the home of the gods. Sir William Jones, the great Orientalist, facetiously designates this family of the Pandian chiefs and their common consort as “the five-maled, single-female flower,” and there is reason to believe that this curiosity bloomed then in other localities of the land besides Indraprasta. The Code must certainly have tended to its abolition, for except in the Ceylon Mountains, among the Nairs of the South, and very limitedly in the Himalaya Mountains, the daughters of India have ceased to lament the Dwaper Yug—a departed age—when they sang:
“Prepost'rous! that one biped vain
Should drag ten housewives in his train,
And stuff them in a gaudy cage,
Slaves to weak lust or potent rage!
Not such the Dwaper Yug! O then
One buxom dame might wed five men!”
Whatever may have been the motive for this unnatural alliance in the ancient days, the purpose in our own, as I learned in the Himalayas, is the gain to be realized by the sale of their fairer daughters to supply the zenanas of the plains, and the dearth of women thus occasioned led to the continuance of this unnatural custom; and so one vice created another, and that, too, its very opposite. The English Government has done what it could to repress the practice of polyandry where it still exists.
A widow in India is undoubtedly the most miserable of her sex anywhere. She is now more than ever under the tyranny of her cruel law, and the bitterest dregs of a woman's misery are then and henceforth wrung out to her. Her youth, her beauty, her wealth, give her no exemption whatever; the rules, relentless as death, enforce their dreadful claims upon her and crush her down. Formerly they were expected to become Suttees and burn with the man's body. British humanity, thank Heaven! has ended that hellish custom. So they live, but how much better than death is their condition let my readers judge, when they learn the facts in her case.
In the first of these pages I introduced a Hindoo wife as she appears in her best estate—a married wife in her full dress and
