After an agreeable conversation with this sensible and excellent man, I returned to my tents to prepare for the reception of Raghunath Rao and his party.  They came about nine o’clock with a much greater display of elephants and followers than the minister had brought with him.  He and his friends kept me in close conversation till eleven o’clock, in spite of my wife’s many considerate messages to say breakfast was waiting.  He told me that the mother of the late Raja, his nephew, was a very violent woman, who had involved the state in much trouble during the period of her regency, which she managed to prolong till her son was twenty-five years of age, and resigned with infinite reluctance only three years ago; that her minister during her regency, Gangadhar Muli, was at the same time her paramour, and would be surely restored to power and to her embraces, were her grandson’s claim to the succession recognized; that it was with great difficulty he had been able to keep this atrocious character under surveillance pending the consideration of their claims by the Supreme Government; that, by having the head of her grandson shaved, and making him go through all the other funeral ceremonies with the other members of the family, she had involved him and his young innocent wife (who had unhappily continued to drink out of the same cup with her husband) in the dreadful crime of mourning for a father whom they knew to be yet alive, a crime that must be expiated by the ’prayaschit,’[7] which-would be exacted from the young couple on their return to Sagar before they could be restored to caste, from which they were now considered as excommunicated.  As for the young widow, she was everything they could wish; but she was so timid that she would be governed by the old lady, if she should have any ostensible part assigned her in the administration.[8]

I told the old gentleman that I believed it would be my duty to pay the first visit to the widow and mother of the late prince, as one of pure condolence, and that I hoped my doing so would not be considered any mark of disrespect towards him, who must now be looked up to as the head of the family.  He remonstrated against this most earnestly; and, at last, tears came into his eyes as he told me that, if I paid the first visit to the castle, he should never again be able to show his face outside his door, so great would be the indignity he would be considered to have suffered; but, rather than I should do this, he would come to my tents, and escort me himself to the castle.  Much was to be said on both sides of the weighty question; but, at last, I thought that the arguments were in his favour—­that, if I went to the castle first, he might possibly resent it upon the poor woman and the prime minister when he came into power, as I had no doubt he soon would—­and that I might be consulting their interest as much as his feelings by going to his house first.  In the evening I received a message from the old lady, urging the