on
her journey, under a hot sun, without being exposed to certain death.
Rather than that I should see her perish, and run the hazard of being
suspected of having killed her myself, and being guilty of one of the
five crimes which the Brahmans consider as the most heinous, he advised
me to give her to him, and then he would mount her on one of his cattle
and take her along with him. That I should be a loser, he admitted;
but, all things considered, it was better to lose her, with the merit of
having saved her life, than equally to lose her, under the suspicion of
being her murderer. "Her trinkets," he said, "may be worth fifteen
pagodas; take these twenty and give me your wife."

The merchant's arguments appeared unanswerable; so I yielded to them,
and delivered to him my wife, whom he placed on one of his best oxen,
and continued his journey without delay. I continued mine also, and got
home in the evening, exhausted with hunger and fatigue, and with my feet
almost roasted with the burning sand, over which I had walked the
greater part of the day. Frightened to see me alone, "Where is your
wife?" cried my mother. I gave her a full account of everything that had
happened from the time I left her. I spoke of the agreeable and
courteous manner in which my father-in-law had received me, and how, by
some delay, we had been overtaken by the scorching heat of the sun at
noon, so that my wife must have perished and myself suspected of having
caused her death, had we proceeded; and that I had preferred to sell her
to a merchant who met us for twenty pagodas. And I showed my mother the
money.

When I had done, my mother fell into an ecstasy of fury. She lifted up
her voice against me with cries of rage, and overwhelmed me with
imprecations and awful curses. Having given way to these first emotions
of despair, she sank into a more moderate tone: "What hast thou done!
Sold thy wife, hast thou! Delivered her to another man! A Brahmanari is
become the concubine of a vile merchant! Ah, what will her kindred and
ours say when they hear the tale of this brutish stupidity--of folly so
unexampled and degrading?"

The relations of my wife were soon informed of the sad adventure that
had befallen their unhappy girl. They came over to attack me, and would
certainly have murdered me and my innocent mother, if we had not both
made a sudden escape. Having no direct object to wreak their vengeance
upon, they brought the matter before the c