to another place." No one sees what is
done to her there, but I know that part of the treatment consists in
scratching her head with thorns, and then rubbing raw lime juice
in--lime juice is like lemon juice, only more acid. When the paroxysm
passes she reappears, and does penance till the next fit comes. This has
been repeated three times within the last few months.

I was visiting in a Hindu house for two years before I found out that
all that time a girl of seventeen was kept alone in an upper room. "Let
her weep," they said, quoting a proverb; "'though she weeps, will a
widow's sorrow pass?'" Once a day, after dark, she was brought
downstairs for a few minutes, and once a day, at noon, some coarse food
was taken up to her. She is allowed downstairs now, but only in the back
part of the house; she never thinks of resisting this decree--it, and
all it stands for, is her fate. Sometimes the glad girl-life reasserts
itself, and she plays and laughs with her sister-in-law's pretty baby
boy; but if she hears a man's voice she disappears upstairs. There are
proverbs in the language which tell why.

I sat on the verandah of a well-to-do Hindu house one day, and talked to
the bright-looking women in their jewels and silks. And all the time,
though little I knew it, a widow was tied up in a sack in one of the
inner rooms. This wrong is a hidden wrong.

I do not think that anyone would call the Hindus distinctively cruel; in
comparison with most other Asiatics their instincts are kind. A custom
so merciless as this custom, which punishes the innocent with so
grievous a punishment, does not seem to us to be natural to them. It
seems like a parasite custom, which has struck its roots deep into the
tree of Hindu social life, but is not part of it. Think of the power
which must have been exerted somewhere by someone before the disposition
of a nation could be changed.

This custom as it stands is formidable enough. Many a man, Indian and
foreign, has fought it and failed. It is a huge and most rigorous system
of tyrannical oppression, a very pyramid to look at, old, immovable.
But there is Something greater behind it. It is only the effect of a
Cause--the Dust of the Actual.

What can alter the custom? Strong writing or speaking, agitations, Acts
of Parliament? All these surely have their part. They raise the
question, stir the Dust--but blow it off? Oh no! nothing can touch the
conscience of the people, and utterly reverse