Page:Collection of notable things worth knowing.pdf/12

This page has been validated.

12

his head cut off, his papers are examined, every thing in his house seized, but the wife is provided for; her jewls are left her.

The harem is sacred even to that rapacious power, which has seized the master’s life only because he was rich. It may be said, that in Turkey, likewise, women are perfectly safe from an idle, curious, impertinent public, and what is called the world can never disturb the ease and quiet of a Turkish wife. Her talents, her beauty, her happiness, or misery, are equally concealed from malicious observers. Of misery, unless a Turkish woman is beyond conception unreasonable, I cannot imagine her portion can be great; for the wife, whose wretched husband earns subsistence by carrying water, or burthens, sits at home bedecked with jewels, or goes out as her fancy directs, and the fruits of his labour are appropriated to her use. In great houses, the wives of the Turks, who compose the train of a Turkish husband, are destined to be subservient to the state of the first wife, and she treats them as she pleases.

heroism and affection.

A woman in Northampton county, in the United States, having observed a rattle-snake coiled on a log near the house, she took her husband’s rifle out to shoot it, but setting the gun at the end of the log, concluded to kill it with a stick, which she effected; when reaching for the rifle,