proportion is not frequently realized; but whether the bridegroom be old or young, the Hindoo bride should not be over twelve years of age.
Her name is the next consideration, and the legislator has seriously provided for this also. Lovers in this land offer new names, and ladies accept them and lose their own. In India it is not so. There the wife is ever known only by her maiden name; hence the name is of vital importance, and the law gravely prescribes as follows: “Let him not marry a girl with the name of a constellation, of a tree, or of a river, of a barbarous nation, or of a mountain, or of a winged creature, a snake, or a slave; nor one with any name raising an image of terror. The names of women should be agreeable, soft, clear, captivating the fancy, auspicious, ending in long vowels, resembling words of benediction.” Chapter iii, sec. 4.
A list of sixty-nine names of Hindoo ladies is before us as we write, and all of them answer to this requirement. They run thus: “Hira, Kaminee, Dasee, Munee, Pudma, Sidhoo, Bhowanee, Rutuna,” etc.
The preliminaries we have already noted completed, the two children are then duly and properly betrothed by the officiating Brahmin. So legal, however, is the ceremony considered, that, should the boy die ere they come to live together as man and wife, the little girl is thereby considered a widow, and under the law of her religion is debarred from ever marrying any one else. Indeed, till British humanity interfered, many of them became suttees, and were actually burned with the dead body of the youth whom they never knew nor loved as a husband — being at once a virgin, a widow, and a suttee on the last wretched day of their singular life!
As soon as the ceremony of betrothal has taken place, the little girl enters on a new phase of her existence. Henceforth she is no more free to roam the fields and enjoy the lovely face of nature. Reserved for her husband, she can no longer be seen with propriety by any man save her father and brothers.
She is from that day “a purdah nasheen”—one who sits behind
