queezed or literally tortured by the Government of the
day, and driven to depend on the usurer for even the seed for each
crop. War and famine had alternated in keeping down the population.
Ignorance and fear had blunted the natural shrewdness of the
cultivator. A foul mythology, a saddening demon-worship, and an
exacting social system, covered the land as with a pall. What even
Christendom was fast becoming in the tenth century, India had been all
through the eighteen Christian centuries.

The boy who from eight to fourteen "chose to read books of science,
history, voyages, etc., more than others"; the youth whose gardener
uncle would have had him follow that calling, but whose sensitive skin
kept him within doors, where he fitted up a room with his botanical and
zoological museum; the shoemaker-preacher who made a garden around
every cottage-manse in which he lived, and was familiar with every
beast, bird, insect, and tree in the Midlands of England, became a
scientific observer from the day he landed at Calcutta, an agricultural
reformer from the year he first built a wooden farmhouse in the jungle,
as the Manitoba emigrant now does under very different skies, and then
began to grow and make indigo amid the peasantry at Dinapoor. He thus
unconsciously reveals himself and his method of working in a letter to
Morris of Clipstone:--

"MUDNABATI, 5th December 1797.--To talk of continuance of friendship
and warm affection to you would be folly. I love you; and next to
seeing your face, a letter from you is one of my greatest
gratifications. I see the handwriting, and read the heart of my
friend; nor can the distance of one-fourth of the globe prevent a union
of hearts.

"Hitherto I have refrained from writing accounts of the country,
because I concluded that those whose souls were panting after the
conversion of the heathen would feel but little gratified in having an
account of the natural productions of the country. But as intelligence
of this kind has been frequently solicited by several of my friends, I
have accordingly opened books of observation, which I hope to
communicate when they are sufficiently authenticated and matured. I
also intend to assign a peculiar share to each of my stated
correspondents. To you I shall write some accounts of the arts,
utensils, and manufactures of the country; to Brother Sutcliff their
mythology and religion; to Brother Ryland the manners and customs of
the inhabitants;