102 JBOUGHIfrG IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 



it and ducking down again. They kept their faces hidden, so 

 in order to get a better view I stood up ; but at my least 

 movement they disappeared, and then hopped away, 

 almost on all fours, as if to them that were quite the 

 easiest mode of progression ; of course, they did it to make 

 themselves as unnoticeable as possible — the true animal 

 instinct. In very truth their lives were not far removed 

 from those of monkeys. 



The sight made me hope that the re-incarnation theory 

 might be true, as the only way — so at least it seems to some 

 people — of reconciling conflicting ideas, conflicting, that is, 

 to our limited comprehensions. Perhaps in this very theory 

 lies the answer to the perpetual why and wherefore surging 

 up in our minds at the sight of degraded existences, which 

 after all may be so only in appearance, the reality being 

 that they are passing through a transition stage. 



Discords, we are told, have their place in harmony. 

 That things will be balanced one day most of us believe, 

 but while some are content to leave it at that, others equally 

 earnest are unable to do so. 



As a woman myself, the condition of these wives and 

 mothers touched me the more. Alike in our womanhood, 

 there was yet a world of difference between us — nay, aeons 

 of development, I would rather think. As they are now, 

 stunted mentally and physically, so was I ; as I am, so are 

 they to be. Not that there is much to choose, in point 

 of development, between these know-nothings and the 

 degenerates of our own race, the last having something 

 to unlearn. 



Some one has fancifully said of self-consciousness that 

 it ' sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, and wakes in 

 man.' These little people and their like in many a corner 

 of the world are not to be pitied, rather are they to be 

 envied ; not theirs the fever of competition, of baulked 

 ambition, and of dashed hopes, which moves more civilised 



