until,’ as shesaid with a most bewitching smile, ‘the right man comesalong.’
“Talking of her husband, the widow said that he had leftsome manuscript which I might like to see. She thenbrought me a bundle neatly bound up in tape. Lookingit over, I suggested its publication, and she gave it to meunreservedly to do with it as I thought best. I have noterased a line or altered a word. It is an autobiography ofundeserved shame and sorrow, as well as an earnest effortof well doing. It is a pity that such a life should havebeen, and I trust that its lessons will be heeded by thosewho need them most.”
The word Eurasian is made of Eur, from Europe, andAsian, from Asia, and applied to the children of a Europeanand an Asiatic and to their descendants, of whom thereis a large class in India.
A prominent newspaper editor of London, England, in a note to theauthor of this work says, “I am impressed with the freedom and freshness ofthe literary style, and am in arms against the majestic abuses aboutwhich it inveighs as if incidentally and without any grand motherly didactics.You arrest attention at once with the desertion of the Pyari by theSahib; the treatment is pathetic and intense.”
A well-known Chicago editor says, “A powerfully written book, thoughwithout any evidence of straining after effect. It should be of especial interestto a wide circle of readers, as it deals with a new subject in a masterlymanner. The life history of the offspring of an English father and a Mohammedanmother affords the author opportunity to give a vast amount of informationabout the doings of the British in India, and the results of thecontact between the two races, with the peculiarities of each, and of theiroffspring, which may well open the eyes of the world