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PREFACE.

MY DEAR SIR,-You have taken so lively an interest in the Mission recently established among the Coorgs, and have so zealously published in your valuable paper, whatever intelligence you have been able to obtain of the progress of the work, in which I am engaged, that I feel it a duty to communicate to yourself and your readers the information, which I have collected during the first months of my sojourn in this province, concerning the religion, the customs, the habits, the character and the history of the people, and to give an account of the nature and peculiarities of the country, which in a Missionary sense of the word, I now call my own. A few months' residence does not, of course, furnish a man with a complete knowledge of a country and its inhabitants, but if you allow the season of first impressions to pass away, without taking a pen and ink sketch, the days of more intimate acquaintance and maturer judgment will find you deficient in that freshness of conception, which alone impels one to engage in the labour of transcribing for the

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use of others, what he has seen and heard, thought and felt, of the world which surrounds him.

I shall, then, give you a description of the field of labour assigned to me, with as much exactness as possible, reserving to a future period the right of supplying such deficiencies and correcting such mistakes as may discover themselves in this attempt of the first

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The above letter introduced the first pages of the Coorg Memoirs to the Madras Christian Herald. After some time the Rajendranama was obtained, examined and embodied in the Coorg papers. Some kind friends advised the author to complete his manuscript and to publish the whole in a separate form. Coorg and its Mission might thus, they hoped, become more widely known, and gain the sympathies of a larger circle of friends. This is the history of the little book. Being the work of a foreigner and a man of little leisure, it lays no claim to English style or superior penmanship, but humbly endeavours to furnish the patient reader with a new and true account of an interesting country and race.

The history of Coorg from 1809 to 1834 has cost considerable labor. Popular traditions, accounts of

eyewitnesses and written documents required to be collected, sifted, arranged, and harmonized. No statement has been made without careful examination. Truth has been told sine ira et studio. The sad tale will excite mingled feelings of horror and pity. Let such as know how to pray, offer up their supplications for the salvation of Coorg. The judgments of God have descended upon the race of its Rajahs. Their history has ended in infamy and exile. Yet in the midst of judgment He has remembered mercy. A child of this house has found her way into the Church of Christ, and Queen Victoria, Sovereign of the greatest Empire of the world, has not been ashamed, to bestow her name and her affection upon a daughter of the last of the Haleri Rajahs. Auspicious omen for Coorg !

O, give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endureth for ever.

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