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390 burned herself, or declared herself willing to return to them. Her sons and grandsons and some other relatives remained with her, urging her to desist; the rest surrounded my house, urging me to allow her to burn. She remained sitting upon a bare rock in the bed of the Nerbudda, refusing any subsistence, and exposed to the intense heat of the sun by day, and the cold of the night, with only a thin sheet thrown over her shoulders. On Thursday, to cut off all hope of her being moved from her purpose, she put on the dhujja, or coarse red turban, and broke her bracelets in pieces, by which she became dead in law, and forever excluded from caste. Should she choose to live after this, she could never return to her family. Her children and grandchildren were still with her, but all their entreaties were unavailing. I became satisfied that she would starve herself to death if not allowed to burn, by which her family would be disgraced, her miseries prolonged, and I rendered liable to be charged with a wanton abuse of authority, for no prohibition of the kind I had issued had as yet received the formal sanction of the Government. Early on Saturday morning I rode out ten miles to the spot, and found the poor old widow still sitting with the dhujja around her head. She talked very collectedly, telling me that ‘she had determined to mix her ashes with those of her departed husband, and she would patiently wait my permission to do so, assured that God would enable her to sustain life till that was given, though she dared not eat or drink.’ Looking at the sun, then rising before her over a long and beautiful reach of the Nerbudda River, she said calmly, ‘My soul has been for five days with my husband's near that sun; nothing but my earthly frame is left, and this I know you will in time suffer to be mixed with the ashes of his in yonder pit, because it is not in your nature or your usage wantonly to prolong the miseries of a poor old woman.’ I replied, ‘Indeed it is not; my object and duty is to save and preserve them, and I am come to dissuade you from this idle purpose, to urge you to live and keep your family from being thought your murderers.’ She said, ‘I am not afraid of their ever being so thought; they have all, like good children, done every