the Suttee in his district.  On the morning of Tuesday—­note the day of the week—­the 24th of the following November, Ummed Singh Upadhya, head of the most respectable and most extensive Brahmin family in the district, died, and presently came a deputation of his sons and grandsons to beg that his old widow might be allowed to burn herself upon his pyre.  Sleeman threatened to enforce his order, and punish severely any man who assisted; and he placed a police guard to see that no one did so.  From the early morning the old widow of sixty-five had been sitting on the bank of the sacred river by her dead, waiting through the long hours for the permission; and at last the refusal came instead.  In one little sentence Sleeman gives you a pathetic picture of this lonely old gray figure:  all day and all night “she remained sitting by the edge of the water without eating or drinking.”  The next morning the body of the husband was burned to ashes in a pit eight feet square and three or four feet deep, in the view of several thousand spectators.  Then the widow waded out to a bare rock in the river, and everybody went away but her sons and other relations.  All day she sat there on her rock in the blazing sun without food or drink, and with no clothing but a sheet over her shoulders.

The relatives remained with her and all tried to persuade her to desist from her purpose, for they deeply loved her.  She steadily refused.  Then a part of the family went to Sleeman’s house, ten miles away, and tried again to get him to let her burn herself.  He refused, hoping to save her yet.

All that day she scorched in her sheet on the rock, and all that night she kept her vigil there in the bitter cold.  Thursday morning, in the sight of her relatives, she went through a ceremonial which said more to them than any words could have done; she put on the dhaja (a coarse red turban) and broke her bracelets in pieces.  By these acts she became a dead person in the eye of the law, and excluded from her caste forever.  By the iron rule of ancient custom, if she should now choose to live she could never return to her family.  Sleeman was in deep trouble.  If she starved herself to death her family would be disgraced; and, moreover, starving would be a more lingering misery than the death by fire.  He went back in the evening thoroughly worried.  The old woman remained on her rock, and there in the morning he found her with her dhaja still on her head.  “She talked very collectedly, telling me that she had determined to mix her ashes with those of her departed husband, and should patiently wait my permission to do so, assured that God would enable her to sustain life till that was given, though she dared not eat or drink.  Looking at the sun, then rising before her over a long and beautiful reach of the river, she said calmly, ’My soul has been for five days with my husband’s near that sun; nothing but my earthly frame is left; and this, I know, you will in time suffer to be mixed with his ashes in yonder pit, because it is not in your nature or usage wantonly to prolong the miseries of a poor old woman.’”