Page:Sketches of some distinguished Indian women.djvu/41

Rh when Ananta Shastri tried to put it into practice by attempting to educate his first wife, his other female relations interfered and succeeded in t thwarting him.

He was, however, determined to try the experiment again with his second wife, and as soon as he reached his home, which was in the Mangalore district in Western India, he set to work to teach Lakshmibai Sanskrit. Again his mother and the other members of his family raised their voices in protest against this breach of time-honoured custom, but the pundit was resolved not to be baffled this time.

He broke up his home, and taking his child wife with him, he journeyed away far into the jungle. There, in the middle of the forests which clothe the slopes of the Western Ghauts, near the fountain head of a sacred river, he took up his abode. A rude dwelling of branches and mats was soon constructed, and here in the forest solitudes, with the roar of the tiger and the howling of the hyaena breaking the silence of night, Ananta Shastri made his home, and devoted himself to the education of his wife. Day by day he taught her to read Sanskrit, the language in which the sacred books of the Hindus are written, and then as her intelligence developed he opened out to her the stores of Hindu poetry and philosophy; but not of religion. The sentences from the Code of