As among eastern nations, the bridegroom usually did not see his wife before marriage. When the preliminaries had been arranged and settled by third parties, the bridegroom sent a present of sweetmeats and a whip to his bride elect, who always spent the night before the marriage ceremony at the house of the bridegroom's parents. On the day of the marriage he put into one of his boots sweetmeats or a trinket, into the other a whip; the newly wedded wife took off the boots, and to remove first that which contained the trinket was considered the omen of a happy life for the woman. "But if she light on the boot with a whip in it, she is reckoned among the unfortunate and gets a bride-lash for her pains, which is but the earnest penny of her future entertainment." There were also other little passes during the complex ceremony, the winning of any indicating the mastery during wedded life. Such was the woman's lot in the seventeenth century, but much was done to better it before Peter the Great introduced western freedom. Collins wrote in 1674:-- "The Russian discipline to their wives is very rigid and severe, more inhuman in times past than at present. Yet three years ago a Moscow merchant beat his wife as long as he was able, with a whip two inches round, and then caused her to put on a smock dript in brandy, to which he set fire, and so the poor creature perished miserably in flames. Yet none prosecuted her death, for there is no law against killing a woman, or slave, if it happens on correction. Some of these beasts will tie up their wives by the hair of the head and whip them stark naked. Now parents make better matches for their daughters, obliging husbands to contract to use them kindly, without whipping, striking or kicking them." Even Peter's code was cruel: it was during his reign that Le Bruyn saw a woman executed in Moscow by being buried alive; covered up to her neck in the dank black soil she lived but two days, whereas, on the same authority, there were others who lingered ten or more. In Russia, as in countries further west, the crime of petty treason, the murder of a husband, was considered almost as heinous as high treason, and punished accordingly. Kept closely confined to a small apartment, living almost always in heated rooms the Russian ladies had fair complexions; "white cream-and-snow tinged with the faint hue of the inside of a camellia" one poet describes it. Others are not so generous; Turberville writes: "To buy her painted colours, doth allowe his wife a fee Wherewith she deckes herselfe, and dyes her tawny skin; She prankes and paints her smoakie face, Browe, lippe, cheeke and chinne."