68 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
they operate with indomitable pertinacity even in 
the agonies of death. On the day after the event 
just recorded^ I entered the dwelling-house of a 
poor Hindoo, detached from the village a few hun- 
dred yards. A lean Pariah dog, foul with mange, 
and attenuated to a mere outline, raised its head 
as I stepped over the threshold, turning its dull 
eye upon me with a still sickly glare, as if the lustre 
of life had departed, and it had been moved in the 
socket by some mechanical impulse independent of 
that animal volition which gives to motion at once 
such an expression and charm. Leaving the starved 
brute “ to die unhonoured and unmourned/’ I en- 
tered the chamber where the emissaries of death 
had been executing his awful purpose, under circum- 
stances peculiarly harrowing. In one corner of the 
hovel appeared the corpse of an aged woman, in which 
the dreadful process of corruption was so actively go- 
ing on that it was frightful to behold, whilst the at- 
mosphere was charged with those horrible fumes of 
decaying mortality, at once disgusting and sickening 
to inhale. In the centre of the floor was a man of 
middle age, stretched upon a ragged palampore, ap- 
parently in the last extremity. His wife lay on 
the bare earth, scarcely a yard from his feet, much 
in the same state: beside her a dead child, about 
two years old. A little girl was kneeling on the 
other side, and kept continually striking the mother’s 
face, and asking in a tone of bitter petulance, to which 
extreme hunger had excited it, for rice. The wretched 
parent only answered by turning her eyes upward 
with so slow and evidently painful a motion, that 
