a fit of
laughter that lasted for several minutes, while the ungainly bird
stalked away with much the stolid air of one who has seen something
whereof he thinks but little.

The babou addressed me in excellent English, and after some
preliminary inquiries as to my stay in Calcutta, accompanied by
hospitable invitations, he gradually began, in response to my evident
desire, to talk of the hopes and fears of the new party.

"It is our great misfortune," said he, "that we have here to do with
that portion of my countrymen which is perhaps most deeply sunk in the
mire of ancient custom. We have begun by unhesitatingly leading in the
front ourselves whenever any disagreeable consequences are to be borne
by reason of our infringement of the old customs. Take, for example,
the problem of the peculiar position of women among the Hindus.
Perhaps"--and here the babou's voice grew very grave and earnest--"the
human imagination is incapable of conceiving a lot more wretched than
that of the Hindu widow. By immemorial tradition she could escape it
only through the flames of the _satti_, the funeral-pile upon which
she could burn herself with the dead body of her husband. But the
_satti_ is now prohibited by the English law, and the poor woman who
loses her husband is, according to custom, stripped of her clothing,
arrayed in coarse garments and doomed thenceforth to perform the most
menial offices of the family for the remainder of her life, as one
accursed beyond redemption. To marry again is impossible: the man who
marries a widow suffers punishments which no one who has not lived
under the traditions of caste can possibly comprehend. The wretched
widow has not even the consolations which come from books: the decent
Hindu woman does not know how to read or write. There was still one
avenue of escape from this life. She might have become a _nautchni_.
What wonder that there are so many of these? How, then, to deal with
this fatal superstition, or rather conglomerate of superstitions,
which seems to suffer no more from attack than a shadow? We have begun
the revolution by marrying widows just as girls are married, and by
showing that the loss of caste--which indeed we have quite abolished
among ourselves--entails necessarily none of those miserable
consequences which the priests have denounced; and we strike still
more deeply at the root of the trouble by instituting schools where
our own daughters, and all others whom we can pre