Page:Letters from India Vol 2.pdf/79

 day—not rain such as you see, but a constant sheet of water pouring down—so for exercise we carried about our respective letters to each other’s rooms, and talked them over, and the mere reading took up two or three hours.

Your account of the snow being ‘congealed water and cold to the touch’ I read aloud, for the benefit of the public.

I think the native female schools will do good at last, but we attended the report last Wednesday that was made of them, and there was a great deal in the report that I cannot believe. The native girls are married always at seven or eight years old, and after that are shut up and seen no more; and this report mentioned little girls of six years old, who came to school in defiance of their fathers’ orders, and who concealed their Testaments between their mats and beds, because their parents forbade them to have them, like little Christian martyrs and great examples. I asked the clergyman afterwards whether he thought a native child of that age, who has not the sense of an English child of three years old, was really disobeying her parents from religious motives, and whether it was right to teach them deceit under any