or burying them alive with the husband's corpse. We have seen how
the first of the many such scenes which he was doomed to witness for
the next thirty years affected Carey. After remonstrances, which
the people met first by argument and then by surly threats, Carey
wrote:--"I told them I would not go, that I was determined to stay
and see the murder, and that I should certainly bear witness of it
at the tribunal of God." And when he again sought to interfere
because the two stout bamboos always fixed for the purpose of
preventing the victim's escape were pressed down on the shrieking
woman like levers, and they persisted, he wrote: "We could not bear
to see more, but left them exclaiming loudly against the murder and
full of horror at what we had seen." The remembrance of that sight
never left Carey. His naturally cheerful spirit was inflamed to
indignation all his life through, till his influence, more than that
of any other one man, at last prevailed to put out for ever the
murderous pyre. Had Lord Wellesley remained Governor-General a year
longer Carey would have succeeded in 1808, instead of having to wait
till 1829, and to know as he waited and prayed that literally every
day saw the devilish smoke ascending along the banks of the Ganges,
and the rivers and pools considered sacred by the Hindoos. Need we
wonder that when on a Sunday morning the regulation of Lord William
Bentinck prohibiting the crime reached him as he was meditating his
sermon, he sent for another to do the preaching, and taking his pen
in his hand, at once wrote the official translation, and had it
issued in the Bengali Gazette that not another day might be added to
the long black catalogue of many centuries?

On the return of the Marquis Wellesley to Calcutta from the Tipoo
war, and his own appointment to the College of Fort William, Carey
felt that his time had come to prevent the murder of the innocents