The buzz of human voices, the happy playfulness of the children, the chaste singing of the domenies fill up the animated picture.  I have sometimes passed an hour or two in witnessing their innocent amusements, without any feeling of regret for the brief sacrifice of time I had made.  I am free to confess, however, that I have returned to my tranquil home with increased delight after having witnessed the bustle of a zeenahnah assembly.  At first I pitied the apparent monotony of their lives; but this feeling has worn away by intimacy with the people, who are thus precluded from mixing generally with the world.  They are happy in their confinement; and never having felt the sweets of liberty, would not know how to use the boon if it were to be granted them.  As the bird from the nest immured in a cage is both cheerful and contented, so are these females.  They have not, it is true, many intellectual resources, but they have naturally good understandings, and having learned their duty they strive to fulfil it.  So far as I have had any opportunity of making personal observations on their general character they appear to me obedient wives, dutiful daughters, affectionate mothers, kind mistresses, sincere friends, and liberal benefactresses to the distressed poor.  These are their moral qualifications, and in their religious duties they are zealous in performing the several ordinances which they have been instructed by their parents or husbands to observe.  If there be any merit in obeying the injunctions of their Lawgiver, those whom I have known most intimately deserve praise, since ‘they are faithful in that they profess’.

To ladies accustomed from infancy to confinement this is by no means irksome; they have their employments and their amusements, and though these are not exactly to our taste, nor suited to our mode of education, they are not the less relished by those for whom they were invented.  They perhaps wonder equally at some of our modes of dissipating time, and fancy we might spend it more profitably.  Be that as it may, the Mussulmaun ladies, with whom I have been long intimate, appear to me always happy, contented, and satisfied with the seclusion to which they were born; they desire no other, and I have ceased to regret they cannot be made partakers of that freedom of intercourse with the world we deem so essential to our happiness, since their health suffers nothing from that confinement, by which they are preserved from a variety of snares and temptations; besides which, they would deem it disgraceful in the highest degree to mix indiscriminately with men who are not relations.  They are educated from infancy for retirement, and they can have no wish that the custom should be changed, which keeps them apart from the society of men who are not very nearly related to them.  Female society is unlimited, and that they enjoy without restraint.