el places, are ready sufferers: "There," says
the _Mahabharata_, "where women are treated with respect, the very gods
are said to be filled with joy. Women deserve to be honoured. Serve ye
them. Bend your will before them. By honouring women ye are sure to
attain to the fruition of all things." And the rash teachers of our
youth would have persuaded us that this generous lesson was first learnt
in Teutonic forests!

Nothing but extreme lowliness can well reply, or would probably be
suffered to reply, to this Hindu profession of reverence. Accordingly
the woman so honoured makes an offering of cakes and oil to the souls of
her mother-in-law, grandmother-in-law, and great-grandmother-in-law, in
gratitude for their giving her a good husband. And to go back for a
moment to Ruskin's contrast of the two races, it was assuredly under the
stress of some too rash reasoning that he judged the lovely art of the
East as a ministrant to superstition, cruelty, and pleasure, whether
wrought upon the temple, the sword, or the girdle. The innocent art of
innocent Hindu women for centuries decked their most modest heads, their
dedicated and sequestered beauty, their child-loving breasts, and
consecrated chambers.

TWO BURDENS

One is on the breast and clings there with arms, and one on the back and
clings with thongs. The burden of the back bows the body, turns the face
from the sky, narrows the lungs and flattens the foot; takes away the
flight and the dance from the gait of man, and ties him towards the
earth--not only in the way of nature, by means of his arched feet, but by
a heavy lien upon his shoulders and his brows. It is the fardel that
makes this vital figure to be subject visibly, and at several points, to
that law of gravitation which, in a state of liberty, it uses to
withstand, to countervail, to leap from, to walk with, making the
universal tether elastic. Bend in two this supple spine that can lift
itself, like a snake erect, with something better than mere balance--with
life and the active will; bend the back, and at once gravitation takes
hold of the loins and grasps the knees, and pulls upon the shoulders, and
the neck feels the weight of an abject head.

Wherever women are told off to hard open-air labour, we shall find among
them a lower class of their own kind--poorer where all are poor, and
straining at their task where all are labouring--who walk the dust with
burdens on their backs. Loads