The married women wear on their heads a large thin Turkish muslin handkerchief, the ends of which hang down behind, and over this a white veil, without which it is a shame for them to be seen. When they go out to walk they wear a large coat made of a very thin kind of woollen stuff, very white, which they spin and weave themselves ; this is thrown over the head, and hangs down almost to the ancles. The few seen walking in towns are generally thus habited. The hair is plaited in innumerable small braids, which fall down the back, and usually descend below the girdle ; for the greater number of them have a profusion of very long hair. They dye it of a deep chesnut, which, if the operation be well performed, is a beautiful colour. The married women paint their faces both white and red, and pencil their eyebrows and eyelashes ; but as this is done with bad materials and bad taste (the ground-work, moreover, being seldom pretty), they mar rather than mend, or improve their features. The privilege of painting the face is not allowed to the girls, who, however, participate in that of staining the hair and nails, both of which they dye of the same colour.
The Tatar women spin and weave all their own linen and that of their husbands, using not the wheel but the distaff. The Murzas' ladies sometimes spin the silk of the country, which (though coarse and rough), is a much more costly material, as a shift of it will cost about fifty rubles. Their linen is, for the most part, soft in its texture, and open, though not very fine. The summer dresses of the men (I mean of the peasants), are entirely of white linen or calico, in which they look very neat and clean ; but the women, generally speaking, are not so; and few, ifany ofthem, escape the itch, which, as well as all scorbutic disorders, seems to be hereditary, and exists here with a virulence of which I had no idea, the hands, feet, and ancles being often covered with one entire sore. They never wear stockings, but generally two pairs of shoes or slippers, the inner ones being made without stiff soles, and the upper assumed when they go out of the house. Besides these, they wear large high wooden clogs when the weather is dirty. Their slippers are very expensive when embroidered with silver thread ; some which I have seen, were so finely worked as to cost twenty-five rubles the pair. Their gowns, when intended to be handsome, are lined throughout the skirt, and covered entirely over the body with some sort of fur, which reaches down the sleeves to the elbow.
The bottom of their trowsers is generally made of some fine Turkish chintz. They are very fond of shewy colours and gilding, in their dress as well as in the decorations of their apartments ; but a Tatar woman, in all her brocade, is a most ungraceful and stiff-looking figure. The peasants are very swarthy in their complexions ; and though the Murza ladies are fair, being never exposed to the heat of the sun, yet personal beauty is rare amongst them.
The Tatar women suckle their children from two to three years, and think us barbarous for weaning ours so early. For the first halfyear they are seldom carried in the arms, but are commonly laid on their backs in a kind of cradle, in which they are bound so as not to roll out. To the top of this, immediately over their heads, are attached coloured beads, bits of glass, or money, in order to attract their notice. This, to an English mother, appears a most promising plan formaking the infants cross-eyed, but it rarely happens that they are so. A Tatar child is swathed from head to foot with no other clothes than a few rags for the first two or three months, but after that it is habited in the same stiff and formal manner as the mother ; and its dress, the ugliness of its features, and, more than all, the scorbutic humours which almost invariably cover it from a very short time after its birth, make it, of all the infants I ever saw, the most disgusting and uninteresting. Rarely indeed is one seen which we may venture to take in our arms*.