Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/522

456 Seated in pairs, they laid their foreheads together and sobbed aloud; the tears rolled down their cheeks in streams, and they presented the appearance of the deepest anguish. Two, who had thus been weeping on each other's shoulder, would separate and unite themselves to other mourners, saluting one another in a style peculiar to these mountaineers: the man stretching out a foot, the female applied her forehead to it, and then did the same with the other foot; after this they united their tears and sobs. Gradually the number of the mourners increased, the wail swelling and deepening until the beautiful hill-side became a very Bochim–a place of tears. Although we knew that this burst of grief was but a working up of excited feelings in many, and a feigned thing with others, it could not be beheld without emotion. I turned homeward with a heart full of sadness for these mourning families. These funeral rites, so vain, so meaningless, so void of all power to help the soul, were but an index to the darkness that reigned within the assembled multitude. Oh, why has God made me to differ from these heathen? Why is it that I know Jesus to be the resurrection and the life, while darkness broods on their minds?