When females are not sold, but remain at home, and are married, they reside in huts distinct from their husbands, and bring up a brood of children in no respects superior to themselves. Their whole energies are exerted to stimulate the predatory habits of their husbands, and their greatest gratification is in the plunder they are able to bring home. They seem to have no ties of kindred, no domestic affections, no family attachments; the daughter, if she is found to have any personal attractions, is educated solely on the speculation of selling her to advantage, and she frequently demands it from her parents as a right to which she is entitled. From this cause it is that all kindly feelings are obliterated, all love for others extinguished, and all passion is centred in self. Christian missionaries early penetrated into this region, and converted the people to their faith, and subsequently the followers of Mahomet entered it, and divided them between the Koran and the Gospel; but they now seem to have little knowledge of either. A nominal Moslem parent brings up her daughter in the seeming profession of that faith, that it may recommend her to her future master at Constantinople; a nominal Christian educates her child in no religion at all, that there may be no impediment to her conforming to any other; thus her natural passions are freed from all the restraints that religion would impose on them. From these causes it is, that there is a certain ferocity and irreclaimable wildness observable in a Circassian beauty. She gratifies the sensuality, but never secures the esteem, of him to whom she is afterwards consigned. She is an object of desire, but never of regard, and always excites more fear than love. When a vessel arrives on the coast, it is always for the purpose of traffic in slaves; and all the girls, who have been waiting its approach with longing eyes, prepare themselves to be sold to the best advantage, and their hearts bound with the bright prospect which they are taught to believe lies before them. The splendour of the harem is contrasted with their own miserable huts; the rich stuffs in which they are to be clothed, with their homely, coarse, and squalid garments; the generous viands on which they are to be fed, with the meagre of their scanty diet. They have no ties to attach them to their native land, or dim the bright prospect that awaits them in another. They look upon their sale to a foreign merchant to be the foundation of their future fortune, and their entrance into a foreign ship their first step to a life of pleasure and enjoyment; nor are they disappointed even in the outset.