Page:Vidyasagar, the Great Indian Educationist and Philanthropist.djvu/54

 ruption and as a whole, and to state in general outline the part that Vidyasagar played in it. In old days the widows either burned themselves in the funeral piles of their deceased husbands as the glorious crown of a life of self-sacrifice and devotion, or led strictly ascetic lives. Since the abolition of Sati in 1829, they generally passed a life of asceticism as enjoined by the Shastras. When Vidyasagar saw the hardships that some the virgin widows endured, his tender heart wept and he formed a resolve to take up their cause. The subject had engaged his attention from boyhood. A playmate of his lost her husband while Isvar Chandra was thirteen years old and this led him to determine to mitigate the sorrows of the unfortunate girls. Again, it has been seen how sincerely he grieved when in spite of his dissuasions his old professor married, soon to leave a girl-widow behind. Hence widows and woes were indelibly associated together in his dreams.

A less authentic but credible report