ahmins soon found it was necessary to assist the resolution of the
sufferers, by means of a little pit into which they contrive to let the
poor widow sink, so as to prevent her reaping any benefit from a late
repentance. But the Government has brought them back to the regard of
their law, and only permit the burning to go on when the pile is
constructed with full opportunity of a _locus penitentiae_. Yet the widow
is so degraded if she dare to survive, that the number of burnings is
still great. The quantity of female children destroyed by the Rajput
tribes Colonel R. describes as very great indeed. They are strangled by
the mother. The principle is the aristocratic pride of these high
castes, who breed up no more daughters than they can reasonably hope to
find matches for in their own tribe. Singular how artificial systems of
feeling can be made to overcome that love of offspring which seems
instinctive in the females, not of the human race only, but of the lower
animals. This is the reverse of our system of increasing game by
shooting the old cock-birds. It is a system would aid Malthus rarely.

_Nota bene_, the day before yesterday I signed the bond for L5000, with
Constable, for relief of Robinson's house.[52] I am to be secured by
good bills.

I think this journal will suit me well. If I can coax myself into an
idea that it is purely voluntary, it may go on--_Nulla dies sine linea_.
But never a being, from my infancy upwards, hated task-work as I hate
it; and yet I have done a great deal in my day. It is not that I am idle
in my nature neither. But propose to me to do one thing, and it is
inconceivable the desire I have to do something else--not that it is
more easy or more pleasant, but just because it is escaping from an
imposed task. I cannot trace this love of contradiction to any distinct
source, but it has haunted me all my life. I could almost suppose it was
mechanical, and that the imposition of a piece of duty-labour operated
on me like the mace of a bad billiard-player, which gives an impulse to
the ball indeed, but sends it off at a tangent different from the course
designed by the player. Now, if I expend such eccentric movements on
this journal, it will be turning this wretched propensity to some
tolerable account. If I had thus employed the hours and half-hours which
I have whiled away in putting off something that must needs be done at
last, "My Conscience!" I should have had a journal with a witness