It is fine and beautiful.  It compels one’s reverence and respect—­no, has it freely, and without compulsion.  We see how the custom, once started, could continue, for the soul of it is that stupendous power, Faith; faith brought to the pitch of effectiveness by the cumulative force of example and long use and custom; but we cannot understand how the first widows came to take to it.  That is a perplexing detail.

Sleeman says that it was usual to play music at the suttee, but that the white man’s notion that this was to drown the screams of the martyr is not correct; that it had a quite different purpose.  It was believed that the martyr died prophecying; that the prophecies sometimes foretold disaster, and it was considered a kindness to those upon whom it was to fall to drown the voice and keep them in ignorance of the misfortune that was to come.

CHAPTER XLIX.

He had had much experience of physicians, and said “the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what; you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.” 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

It was a long journey—­two nights, one day, and part of another day, from Bombay eastward to Allahabad; but it was always interesting, and it was not fatiguing.  At first the, night travel promised to be fatiguing, but that was on account of pyjamas.  This foolish night-dress consists of jacket and drawers.  Sometimes they are made of silk, sometimes of a raspy, scratchy, slazy woolen material with a sandpaper surface.  The drawers are loose elephant-legged and elephant-waisted things, and instead of buttoning around the body there is a drawstring to produce the required shrinkage.  The jacket is roomy, and one buttons it in front.  Pyjamas are hot on a hot night and cold on a cold night—­defects which a nightshirt is free from.  I tried the pyjamas in order to be in the fashion; but I was obliged to give them up, I couldn’t stand them.  There was no sufficient change from day-gear to night-gear.  I missed the refreshing and luxurious sense, induced by the night-gown, of being undressed, emancipated, set free from restraints and trammels.  In place of that, I had the worried, confined, oppressed, suffocated sense of being abed with my clothes on.  All through the warm half of the night the coarse surfaces irritated my skin and made it feel baked and feverish, and the dreams which came in the fitful flurries of slumber were such as distress the sleep of the damned, or ought to; and all through the cold other half of the night I could get no time for sleep because I had to employ it all in stealing blankets.  But blankets are of no value at such a time; the higher they are piled the more effectively they cork the cold in and keep it from getting out.  The result is that your legs are ice, and you know how you will feel by and by when you are buried.  In a sane interval I discarded the pyjamas, and led a rational and comfortable life thenceforth.