[108] Eating the head means wishing death. When two rival wives fall out they literally become frantic through anger and jealousy. With shaking hands and dishevelled locks they abuse and curse each other most violently. XIX. HINDOO WIDOWS. The system of early marriage, and the barbarous institution of condemning a Hindoo female to a life of perpetual widowhood after the death of her husband, are evils which cannot be too strongly deprecated. In this country, owing to the prevalence of early marriage and the manner in which it is consummated, a Hindoo does not become a housekeeper immediately after his marriage. The wife generally remains one or two years with her parents, occasionally going to her father-in-law's house for a few days only; her husband pays her a visit now and then, but not without the special invitation of his mother-in-law. The object of such an invitation is evidently to make the son-in-law behave well towards her daughter. For the attainment of this object, as I have described before, no means is left untried. Indeed it has become a proverb among the Hindoos that when a man fares sumptuously, it is said, he has been fed with all the fondness shown to a son-in-law. It has always struck me that if a Hindoo female were permitted to re-marry after the death of her first husband, the affection of a mother-in-law for a son-in-law would not have been so warm as it now is under the existing state of things, which admits of no alternative. Living under the paternal roof for one or two years after her marriage, a Hindoo girl sometimes becomes a widow,[109]--a state of life which is unspeakably miserable. When a young female of ten or eleven years of age loses her husband, with whom perhaps she had scarcely ever exchanged a single word, she is quite unconscious of the unmitigated misery she is fated to endure for the remainder of her long existence.[110] Deplorable as such a condition undoubtedly is, it becomes doubly miserable from the cold, uncongenial and unsympathetic atmosphere by which she is surrounded, and the uncared-for neglect with which she is treated ever afterwards. Except a mother, who can adequately conceive the thousand and one miseries which are in store for the daughter? It is a gloomy picture from the beginning to the end, and the gloom deepens as time rolls over her devoted head. Cursed be the name of the lawgiver who has made such a cruel ordinance, and cursed the society that has become a thrall to it! Opposed to the feelings of humanity and natural affection, the divine lawgiver of the Hindoos, Manu, expressly enjoins that "although the state of widowhood might be deemed onerous by the fair sex of the west, it would be considered little hardship in the east. Let her emaciate her body, by living voluntarily on pure flowers, roots and fruits, but let her not, when her lord is deceased, even pronounce the name of another man. A virtuous wife ascends to heaven, if, after the