ontinuous row of sixty little
houses. These, having their backs on the hills, must look, of course, to
the centre of the plain, which is just sixty yards from the front door
of each dwelling. Every house has a small garden before it, with a
circular path, a sun-dial, and twenty-four cabbages. The buildings
themselves are so precisely alike, that one can in no manner be
distinguished from the other. Owing to the vast antiquity, the style
of architecture is somewhat odd, but it is not for that reason the less
strikingly picturesque. They are fashioned of hard-burned little bricks,
red, with black ends, so that the walls look like a chess-board upon a
great scale. The gables are turned to the front, and there are cornices,
as big as all the rest of the house, over the eaves and over the main
doors. The windows are narrow and deep, with very tiny panes and a great
deal of sash. On the roof is a vast quantity of tiles with long curly
ears. The woodwork, throughout, is of a dark hue and there is much
carving about it, with but a trifling variety of pattern for, time out
of mind, the carvers of Vondervotteimittiss have never been able to
carve more than two objects--a time-piece and a cabbage. But these they
do exceedingly well, and intersperse them, with singular ingenuity,
wherever they find room for the chisel.

The dwellings are as much alike inside as out, and the furniture is all
upon one plan. The floors are of square tiles, the chairs and tables
of black-looking wood with thin crooked legs and puppy feet. The
mantelpieces are wide and high, and have not only time-pieces and
cabbages sculptured over the front, but a real time-piece, which makes
a prodigious ticking, on the top in the middle, with a flower-pot
containing a cabbage standing on each extremity by way of outrider.
Between each cabbage and the time-piece, again, is a little China man
having a large stomach with a great round hole in it, through which is
seen the dial-plate of a watch.

The fireplaces are large and deep, with fierce crooked-looking
fire-dogs. There is constantly a rousing fire, and a huge pot over it,
full of sauer-kraut and pork, to which the good woman of the house is
always busy in attending. She is a little fat old lady, with blue eyes
and a red face, and wears a huge cap like a sugar-loaf, ornamented
with purple and yellow ribbons. Her dress is of orange-colored
linsey-woolsey, made very full behind and very short in the waist--and
inde