8 Notes of a tour in the Tributary Mehals. [No. 1, 
min families, up to a recent date; many of the grandmothers of the 
present generation of chiefs and Brahmins having so distinguished 
themselves. One man was pointed out to me as having lost his mother 
by the rite of suttee. He would not say ‘lost ;’ he no doubt regards 
her as canonized by the act. 
A rather romantic story of a suttee that occurred some fifty years 
ago in Gangpore is related. 
A Brahmin took a dislike to a girl he had just married, and turned 
her out of doors, a wedded maid. She took refuge with her parents 
who were poor, and who soon after died, leaving her destitute; then 
she wandered from village to village subsisting on alms and leading a 
wretched widowed life. Her husband married a second time, and sons 
and daughters were born to him and grew up about him, and in the 
fullness of years he died. His second wife had preceded him, so his 
corpse was placed alone on the funeral pile, and the torch was about 
to be applied to it, when a poor emaciated and meanly clad female 
stepped forward, and as the first, the faithful and only surviving wife 
of the deceased, claimed the right of suttee. Her request was com- 
plied with. Bathed, anointed, clothed, and adorned with flowers like 
a bride, she ascended the pile and clinging to the corpse of the hus- 
band who had so cruelly discarded her, and for the first time in her 
life pressing her lips to his, the flames arose and their ashes were 
mingled together ! 
There is no doubt still a strong sentiment in favour of suttee in the 
Tributary Mehals, and States under native government. Its prohibition 
has not been long enforced in the eastern parts of Rewa. Not long 
ago, in that territory, on the death of a Brahmin, his widow, notwith- 
standing the prohibition, was so vehement in her desire to join her 
husband on the pyre, that her relatives as the only method of restrain- 
ing her, locked her up. When the ceremony was over they proceeded 
to release her, but found that her spirit too had fled. She had attained 
her object, as my informant declared, by a special interposition of 
Providence in her behalf. 
Proceeding north-west from Nugra and the banks of the Brahmini 
river, you enter the Nuagurh division of Gangpore and come to 
Lainggurh, near the confluence of several streams, which was once the 
capital and promises to be so again, as the present Rajah is just now 

