immunity from the corruption which, they declare, exists among us. What possible value in the eyes of a woman is an outward show of respect, when her very position as a suppliant wife is in itself a humiliation? Of what avail the facility of divorce and right it gives her to remarry, when the second husband can at any time repeat the offence for which she left the first? What great matter is it for a man to be required to recognize his illegitimate son, when he has not the means to support him, and can have fifty others “legitimately,” who, if they are spared the opprobious epithet of “bastard,” are not spared from want and neglect? The social evils which exist in European lands are to be found in Turkey under different conditions and names, and the fact that they are tolerated, and even sanctioned, certainly does not extenuate them, while it may and does make them more common. For a Turk to attempt to criticise any one else in this regard is to the last degree blind and fatuous. * * * * * From the foregoing it is very easy to imagine what sort of women the Turkish ones are--merely “pleasing females” for the most part, who, barely knowing how to read and write, as a matter of fact do neither; miraculous beings those who have a little superficial smattering of education. It would not be agreeable to the men, in whose eyes they are endowed with “long hair and little brains,” for them to cultivate their minds, as it might be very inconvenient were they to become equal in this respect, or even superior to, themselves. And so, as they never read and are debarred from picking up any stray crumbs of knowledge by association with men, they grow up in a state of crass ignorance. The separation of the sexes also results in the loss of gentleness on the one hand and of high-mindedness on the other. The men grow rough as they grow older, and the women become gossips: even in old age, from never having moved in any society beyond the narrow circle of their female friends and relatives, the women retain something puerile in all their ideas and habits, are excessively curious, everything astonishes them, and they make a great deal out of every trifle; they have spiteful little tricks, too, and are inclined to look down on and despise education; they burst out laughing when any one speaks to them, and pass hours at a time over the most childish games, such as chasing each other from room to room, and snatching sugar-plums out of one another’s mouths. On the other hand, to paraphrase the French saying, they have good qualities in their defects: their natures are frank and open, easily read at a glance; they impress you as being “real persons,” as Madame de Sévigne said of them, not masques or caricatures or apes; free, natural, and, even when they are unhappy, “_all of one piece_;” and if, as it is said, one of them has only to affirm and reaffirm a thing for every one to discredit it, it only means that