wo-storied houses in the
neighbourhood. The brickbats and the bones must have come from there. As
a matter of fact the police discovered that the Boarding House students
and the people who lived in these houses were not on good terms. Those
people had organized a music party and the students had objected to it.
The matter had been reported to the Magistrate and had ended in a
decision in favour of the students. Hence the strained relations. This
was the most natural explanation and the only explanation. But this
explanation did not satisfy me for several reasons.

The first reason was that the college compound contained another well
kept lawn that stood between the Hostel buildings and those two-storied
houses. There were no brickbats on this lawn. If brickbats had been
thrown from those houses some at least would have fallen upon the lawn.

Then as regarded the brickbats that were in the room, they had all
dropped from the ceiling; but in the morning we found the tiles of the
roof intact. Thirdly, in the middle of the central lawn there was at
least one whole brick. The nearest building from which a brick might
have been thrown was at a distance of 100 yards and to throw a whole
brick 9"x41/2"x3" such a distance would require a machine of some kind
or other and none was found in the house.

The last thing that created doubts in my mind was this that not one
brickbat had hit anybody. There were so many of us there and there was
such an abundance of brickbats still not one of us was hit, and it is
well known that brickbats hurled by Ghostly hands do not hit anybody. In
fact the whole brick that came and stood on edge within 3 inches of my
toe would have hurt me if it had only toppled over.

* * * * *

It is known to most of the readers that Sutteeism was the practice of
burning the widows on the funeral pyre of their dead husbands. This
practice was prevalent in Bengal down to the year 1828 when a law
forbidding the aiding and abetting of Sutteeism was passed. Before the
Act, of course, many women were, in a way, forced to become Suttees. The
public opinion against a widow's surviving was so great that she
preferred to die rather than live after her husband's death.

The law has, however, changed the custom and the public opinion too.

Still, every now and then there are found cases of determined Sutteeism
among all classes in India who profess Hinduism. Frequent instances are
found