As most of the richer Persians have more than one house in the villages, Europeans generally have no great difficulty in hiring a place to stay at. The houses are left during the winter in charge of a villager, who uses the lower rooms only, the upper ones being then uninhabitable from the intense cold. Indeed the cold is so great that we were told that one winter the animals had been dying of thirst, as the water was frozen beyond the possibility of breaking the ice, and they had not fuel enough to melt it. The whole building is much rougher than the town house, though the roofs have to be made more carefully. The villages are very small and isolated, and the winter population is quite trifling. There is in these villages a little arable land, but the people depend chiefly on root-crops, nuts, and dried fruit for their winter stores, and on the produce of the sheep and goats. The animals are tended in summer by the children. The little boys spend most of their time up the walnut trees, throwing down leaves for them to eat, while the little ragged shepherdesses carry a twelve-foot staff for whacking the walnut trees, when they do not climb them in the same way as their brothers. Those who go to the villages in the summer take with them everything they need in the way of carpets, furniture, and cooking utensils, also all groceries, and even wheat and charcoal; for the commonest things of this kind are often absolutely unprocurable. A rich Persian has stores frequently sent to him from Yezd during his stay. Even in Yezd some necessary store or other is almost always running short, so that something is generally at famine prices. This, of course, is due to the great isolation of the town. But in the villages it is intensified. Sometimes there will be no meat, at another time hardly any bread, and some years ago we found it almost impossible to procure milk, and were told by our Persian friends that they had the same difficulty. This eighteen-hour journey, with all the paraphernalia of the home, is the average Yezdi’s only experience of foreign travel; and for this reason I have thought it necessary to give some account of what he sees and finds.