This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process.

We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Flora Annie Steel was a writer who lived in British India for 22 years. She was noted especially for books set in the Indian sub-continent or connected with it.

Flora was interested in relating to all classes of Indian society. The birth of her daughter gave her a chance to interact with local women and learn their language. She encouraged the production of local handicrafts and collected folk-tales, a collection of which she published in 1894.

In 1889 the family moved back to Britain, and she continued her writing there. Some of her best work, according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, is contained in two collections of her short stories, From the Five Rivers and Tales of the Punjab.

She also wrote a popular history of India. John F. Riddick describes Steel's The Hosts of the Lord as one of the "three significant works" produced by Anglo-Indian writers on Indian missionaries, along with The Old Missionary (1895) by William Wilson Hunter and Idolatry (1909) by Alice Perrin.