30 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
a muscle, but sat sullen and enduring, while the 
man’s rage appeared to kindle in proportion to her 
non-resistance. 
There were several persons looking on with per- 
fect unconcern, from whom I learned that it was a 
domestic despot heating his wife for some act of so- 
cial dereliction. Becoming uneasy at seeing the mer- 
ciless mode of chastisement pursued by the enraged 
Hindoo, I sent one of my native attendants to ex- 
postulate with the man upon his undue severity. 
The moment he attempted to interpose in this fa- 
mily disagreement, the woman released herself from 
the cords by which she was bound, rushed upon my 
unhappy messenger, threw her head into his stomach 
with the fury of an excited tigress, and poured upon 
him a volley of such eloquent abuse for interfering be- 
tween a husband and wife as perfectly astounded me, 
though it only excited a smile on the countenances of 
the generality of the bystanders. She had no sooner 
put to flight the man whom I had sent as a pacificator, 
for he scampered away from the scene of combat as if 
he had been stung by a scorpion, than she took her 
station at the stake, to which her better half again 
bound her, and proceeded to thump her to her heart’s 
content and his own. 
It is a strange anomaly in human nature, but 
with the Hindoo wife passive endurance is at once 
a virtue and a social obligation. She esteems her 
husband in proportion as he maintains what she con- 
ceives to be the dignity of his character; and this, 
in her mind, is most properly maintained when he 
makes the wife feel his power and her own impo- 
