Harvesting is also done by the women. The season between June and August of each year is therefore peculiarly severe upon them. Their domestic duties must be finished soon after sunrise; then, with their sickles, they start out from the villages to the harvest fields, a mile or two distant. One may often see the baby in its tiny cradle flung across the shoulder of the mother on her way to the day's labor. She puts the cradle down in the shade in view of the reapers, and performs her daily task in the broiling sun. While the women reap, the men gather the bundles and bind them for the threshing floor. At the close of the day, homeward they trudge, tired and soiled by the day's work; the mothers carrying their little ones back to their homes, where the domestic duties of evening are to be performed before comes the opportunity for rest. When grain harvest is over, the vineyards are to be gleaned, and the women are to do most of the work of picking the ripe, luscious branches of grapes, filling the huge baskets and carrying them to the place where the fruit is to be spread out to be dried. In fifteen or twenty days the grapes have become raisins, and they are again taken up and piled away, ready for the market. Wine and molasses are also made from grapes, the work being largely the task of the women. Just as Persia has its Ruths gleaning in the fields, so also Rebekah with her water pot may be seen daily. In lieu of modern buckets, the Persians are content to have their women take large earthen jars, morning and night, to the public wells, springs, or streams outside the village. There the women fill their pots, lift them first to the hips, then to the back or shoulder, and trudge home with their burden, chatting happily as they go, and becoming straight and strong by the muscular exercise involved. Eight or ten trips may be necessary before each woman has filled all her jars, and so procured the necessary amount of water for the daily use. There is a saying in Persia: "When cousins marry they are never happy." And yet, as a rule, marriages are within the religious sects. If a Christian--Christians in Persia are of the ancient Nestorian faith--should marry a Mohammedan woman, he would be compelled to renounce his religion for the Mohammedan, as the ruling class would not allow it to be otherwise. Christian parents, on the other hand, would not give their consent to the union of their daughter with a worshipper of Islam. Occasionally, however, attractive Nestorian girls are captured and carried off, and compelled to accept the Mohammedan religion, and married to a Persian or a Turk. Generally, girls marry within their own villages, since each neighborhood is, as a rule, a community uninfluenced and unvisited by people from other communities. Persia is no exception to the ordinary Oriental rule, that marriage contracts are made by the parents--the children accepting with unquestioning obedience the conditions that have been prepared for them.