66 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
thing could exceed the misery that prevailed. Mo- 
thers frequently came to us and offered to sell their 
children for a single meal of rice. It was distress- 
ing to witness sufferings which we could not alle- 
viate,, and to be obliged to turn from supplications to 
which we could give nothing but our sympathies ; for 
our united means would, as an aggregate, have been 
but as a drop in the ocean towards ameliorating the 
general distress. The calamity was dreadful beyond 
description. I have seen groups of miserable Pa- 
riahs, almost maddened by hunger, scrape up the 
ordure of our baggage bullocks, and absolutely fight 
for it with desperate ferocity. This, when obtain- 
ed, they washed for the occasional seeds of gram* 
which were to be found in it. During this melan- 
choly season I witnessed scenes of the most appalling 
misery. 
I remember walking out one morning just about 
sunrise. Within a few yards of a village I saw a 
poor woman seated upon the ground in a state of 
complete exhaustion. Her back was supported by a 
large stone ; and her hands hung, as it appeared, in- 
sensibly by her side. From the waist upward she was 
entirely naked, and the squalid misery of her appear- 
ance defies description. Her eyes were closed, her 
chin had fallen, her lips moved so gently as scarce- 
ly to indicate the presence of life. Her long hair hung 
over her shoulders, and partly hid her countenance, 
which had the ghastly expression of death when the 
spirit quits its prison with a fierce conflict. Her frame 
presented the appearance of a skeleton covered with a 
* Gram is a soit of vetch upon which cattle are feci in India. 
