ngrained with dirt, their heads encrusted with sores and
filth, their eyes inflamed and uncleansed, their garments smelling, and
one and all looking thoroughly ill and wretched. It is the rarest thing
to see a healthy-looking baby.

As I have sat amongst them and talked with them, I have tried to reason
with them and point out the advantages of cleanliness and industry; all
admit that I am right and that our habits are better than theirs, yet
none have the heart or the energy or the character to break away from
their customs and their innate laziness and to rise up and be women.

Yet one can hardly wonder at their condition, what chances have they
had? Married at ten or eleven, untrained and untaught, many of them not
knowing how to hold a needle, or make the simplest garment; still in
their teens with two or three children to burden them, whom they long to
see big enough to turn out into the streets and play as they did before
them. Their only interest in life, each other's family brawls and
scandals; their health undermined by close confinement and want of
exercise, is it a wonder that they sink into a state of callousness and
indifference about everything?

I have seen a bright-spirited, energetic, laughing, romping girl of
eleven, turned in one year into a miserable, lazy, dull, inert woman
with her beauty and health gone, and looking nearer thirty than
thirteen. One often does not wonder at such a condition of things,
rather does one wonder when the reverse prevails, and one is able to
realize their possibilities in spite of all their drawbacks. I know of
women, though they are but very few, equally poor and unfavored as those
I have described, who can be found sitting in their own little rooms,
their younger children with them, holding themselves aloof from the
usual gossip, their rooms swept, themselves clean and tidy, their
babies, though not ideal, comparing favorably with the others; their one
apparent trouble, the elder children whom they do not know how to train
and whom they cannot keep out of the streets; unless indeed there chance
to be a mission school in the near neighborhood.

The same state of things pervades all classes of society, though in the
middle and upper classes the Moslems are usually very cleanly both in
their persons and in their homes, but the majority of the women are in
the same low degraded moral state. Life in the harems is spent in
smoking and idle gossip, and things far worse; th