CHAPTER 4.
A Suttee[1] on the Nerbudda.
We took a ride one evening to Gopalpur, a small village situated on the same bank of the Nerbudda, about three miles up from Bheraghat.
On our way we met a party of women and girls coming to the fair.
Their legs were uncovered half-way up the thigh; but, as we passed, they all carefully covered up their faces.

'Good God!' exclaimed one of the ladies, 'how can these people be so very indecent ?' They thought it, no doubt, equally extraordinary that she should have her face uncovered, while she so carefully concealed her legs; for they were really all modest peasantry, going from the village to bathe in the holy stream.[2] Here there are some very pretty temples, built for the most part to the memory of widows who have burned themselves with the remains of their husbands, and upon the very spot where they committed themselves to the flames.

There was one which had been recently raised over the ashes of one of the most extraordinary old ladies that I have ever seen, who burned herself in my presence in 1829.

I prohibited the building of any temple upon the spot, but my successor in the civil charge of the district, Major Low, was never, I believe, made acquainted with the prohibition nor with the progress of the work; which therefore went on to completion in my absence.

As suttees are now prohibited in our dominions[3] and cannot be often seen or described by Europeans, I shall here relate the circumstances of this as they were recorded by me at the time, and the reader may rely upon the truth of the whole tale.
On the 29th November, 1829, this old woman, then about sixty-five years of age, here mixed her ashes with those of her husband, who had been burned alone four days before.