People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1895 — PREFERRED TO DIE. [ARTICLE]

PREFERRED TO DIE.

Sad Story of One Girl Who Died Rather than Wed a Brutal Cripple. A, little girl in India went to the missionary school. She was a pretty, clever little thing, and so attracted the teacher that she ventured to visit her in her home. She found the child overshadowed by the horror of hep approaching marriage. As a baby she had been betrothed, but, according to custom, she lived in her father’s house till she was 12; then she was taken from her own people and given over to her husband, a hideous little man, deformed, his face scarred with disease, of bad character, and notoriously given to drink. The child was terrified of him and he derived a ghoullike pleasure from her terror —used to jump at her in the dark, make faces at her, and told her that once really married to him and in his home he and his old mother would make short work of her beauty with a red-hot. fork, so that it would soon be difficult to choose between their two faces. At last the fatal day arrived. The missionary’s heart ached for the little friend she was unable to help, and as she went about her work she prayed, says a writer in Temple Bar, that God might save His hapless creature. At noon the child’s mother burst into the house. “Nahomi is dead!” she cried. The two women hurried to her home. She had washed her little person and her Imir, had braided it neatly, had put on her bridal gown, had decorated het self with flowers and jewelry, and then had gone quietly into the yard behind the house, where a datura tree hung its great white trumpets against the blue sky, dug up and ate a little of its poisonous root, and then crept back into her home, where she now lay, cold, stark —free.