DRESS OF THE OSSITINIANS. 
82 
furniture. The only light it received was through the door, 
and a round hole in the roof, which latter served as a chimney : 
a few morsels of wood and dried dung lay smoking there, in the 
midst of this wretched apartment. Some earthen vessels, and a 
broken bowl or two, were placed round it, but no seats whatever. 
In one corner of the room, however, I at last discerned, through 
the gloom, an old wooden box, close to which stood a woman ; 
but on the instant she was observed, she made her exit into 
some still darker recess than the one in which I was standing. 
If I might be allowed to form an opinion of the Ossitinian fair 
sex from this specimen, and those I had seen in the court-yard 
of General Kasibeck’s house, besides two or three I had passed 
in my walk, I should say, they have no pretensions to beauty. 
Their stature is rather squat; their visages broad-cheeked, flat¬ 
nosed, dark, and otherwise ugly excepting their eyes, and they 
are certainly their best feature. Dirt, rags, and splaw naked 
feet, might comprise the far from agreeable description, only 
there is sometimes a little difference in the fashion of the rags. 
Two or three of the women I saw, wore a sort of sheet, not the 
cleanest, by way of a veil; but they did not draw it over their 
faces. Others were enveloped in a kind of bed-gown, with long 
Georgian sleeves. The lower extremities of all of them being 
clothed in loose trowsers. The garments of the men, by adding 
the badges of a wild species of warfare to their rough materials, 
gave something of the picturesque to what, in the women, spoke 
only of poverty and wretchedness. The group at the black¬ 
smith’s was particularly fitted for the sketch of a painter; in¬ 
deed, it was altogether a curious spectacle. The man himself 
was surrounded by ten or twelve by-standers, during his em¬ 
ployment j and the noise they made is not to be described. All 
