But let us examine one of these homesteads where the house-fathers and house-mothers still preside—and the description of the one we saw first will serve for all. In order to find our way to the dwelling-house we had to enter by a yard, enclosed by a rough wooden fence, called the ‘_plot_.’ Within this, to the right, was the ‘_Kucica_’ or common cottage, and then followed in order the pig-sty, the barn, the hay-loft and cart-shed, the round conical-peaked hay-stack, and another store-house. This homestead square reminded one of old English, Norse,[160] and Franconian farms; and we found the dwelling-houses trisected into a sleeping-room, a kitchen, and a store-room, like the homesteads of Scandinavian backwoods. The centre room of the three is the kitchen, in one corner of which is a flat stone hearth, a small paved square for cooking on, such as is universal in Illyria. In the other corner there was a stove of a kind which also occurs throughout all these lands; it was of baked clay, square below, and bell-shaped above, bayed all over with circular pigeon-holes, which in Bosnia, where still ruder forms of this stove occur, are actually pots embedded into the clay; though whether this practice arose from a scientific desire to gain a greater heating surface, or whether for the celebration of certain culinary mysteries, or whether for ornament, or, what is more probable, by reason of some exigencies of structure—we were never able to determine. Before the kitchen was a kind of fore-hall, as in a Northern cottage; but, in this warm climate, open to the air, and forming a verandah, which in the larger houses runs along the upper storey, where the family live. We peeped into the dormitory, which was the largest room of the three, and saw beds ranged round the room, and a picture of a saint suspended from the wall. The house itself was of wood, and showed in parts the rich time-stains of an Alpine chalet. Yet in places one might notice the Sclavonic tendency towards whitewash and mud plaster. The roof was double; first a shingling of short wooden planks, and above that a substantial thatch. [Illustration: Stupa]