As a sentient being, endowed with all the finer susceptibilities of human nature, is it possible that she should so far forget herself as not to feel the bitterest pangs of despondency at her hopelessly forlorn condition? Driven from the genial atmosphere of a social circle, she drags a loathsome existence in this selfish and unsympathetic world. Except she that gave her birth, who would deign to look upon her with love and affection? Instead of being regarded, as she assuredly should be, as the soul of simplicity, a living picture of sweet innocence, she is shunned as one whose very presence portends evil. If she possess unaffected modesty and a keen sense of honor and virtue, who is to recognise and appreciate those amiable qualities in a society which is preposterously estranged from all natural susceptibilities? If she have riches what would that avail her, a poor misguided victim of superstition![111] Her charity, instead of being founded on the catholic principles of genuine liberality shewing a discriminate breadth of view, too often exhibits an unhappy tenacity of adhesion to exclusiveness in the performance of idolatrous ceremonies. If she is placed above the atmosphere of artificialness, it is her misfortune to be surrounded by a concatenation of conventional restrictions which render her life a visible embodiment of helpless misery and anguish, and if she ever appeals, she appeals to the Being who is the only friend of the hopeless and the poor. To attempt to reconcile a widow to her forlorn lot is to tell a patient burning with fever not to be thirsty. Her days are dismal, her nights are dreary. It was the dread of widowhood, and the unmitigated life-long miseries inseparable from it, that led fifty wives at a time to ascend the funeral pyre of a Rajpoot husband, with all the composure of a philosophic mind. It redounds greatly to the credit of the British Government that its generous exertions have not only struck the death-knell of this inhuman practice, even in the remotest corner of the Empire, but, what is more commendable, endeavoured "to heal the wounds of a country bleeding at every pore from the fangs of superstition."