In strange contrast to these were the Mahometan women, several of whom we noticed in the streets towards evening. Their whole face was concealed but for the tiniest eyeslits imaginable; but their insatiable bashfulness is not contented even with this, for in passing a stranger they must needs bow the head so that the fringe of the upper veil which curtains the head falls forward far enough to eclipse their last loophole of humanity! Their hands they modestly hide in two front pockets of their dress. Their exterior envelopes are sometimes green, sometimes white, sometimes of a darker hue; those whose under veil is black and outer white, looking at a little distance strikingly like nuns. Besides the two ordinary veils—that which drapes the head and that which swathes the nose, mouth, and bosom—their forehead is often covered with an additional piece not unlike the half mask worn at masquerade balls, usually of black horse-hair, with the two eyeslits above-mentioned fringed with gold. The whole form is mummied in such a way that an Englishman who had travelled through a great deal of the Ottoman dominions, but who had not visited Bosnia, could hardly be induced to believe that the figure below represented a woman of European Turkey. To find her like, one must transport oneself as far away as Egypt. Outside the limits of conservative old Bosnia, her disguise would be laughed at by the Turks themselves! [Illustration: Bosniac Mahometan Woman.] But what is still stranger is that in Bosnia should coexist the two extremes of veiling and not veiling. If the married women here veil themselves more than anywhere else, _en revanche_ unmarried girls are allowed to display their charms in a way which, to the well regulated Turk of another province when he first visits Bosnia, is quite scandalous. There is a Turkish proverb, ‘Go to Bosnia if you wish to see your betrothed!’ It is actually a fact that in this reactionary land there are such things as Mahometan love-matches; and even when the mother is allowed to select the spouse in the usual way, by inspecting, that is, the ‘stock’ in the baths, even then—so demoralized are the customs of these Mahometan Sclaves!—the young people are allowed to converse together before tying the conjugal knot. On Fridays and Mondays—days of greater liberty to all the Mahometan women—lovers may steal up to their sweethearts’ windows and whisper airy nothings to them through the lattice. This Bosnian custom is called _aschyklik_, and has been compared with the _Fensterln_ of Styria and Upper Austria.[205] Mondays and Fridays, and through a lattice—what restrictions can be more judicious?