To send forth a young lady in her eighteenth or twentieth year, in all the superabundant energy of youth, supported upon a stick, and thus muffled up, in the sole view that the assumption of the characteristics of advanced life may spare her certain glances, may be justly deemed the _ne plus ultra_ of tyranny and hypocrisy. These erroneous notions of morality are to be met with, more or less, everywhere in the East; but nowhere does one find such striking examples of Oriental exaggeration as in that seat of ancient Islamite civilization, Bokhara. In Constantinople, as well as other cities of Turkey, there are certain Seir-yeri (promenades), where ladies appear in public. In Teheran, Ispahan, and Shiraz, it is the custom for the Hanims, _en grande toilette_, and mounted on magnificent horses, to make excursions to the places of pilgrimage situate in the environs of those cities. The tomb of the Said is the place of rendezvous, and instead of prayers, reciprocal declarations of love are not seldom made. In Bokhara, on the contrary, there is not a shadow of all this. Never have I seen there a man in the company of his wife. The husband slinks away from his other half, or third, or fourth, as the case may be; and it is a notorious fact, that when the wives of the Ameer pass by any place, all men are expected to beat a hasty retreat. Under such circumstances it is easy to see how society must constitute itself, and what shapes it must assume. Where the two sexes are so separated, it can never put on an appearance of gladness and geniality; all becomes compulsion and hypocrisy; every genuine sentiment is crushed by these unnatural laws which are imposed as God's ordinances, and as such expected to be observed with the strictest obedience.