[ 163 ] 
in, into that which his horses and cattle inhabit ; a© 
these are stabled (at least for the night) both summer 
and winter, you will easily believe that this fashion 
does not contribute much to neatness or cleanliness. 
And indeed as the French houses are all collected 
in villages, and those villages more irregularly built 
than you can well conceive, and the streets ex¬ 
tremely narrow and encumbered with the dung of 
their cattle—their villages are in general very dir» 
ty ; to this however there are some exceptions, par¬ 
ticularly in Flanders, and in the new built villages. 
Where slate is to be got, the houses are covered with 
it; where it is not, which is commonly the case^ 
they are thatched with rushes. The thatch is very 
thick, and extremely well laid, and would certainly 
make the best of roofs, were it not for the melan¬ 
choly accidents by lire that it occasions 5 these are 
very frequent, and when they do happen it is seh- 
dom that a single house in a village escapes. I 
have seen in Franche-Comte a large extent of coun¬ 
try, where the houses were covered with stones 
which are thin and iiat, but not so thin as not to 
form a very heavy roof, when laid as these were in 
the manner of tile, and considering that the walls of 
the houses were made of the same small stone, I 
think it required some degree of courage to live in 
such shackling quarries. In the Alps, the houses 
are covered with shingles, put together without 
nails, and confined by a pole laid across every se¬ 
cond or third layer, and kept down by fiat stones. 
Thro’ ail that i saw of Piedmont, and the Pays de 
