In a few days, the bridal tent is taken down, and the husband removes to his accustomed dwelling. During the two first years, the wife is not allowed to visit her parents, unless upon some great emergency; and then she must sit down outside of their hut, without presuming to enter it. At the end of that period, she goes to see them, and is loaded with presents. Among one tribe of the Calmucks, called Soongas, marriages are celebrated on horseback. The bride, mounted on a fleet horse, gallops off at full speed; the lover pursues; and if he overtakes her, she is carried to his hut, and becomes his wife without further ceremony, except an entertainment to friends. If the damsel be disinclined to the match, the lover seldom succeeds in overtaking her before they arrive at the destined goal. The Calmucks are, almost without exception, remarkably expert riders. Even matrons of eighty years old will gallop twenty miles without stopping, and children pursue the fleet-footed antelopes half a day, upon their unshod horses. If men think they have sufficient cause for jealousy, they sometimes put their wives to death with their own hands; but if a woman should, in a sudden fit of desperation, kill her husband, her nose and ears would be cut off, and she would be sold for a slave. They have very definite laws concerning marriages and marriage portions; and certain punishments are appointed for those who attempt to break off a match. The Buraits, on the frontiers of China, live in a manner very similar to the other Tartars. They have in their huts images of wood, felt, or tin, intended to represent good and evil spirits. The women are not permitted to approach these images, or even to pass before them. Polygamy is lawful among this tribe; and they take from one wife to five, according to their means of support. A girl costs from five head of cattle to one hundred; and the wealthy sometimes give five hundred. The dowry given with the bride generally amounts to about one-fourth of the price paid for her. A new tent is built for a wedding. Festivities are kept up for five days, with singing, dancing, wrestling, and horse-racing, and each day a horse is killed, to feast relations and friends. Owing to the general contempt in which women are held, boys treat their fathers with much more respect than their mothers. When a woman dies, cooking utensils, a pipe, and a quantity of tobacco are buried with her, for her use in another world, as bows and arrows are always buried with the men.