The Rajah did all he could, or could make his people do, to get rid of them; but at last, afraid that some of the Brahmins would really die, he consented that his son should go and fetch his bride, if Hunmunt Sing would pay down twenty-five thousand rupees more, to defray the cost of the procession, in addition to the seventy-five thousand.  He did so, and his daughter was taken off in due form.  He has another daughter to dispose of in the same way.  The Rewa Rajah has thus taken five or six wives for his son, from families a shade lower in caste; but the whole that he has got with them will not be enough to pay one of the Rajpoot families, a shade higher in caste than he is, in Rajpootana, to take one daughter from him.  It costs him ten or twelve lacs of rupees to induce the Rajah of Oudeepoor, Joudhpoor, or Jypoor, to take away, as his bride, a daughter of Rewa.  All is a matter of bargain and sale.  Those who have money must pay, in proportion to their means, to marry their daughters into families a shade higher in caste or dignity, or to get daughters from them when such families are reduced to the necessity of selling their daughters to families of a lower grade.

Among Brahmins it is the same.  Take, for example, the Kunojee Brahmins, among whom there are several shades of caste.  The member of a family a shade higher will not give his son in marriage to a daughter of a family a shade lower, without receiving a sum in proportion to its means; nor will he give a daughter in marriage to such a family till he is so exalted as to be able to disregard the feelings of his clan, or reduced to such a degree of poverty as shall seem to his clan sufficient to justify it.  This bargain and sale of sons and daughters prevails, more or less, throughout all Hindoo society, and is not, even now, altogether unknown among Christian nations.  In Oude, this has led to the stealing of young girls from our own districts.  Some men and women from our districts make a trade of it.  They pretend to be of Rajpoot caste, and inveigle away girls from their parents, to be united in marriage to Rajpoots in Oude.  They pretend to have brought them with the consent of their parents, of the same or higher caste, in our territories, and make large sums by the trade.

December 31, 1849.—­Eight miles to Sotee, over a country well studded with trees, and generally well cultivated.  The soil is, all the way, doomuteea.  The road, the greater part of the way, lies in the purgunnah of Nyn, held by Jugunnath Sing, a Kumpureea Rajpoot, and his nephew, and the collateral branches of their family.  They have a belt of jungle, extending for some twelve miles along the right bank of the Saee river, and on the right side of the road, and within from two to six miles from it—­in some parts nearer, and in others more remote.  Wild hogs, deer, neelgae, and wild cattle abound in this jungle, and do great injury to the crops in its vicinity.  The peasantry can