In each district it is the custom to hold a military assembly every month. The colonel commanding this district, from whom I have received a world of courtesy, held his assembly here, having a gathering of some two hundred pikemen and arquebusiers. He let them engage in a sham fight, and it seemed to me they were, for peasants, very expert; but his principal duty is to instruct them in military formation and discipline. The people here are divided into the French and Spanish factions, and weighty questions with regard to this matter were constantly arising; moreover they make public profession of their party. In these parts the men and women of our party wear bunches of flowers, and their caps and their locks of hair down over the right ear, while those who favour the Spaniards wear them on the left. The peasants and their wives all go clad like gentle-folk. You never see a woman who does not wear white shoes, fine-thread stockings, and a coloured sarcenet apron. They dance and cut capers and twirl about marvellously well. In this country when they talk of the prince they mean the Council of one hundred and twenty[52]. The colonel aforesaid could not get married without leave of this “prince,” and he only gained permission with great difficulty, because the authorities were loth that he should make friends or connections in the country; moreover, he cannot buy any property. No soldier can leave the country without leave. In the mountainous parts are many people who beg for money, and out of what they gather thus they buy their arms. On the Wednesday I went to the bath and remained there more than an hour. I sweated a little, bathing my head at the same time, and I saw how handy the German fashion was in winter time for warming clothes and other things at the stoves they use, for there the bathman, having put a little coal into a chafing dish, the lid of which was raised by a brick inserted so as to admit air to ventilate the fire, managed to dry the bath clothes expeditiously and well, much more conveniently than at a fire like ours here, which is made in one of our basins. Here they call the girls and boys children till they are ripe for marriage. The boys are always lads till their beards are grown.