Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/1028

 982 BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. [Chap. sigh broke the death-like silence of the crowd, until a slight smoke, curling from the summit of the pyre, and then a tongue of flame, darting with bright and lightning-like rapidity into the clear blue sky, told us that the sacrifice was completed. Fearlessly had this courageous woman fired the pile, and not a groan had betrayed to us the moment when her spirit fled.” * The following is quoted from Bengal Under The Lieutenant Governors by C. E. Buckland, Vol. I, pages 160-161. “Although it does not fall within his Lieutenant Governorship, I think the following account of a Suttee, as narrated by Sir F. Halliday, 70 years later, will be considered interesting, and it has never been printed elsewhere :— “Suttee was prohibited by law in 1829. At and before that time I was acting as Magistrate of the district of Hoogly. Before the new*law came into operation, notice was one day brought to me that a Suttee was about to occur a few miles from my residence. Such things were frequent in Hooghly as the banks of that side of the river were considered particularly propitious for such sacrifices. When the message reached me, Dr. Wise of the Medical Service anda clergyman (whose name | forget), who was Chaplain to the Governor General, were visiting me and expressed a wish to witness the ceremony. Accordingly we drove to the appoin- ted place where a large crowd of natives was assembled on the river bank and the funeral pile one of the northern provinces of Western India in 1839.
 * Mrs. Porstan's Random Sketches during her residence in