182 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
CHAPTER XVII. 
The discarded Brahminee was now a miserable 
outcast, without home, kindred, or friend. She 
sought the neighbourhood in which the days of her 
youth had been passed ; but all either shunned, met 
with curses, or pointed the finger of scorn at the 
degraded Hindoo. Having forfeited caste, even the 
pariahs looked upon her with contempt. Not one of 
her family would administer to her wants, and she 
was obliged to obtain a precarious subsistence by 
accepting the situation of ayah, or nurse, in a Portu- 
guese family, in which she lived for several months ; 
but the child committed to her charge dying, she 
was again cast upon the world without a home to 
shelter her, being once more reduced to the most 
pitiable destitution. No alternative remained but a 
return to that faith which she had abandoned under 
circumstances rather of necessity than from any sense 
of conviction ; and although entertaining no hopes of 
being restored to her former social eminence, she 
nevertheless determined to atone for the indignity 
offered to the gods of her ancestors, by a life of sin- 
cere penitence and a rigid observance of the requi- 
sitions of those laws established by them, as she 
most fervently believed, for the benefit of their wor- 
shippers. 
