On the arrival of a male visiter, should any of the ladies be wandering amid the bright blossoms in which they so much delight, the alarm is instantly given; and they shuffle away to their pretty prison-room as fast as their heelless slippers will enable them to move. Perhaps the guest may be a suitor; but if so, the case is not altered one iota. The lady still runs away, without any attempt to indulge her curiosity by a peep at her destined lord; while the gentleman, on his side, takes his seat in the great saloon, and, after smoking a score of pipes, and making a thousand _teminas_ to the father or brother of his bride elect, mounts his horse, or resumes his place in his caïque, and departs; in full possession of all the particulars of the lady’s property; and in contented ignorance of all that relates to her character or person. “Will you take this woman, whether she be halt, or deaf, or humped, or blind?” asks the priest on the bridal day, as the happy bridegroom stands opposite to a mummy-like mass of gold threads and cachemire, with his own monstrous calpac tricked out in the same glittering finery, until he looks like a male Danaë; and with true stolid Armenian philosophy he answers: “Even so I will take her.” The European young lady associates the idea of marriage with tenderness, and indulgence, and domestic enjoyment; emancipation from maternal authority, and comparative personal liberty. She smiles in the stillness of her own spirit at the fair visions of happiness that rise before her; and there is no bitterness in the tears with which she quits the home of her infancy. But the Armenian maiden only exchanges one tyranny for another—she is transported to the home of a stranger, whom a priest has told her that she is to love, and whom she has never seen—beneath the roof-tree of a man whom, henceforward, she is bound to honour, though her heart may loathe the mockery. To obey is her least difficult duty, for she has been reared in obedience; but yet she cannot escape the pang of feeling how much more easy was that blind submission to another’s will, when it was enforced by the mother who had laid her to sleep upon her bosom in her infancy, and on whose knee she had sported in her girlhood; than when she is suddenly called upon to bow meekly beneath the dictation of a new and strange task-mistress, knit to her by no tie, save that new and unaccustomed link which has just been riveted by the church; and by which she has become the slave not only of her husband, but of his parents also. Has she fortune, beauty, rank, they avail her nothing; for two long years she must not speak before her step-mother, save to reply to some question that may be put to her; and, should she herself become a parent, she has yet a sterner and a more difficult task to learn; for she cannot even fondle her infant before witnesses; but must fly and hide herself in her own chamber when she would indulge the outpourings of maternal love.