Was it any wonder that in consequence of this the people of Saraceni had become in time the most idle of men? He is a fool who sows where he cannot reap, or where he does not know whether he will be able to reap or not. The Fatza was a sandy spot; the corn grew a few inches high and the maize a yard; on Rîpoasa one could not grow blackberries even, for at the bottom the water spoilt the fruit. Where there is no hope of reward there is no incentive to work. Whoever works wants to earn, but the people of Saraceni had given up all thoughts of gain, and therefore no one felt inspired to work. Those who could afford it passed their time lying out of doors; those who could not, spent their day working in the neighbouring villages. When the winter came life was hard and bitter. But whoever has got used to the bad does not think of better things; the people of Saraceni appeared to think that things could not be better than they were. Fish in the water, birds in the air, moles in the ground, and the people of Saraceni in poverty! Saraceni? One can imagine what a village like Saraceni must have been; here a house, there a house--all alike. Hedges were superfluous, seeing there was nothing to enclose; the street was the whole village. It would have been absurd to put a chimney on the house--the smoke found its way out through the roof. There would have been no sense in putting plaster on the walls either, as that dropped off in time. Some of the buildings were made of bits of wood knocked together, a roof of straw mixed with hay, an oven of clay, an old-fashioned veranda outside, a bed with four posts built into the ground, a door made out of three boards held together by two stakes placed crosswise--quickly made and well made--whoever was not pleased with it, let him make something he liked better. At the top of the village, that is to say on the highest point, was a sort of building which the Saracenese called the "church." It was a heap of old tree trunks piled one on the top of the other in the form of walls. In the old days--when, one does not know--these kind of walls were open to the sky; later, one does not know when, the walls had been made to converge in one place, to support what was supposed to do duty for a tower. This--owing to the fact that the supports of the facade had perished through the buffeting of a very strong wind--had fallen towards the patient earth, dragging the entire structure after it. And there it had remained ever since, for the church counted for little in Saraceni; it was superfluous.