Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/401

Rh thing in their power to induce me to live among them, and if I had done so, I know they would have loved me and honored me, but my duties to them have now ceased. Our intercourse and communion here end. I go to attend my husband, Omed Sing Opuddea, with whose ashes on the funeral pile mine have been already three times mixed.’

“This was the first time in her long life that she had ever pronounced the name of her husband; for in India no woman, high or low, pronounces her husband's name. She would consider it disrespectful toward him to do so. When the old lady named her husband, as she did with strong emphasis, and in a very deliberate manner, every one present was satisfied she had resolved to die. Again looking at the sun, she said with a tone and countenance that affected me a good deal, ‘I see them together under the bridal canopy!’ alluding to the ceremonies of marriage; and I am satisfied that she at that moment really believed that she saw her own spirit and that of her husband under the bridal canopy in paradise, and equally believed that she had been, in three previous births, three times married to him on earth, and as often had died with him, and must repeat it now again. I asked the old lady when she had first resolved to become a suttee? She told me that about thirteen years before, while bathing near the spot where she then sat, the resolution had fixed itself in her mind, as she looked at the splendid temples on the bank of the river erected by the different branches of the family, over the ashes of her female relatives, who had at different times become suttees. Two were over her aunts, and another over her husband's mother. They were very beautiful buildings, erected at great cost. She said she had never mentioned her resolution to any one, till she called out Suth! ''suth! suth!'' when her husband breathed his last, with his head in her lap, on the bank of the Nerbudda, to which he had been taken, when no hopes remained of his surviving the fever of which he died.

“I tried to work upon her pride and her fears—told her that it was probable that the rent-free lands, by which her family had