hters they give in marriage to Oude families, are
destroyed in Oude without fear or concealment; while the daughters
they receive in marriage, from Oude families, are sent over the
border into Oude, when near their confinement, on the pretence of
visiting their relations. If they give birth to boys, they bring them
back with them into your districts; but if they give birth to girls,
they are destroyed in the same manner, and no questions are ever
asked about them." "Do you ever eat or drink with Rajpoot parents who
destroy their female infants?"--"Never, sir! we are Brahmins, but we
can take water in a brass vessel from the hands of a Rajpoot, and we
do so when his family is unstained with this crime; but nothing would
ever tempt us to drink water from the hands of one who permitted his
daughters to be murdered." "Do you ever eat with the village or
family priest who has given absolution to parents who have permitted
their daughters to be murdered, by eating in the room where the
murder has been perpetrated?"--"Never, sir; we abhor him as a
participator in the crime; and nothing would ever induce one of us to
eat or associate with him: he takes all the sin upon his own head by
doing so, and is considered by us as an outcast from the tribe, and
accursed! It is they who keep up this fearful usage. Tigers and
wolves cherish their offspring, and are better than these Rajpoots,
who out of family or clan pride, destroy theirs. As soon as their
wives give birth to sons, they fire off guns, give largely in
charity, make offerings to shrines, and rejoice in all manner of
ways; but when they give birth to poor girls, they bury them alive
without pity, and a dead silence prevails in the house; it is no
wonder, sir, that you say that the curse of God is upon the land in
which such sins prevail!"

The quality of testimony, no doubt, like that of every other
commodity, deteriorates under a system, which renders the good of no
more value in exchange than the bad. The formality of our Courts
here, as everywhere else, tends to impair, more or less, the quality
of what they receive. The simplicity of Courts, composed of little
village communities and elders, tends, on the contrary, to improve
the quality of the testimony they get; and in India, it is found to
be best in the isolated hamlets of hills and forests, where men may
be made to do almost anything rather than _tell a lie_. A Marhatta
pandit, in the valley of the Nerbudda, once t