covered with various exceedingly ingenious devices for the convenient
reception and hospitable entertainment of soot, supposed by the innocent
and deluded proprietor to be "meant for ornament." Its gable roof slopes
at an acute angle, and terminates in an interesting and romantic manner,
at each extremity, in a tooth-pick. Its walls are very precisely and
prettily plastered; and it is rendered quite complete by the addition of
two neat little bow windows, supported on neat little mahogany brackets,
full of neat little squares of red and yellow glass. Its door is
approached under a neat little veranda, "uncommon green," and is flanked
on each side by a neat little round table, with all its legs of
different lengths, and by a variety of neat little wooden chairs, all
very peculiarly uncomfortable, and amazingly full of earwigs: the whole
being surrounded by a garden full of flints, burnt bricks and cinders,
with some water in the middle, and a fountain in the middle of it,
which won't play; accompanied by some goldfish, which won't swim; and
by two or three ducks, which will splash. Now, I am excessively sorry to
inform the members of any respectable English family, who are making
themselves uncomfortable in one of these ingenious conceptions, under
the idea that they are living in a Swiss cottage, that they labor under
a melancholy deception; and shall now proceed to investigate the
peculiarities of the real building.

40. The life of a Swiss peasant is divided into two periods; that in
which he is watching his cattle at their summer pasture on the high
Alps,[5] and that in which he seeks shelter from the violence of the
winter storms in the most retired parts of the low valleys. During the
first period, he requires only occasional shelter from storms of
excessive violence; during the latter, a sufficient protection from
continued inclement weather. The Alpine or summer cottage, therefore, is
a rude log hut, formed of unsquared pine trunks, notched into each other