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Is there one, of those you have taught who is with us still?" The answer was self-evident. There was none. But there was no sting for him in what she asked. Rather her words came as a relief, for he could feel the strength behind them. He still said nothing. "Have we stopped one single suttee? Have we once, in any least degree, lessened the sufferings of one of those poor widows?"

I suppose it is quite safe to conclude that that fire-bug is in holy orders. Close to the cremation-ground stand a few time-worn stones which are remembrances of the suttee. Each has a rough carving upon it, representing a man and a woman standing or walking hand in hand, and marks the spot where a widow went to her death by fire in the days when the suttee flourished. Mr.

Hired female mourners were kneeling about, wailing and beating their breasts, while behind them stood the high caste widow, her face as tragic as Dido's at the pyre of Aeneas. Suddenly she threw her arms high over her head. "I am suttee!" Suttee! It was against the law of the British Raj. The soldiers began arguing with the widow, but only half heartedly.

Everything, in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own; and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free from all clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in the rite of suttee, the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon her husband's pyre, in order that her spirit might follow him unhampered to the world of ghosts whither he was bound.

Suttee had fallen in disuse in Allaha. He, Ramabai, would now apparently side with Umballa as against Colonel Hare, who would understand perfectly. As the colonel would refuse to marry, he, Ramabai, would suggest that the colonel be married by proxy. However suspicious Umballa might be, he would not be able to find fault with this plan. The betrothal would take place in about a fortnight.

That was the influence of the great missionary, Dr. Alexander Duff, who inspired the prohibition of suttee and other measures which marked the withdrawal of the countenance originally given by the East India Company to religious practices incompatible, in the opinion of earnest Christians, with the sovereignty of a Christian Power.

More minute and exact are the details which Mrs. Postans has collected in reference to the mode of life, the religion, and the old forms of society and government in one of the north-western provinces of India, under the title of "Cutch." It includes a very animated account of a Suttee, that cruel mode of compulsory self-sacrifice which the British Government has since prohibited.

Her pretty clothes are taken from her, and she is required to do the menial work of the family; this is the Indian protest against the abolishing of the suttee, or the burning of widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands, cruelties prevented by English rule, as are also the practice of child suicide and the passing of the Juggernaut car over the prostrate bodies of living victims.

You can get the facts of a custom like caste, and Suttee, and Thuggee, and so on and with the facts a theory which tries to explain, but never quite does it to your satisfaction. You can never quite understand how so strange a thing could have been born, nor why. For instance the Suttee.

"But who is to see that Sher Singh keeps his word and does not arrange a suttee?" "You and I, of course. We attend the funeral, naturally, with all our sowars, to show due honour to the deceased. By the bye, that reminds me, we should be rather an easy prey after firing the volleys. The front rank had better load with ball, and reserve their fire, and only the rear rank fire with blank.