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 prevail upon to send, are educated with the utmost care.  In our religion we retain Brahma—­by whom we mean the one supreme God of all—­and abolish all notions of the saving efficacy of merely ceremonial observances, holding that God has given to man the choice of right and wrong, and the dignity of exercising his powers in such accordance with his convictions as shall secure his eternal happiness.  To these cardinal principles we subjoin the most unlimited toleration for other religions, recognizing in its fullest extent the law of the adaptation of the forms of relief to the varying moulds of character resulting from race, climate and all those great conditions of existence which differentiate men one from another.”

[Illustration:  CHARIOT OF THE PROCESSION OF THE RATTJATTRA, AT JAGHERNATH.]

“How,” I asked, “do the efforts of the Christian missionaries comport with your own sect’s?”

“Substantially, we work together.  With the sincerest good wishes for their success—­for every sensible man must hail any influence which instills a single new idea into the wretched Bengalee of low condition—­I am yet free to acknowledge that I do not expect the missionaries to make many converts satisfactory to themselves, for I am inclined to think them not fully aware of the fact that in importing Christianity among the Hindus they have not only brought the doctrine, but they have brought the Western form of it, and I fear that they do not recognize how much of the nature of substance this matter of form becomes when one is attempting to put new wine into old bottles.  Nevertheless, God speed them!  I say.  We are all full of hope.  Signs of