At the turn of the winding track, bordered by the paddy-fields or acres of golden barley, oats and tobacco, lies a village. It is but a cluster of some dozen straw-thatched hovels, dirty and unprepossessing, but infinitely quaint and picturesque. The walls of the houses are crumbling and stayed up with beams and massive timbers; the latticed windows are papered, the doorways low. A hole in the wall serves the purposes of a chimney; a dog is sleeping in the porch; a pig squeaks, secured with a cord through the ears to a peg in the wall. Cocks and hens are anywhere and everywhere, the family latrine—an open trough, foul and nauseous, used without disgust by all members of the family save the older women-folk, stands upon the verandah. Somewhere, near the outer limits of the small settlement, an erection of poles and straw matting distinguishes the village cesspool, the contents of which are spread over the fields in the proper season. A glimpse into a house, as one rides through the village shows a man combing his long hair, a woman beating her husband’s clothes or ironing with a bowl heated with charcoal; many naked children, the progeny of child-wives, scarce out of their teens. For the moment the village seems devoid of life. As the clatter of the cavalcade resounds, a child, feeding itself from a basin of rice, emerges from a window; a man tumbles to his feet yawning noisily. Women, with infants hanging at their breasts or bearing children strapped to their backs in dirty clothes, the usual naked band of well-developed breast and unwashed back showing, crowd into the streets. All eye the newcomers with indifferent curiosity, until we wish them a plenteous rain—“May the rain come soon, good people.” Then they bend their heads respectfully at the salutation, and instantly become bright and smiling. Winsome kiddies, muddy and naked, offer us flowers, and bowls of water from the streams upon which their elders have settled. [Illustration: COUNTRY CARTS] As the road threaded through the mountains, long valleys, widely and richly cultivated, the yellow lustre of the golden crops blazing in the sunlight, lay below. Granite peaks towered upwards, their rugged faces scored by time and tempest, their ragged outlines screened with firs and birch. The still air was laden with the aromatic scent of the pine-woods; the sky was clear and blue. In the distance, snow-white clouds hung in diaphanous festoons about a curve in the mountains. The rough contour broke where the heights were bleakest and most barren. A twist in the broad valley which our road traversed limited the prospect, but the direction lay beneath the shadows of those distant peaks, and the perspective already compensated for the precipitous climb.