DOMESTIC DISCIPLINE. 
79 
estimation of a Hindoo woman. It frequently hap- 
pens that parents will expend everything they pos- 
sess in the world upon an entertainment given on 
the marriage of a child, and readily encounter the 
severest privations during the rest of their lives, in 
order thus to gratify a momentary vanity. 
I was much amused by an occurrence at a small 
village through which we passed on our way toward 
the Courg district, whither we directed our course 
after we quitted Sravana Belgula. In a narrow 
enclosure, behind a small hovel, we saw a woman 
tied to a stake, and a man standing over her ad- 
ministering severe chastisement with a thick bam- 
boo, which he occasionally applied to her naked shoul- 
ders so earnestly, that she screamed with a piercing 
but dissonant expression of suffering. She bore the in- 
fliction for some time without manifesting the slight- 
est disposition to retaliate; but at length, goaded 
by the unbending severity of her tyrant, she made 
a sudden spring at his leg as he advanced to repeat 
the castigation, and, seizing him by the calf with 
her teeth, bit it so energetically, that he howled like 
a scourged whelp. Springing aside, however, he got 
beyond her reach, and then administered the disci- 
pline of the bamboo at so furious a rate, that I thought 
the woman’s bones in jeopardy. She now bore the 
blows without wincing, fixing her full dark eyes upon 
him with an expression of calm triumph which seemed 
to say, You may kill me, now I have had my re- 
venge !” The rattling of the hollow bamboo against 
her ribs might have been heard, I am sure, at the 
distance of a hundred yards : still she did not move 
