The majority of the people reside in villages. These are largely of the same pattern, and consist of a large public square, around which are grouped without much attention to regular streets, a number of one-story adobe (sun-dried) brick houses. The individual houses are built around the four sides of smaller squares called _placitas_. The rooms of the house open on this _placita_; also the stable. The buildings are usually one story high, with dirt floors and flat dirt roofs. During the rainy season the roofs leak badly. Among the older houses there are but few that have glass windows. A few others have mica windows. The larger number have an open lattice work, protected in stormy weather by a tight board shutter. The roof is made of poles, covered first with grass, then two feet of dirt, and is used for various family purposes. (2 Kings 19: 26; Acts 10: 9.) The floor is the native earth, beaten hard, then covered with a layer of adobe clay. The fire-place is in a corner, and on three sides of the room a raised bench of clay forms a seat, and also a shelf for piling away the bed blankets during the day. Many of the houses, especially of the poorer classes, are without chair, bedstead, or table. Many of the rooms are neatly whitewashed with a white clay found in that region, and the walls hung with crucifixes, mirrors, and lithograph pictures of saints. There is one large opening, or gate, into the _placita_, admitting alike the family, donkeys, goats and sheep. The streets are narrow, irregular, and without sidewalks. The roads, worn by the travel of centuries, are lower than the adjacent country, and during a rainy season filled with muddy water. Wagons are scarce, as also are the native carts, some of them with a primitive wheel, constructed from a solid section of a tree. The Mexican’s chief friend is the donkey, and in the streets of the villages are to be seen droves of them loaded with hay, fire-wood, vegetables, crates of fruit, melons, merchandise, casks of whisky, trunks, lumber, etc. It is no uncommon thing to see a drove, each with a heavy stick of timber projecting into the air beyond his head, and the other end dragging on the ground behind him. In the fields are occasional lodges (Isaiah 1: 8) as a shelter while watching the vineyard, melon or grain fields. Roads for foot-passengers and pack-animals run through the grain and corn fields (Mark 2: 23; Matthew 13: 4) and along the unfenced wayside were the graves of the former inhabitants, or the points where the pall-bearers rested in bearing the body to the grave, marked with a rude board cross and pile of stones (Joshua 7: 26; 2 Samuel 18: 17). The women carry water in great jars on their heads or shoulders (Gen. 24: 46). They plow like the ancients with a crooked stick fastened to the horns of the oxen—several yoke of oxen following one another (1 Kings 19: 19).