Page:The Life of Dr. Anandabai Joshee.djvu/194

186 body with the sacred fire, according to the Hindu rites, but our fears were groundless. When I offered sacrifices to avert her death, they had gladly officiated, showing a generous liberality."

Anandabai needed neither vows nor sacrifices nor crematory rites to bring her soul to the foot of "The Great White Throne," but she had more than once desired that everything should be done, after her death, to gratify and appease those who still recognized their force.

"It will do me no harm," she said once, when speaking to me of such matters.

After the body was placed upon the funeral pile, Mr. V. M. Ranadè made an oration in Dr. Joshee's honor, and the cremation was then completed.

"But she is dead! that sweet intellectual soul, that large-brained self-forgetful womanly creature—dead at the early age of twenty-one years and eleven months—dead on the threshold of the work for which she was so well equipped!"

There are those of us who loving her tenderly cannot think without pain of the weary journey, undertaken without the needed nurse and companion but turning our eyes to the country which she loved, and which, because she loved it.