Everywhere we must make our way, amidst indescribable difficulties, through almost impassable mud and clay. The people crowded together in miserable hamlets, inhabit wretched homesteads, crudely and bunglingly put together of undressed timber, or of twigs wattled together and covered with clays or thatched with straw or reeds, consisting seldom of more than one room, which shelters alike man, woman, child, man servant, maid servant, fowl and beast, a commingling of sex and species not altogether conducive to modesty or morality. The floor, for the main part is composed of the hard bare ground, or at best is covered with dry leaves or with filthy rushes. Nowhere a window, nowhere a chimney, the smoke of the ill-fed, cheerless fire escaping through a hole in the roof. Straw pellets constitute the bed, and a round log serves the place of bolster and pillow, one platter of treen stands in the center of the table--if "table" it might be called--from which man, woman and child, master and servant, maid and mistress, eat with spoons of wood. Fingers serve the place of knives and forks, and a wooden trencher makes the round to quench the thirst. Everywhere we meet with men with squalid beards, and women with hair unkempt and matted with filth, and both, clothed in garments of untanned skin, or, at best, of leather or hair cloth, that are not changed till they drop in pieces of themselves, a loathsome mass of vermin, stench and rags. No attempt at drainage; the putrefying slops and garbage and rubbish are unceremoniously thrown out of the door.