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There is a shop downtown with a department in the basement, underneath the sidewalk. The sidewalk is made ofthick glass, and as you look up you can see the feet of the crowds of people as they pass overhead. If the World were made of glass and you could look down through it in the same way, you could see the bottoms of thefeet of the crowds passing by on the other side of the World. It is the “Opposite-feet” Land. That sounds awkward, so grown-ups call it “The Antipodes,” which means exactly the same thing—“opposite-feet.” The Opposite-feet Land on the other side of the World is a pie-shaped country called India. It is the half-way country—half-way round the World. You go away from home till you reach India, then, though you keep on going, you are coming back. I went west around the World and a friend of mine went east. We both started at the same time and met in India. When I landed at a place called Calcutta, there he was on the dock waiting to greet me. From Calcutta we used to get a kind of cloth which we called, from the name of the place, calico.
When I say “Indians”, you probably think of tommyhawks, colored feathers, and warpaint. But you are thinking of American Indians—the kind that were in our country before the white man came. There are only a few ofthese Indians left. They belong to the red race.
There is another kind of Indian that belongs to the white race, the same as we do, and there are more than twice as many of them as there are people in our whole country. They get the name “Indians” from the name of the country where they live—India.
