My earnest denial of any connection with the Government was received with a look of suspicion, for they confounded every white man (then few and far between in India) with the Government; and when I proceeded to assure him that I was not even an Englishman, the Hindoo looked at me and exclaimed, “Why, Sahib, your face is white, you talk the English language, and are by religion a Christian; what else can you be but an Englishman?” I told him I was an American; but, more confused still, he asked, “A what?” “Why, an American.” He had never heard the word before, nor perhaps one in ten thousand of his race, and he inquired what “an American” meant. He had no idea there was any other nation than England talking the same language and as white as they, and who were also Christians. This was generally true of his countrymen then. But when, five years after, “the cotton famine” raised so wonderfully the value of their staple, and the Hindoo farmer began to receive two, and even three, rupees for the same quantity of cotton for which he obtained only one the year before, men opened their eyes and began to study geography, to find out that there was a nation, and a great one, beyond England, whose faces were white and who spoke the English language, and were Christians too. So that our civil war in this country woke up the dormant intellect of ten thousand homes in the depths of India, and led men to inquire and study, and so far stimulated education, and showed its value, as no foreign event for hundreds of years previously had done.
But in 1857 the cotton famine had not occurred, and my Hindoo visitor was perplexed. Notwithstanding the general confidence they have in the truthfulness of the white faces, I have reason to think that this man left my dwelling under the conviction that I had tried to deceive him; that I was what he supposed, and had denied it to screen myself and my purpose. It is probable that that interview and its impressions exposed my family and myself to their more special vengeance when the day came.
With Joel's aid I commenced the work, hoping to have something done by the time the first party of our brethren should reach
