being no property among them, every man may freely enter into any house
whatsoever. At every ten years' end they shift their houses by lots.
They cultivate their gardens with great care, so that they have both
vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers in them; and all is so well ordered and
so finely kept that I never saw gardens anywhere that were both so
fruitful and so beautiful as theirs. And this humour of ordering their
gardens so well is not only kept up by the pleasure they find in it, but
also by an emulation between the inhabitants of the several streets, who
vie with each other. And there is, indeed, nothing belonging to the
whole town that is both more useful and more pleasant. So that he who
founded the town seems to have taken care of nothing more than of their
gardens; for they say the whole scheme of the town was designed at first
by Utopus, but he left all that belonged to the ornament and improvement
of it to be added by those that should come after him, that being too
much for one man to bring to perfection. Their records, that contain the
history of their town and State, are preserved with an exact care, and
run backwards seventeen hundred and sixty years. From these it appears
that their houses were at first low and mean, like cottages, made of any
sort of timber, and were built with mud walls and thatched with straw.
But now their houses are three storeys high, the fronts of them are faced
either with stone, plastering, or brick, and between the facings of their
walls they throw in their rubbish. Their roofs are flat, and on them
they lay a sort of plaster, which costs very little, and yet is so
tempered that it is not apt to take fire, and yet resists the weather
more than lead. They have great quantities of glass among them, with
which they glaze their windows; they use also in their windows a thin
linen cloth, that is so oiled or gummed that it both keeps out the wind
and gives free admission to the light.