Page:Letters from India Vol 2.pdf/94

 fess—scorched them. Of course the man did confess at last; indeed, I should like to see George and not confess anything and everything if they took to scorching Emily and me. It is a very bad precedent that of torturing the women of a family by way of punishing the men. It might just happen they would not mind, certainly less than if they were tortured themselves. One of the native princes made his prime minister pound his family’s heads in a mortar with a pestle. I should not object to that so much if he set about it judgematically.

It sometimes strikes me we really are in what is called a barbarous country. The other day the baboo died here—a very high caste servant, through whose hands great sums of money pass. He might have been saved, but would not degrade himself by taking English nourishment, and, being a Hindu, was at last carried off by his attached friends before he was dead and laid by the side of the river, where they poked mud into his mouth, and there was no choice for us but to let him be murdered in his own way. Yours most affectionately, F. H. E.