PREFACE
In my Preface I address myself mainly to the professional critic and reviewer and to the Anglo-Indian official, and I plead their kindly generosity. To the critics I would say that I am an entertainer pure and simple, with no habit of the pen whatever. I feel that in their presence I am but as the dust of the earth (only, however, in reference to their own special line of life). I am like an amateur sitting down to play my first game of chess with Lasker or Blackburne or starting out to box with Carpentier or Jack Johnson. Remember, what is sport to you is death to me; you know the rules of the game—I don't; so as you are strong be merciful to my humble efforts.
And to the Anglo-Indian, who resents, and very rightly resents, the impertinent criticisms of the average globe-trotter and the hasty generalizations of the casual six-weeks' visitor to the land in which he has perhaps laboured with knowledge and discrimination and self-sacrifice for thirty or forty years, and upon which, nevertheless, he would hesitate to express a final or definite opinion, I would say I have only told those things of which I myself had actual' experience. I
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