What luxuries one may enjoy here in the most pleasant company,--a glorious nature, palatial residences, choice fruits, dishes and wines, pleasures of all kinds, surrounded by a host of servants, who, in snow-white garments and with bare feet, noiselessly and swiftly move about in order to gratify one's desires upon the slightest sign,--and still how I long for the home in the North, with the cool winds and frost and snow which quicken the blood, give appetite, and fill one with a feeling of surging vitality and energy, unknown in the enervating climates of the South. From my veranda I see a crowd of people on the street who seem to pay homage to some one. It proves to be an idiotic beggar, Sobulla. The Hindoos believe that when a person has lost his reason he is filled with the spirit of God, and hence they always treat the insane with respect and tender care. This April heat makes it easy to realize the Hindoo proverb, which says: "Never run when you may walk, never walk when you may stand still, never stand when you may sit, never sit when you may lie down." CHAPTER XXVI. The Women of India--The Widows--The American Zenana--Prizes Awarded in a Girl's School--Annandabai Joshee--Her Visit to America--Reports to the Government--Departure from India--Burmah--Ceylon--Arabia--Cairo. From our point of view the social condition of women in India is highly deplorable. The women are not regarded as the equals of men, but rather as an appendix to them. Their religion teaches that they have no acknowledged rights as individuals, and that the only happiness they can attain in this world and in the world to come is to become wives and mothers of men, and that the more a woman sacrifices herself for man the greater will be her reward in the future. If the man to whom she is married dies, the remainder of her life is full of sorrow and suffering, and it is only in the life hereafter that she can expect any happiness, and that by being reunited with him. This belief gave rise to the so-called "sati," or the custom to burn the wife on her deceased husband's pyre in order that she might _at once_ be reunited with him and enjoy salvation through him. "Sati" is now prohibited by the English government, but every widow in India is still doomed to a life of misery and degradation.