The stems of wild aloes which have been allowed to flower are stuck into the ground, side by side, and pieces of leaves tied on outside them with aloe-fibre.

These cut leaves are set like tiles to form a roof, and pegged down with the thorns which grow at their extremities.

Picturesque and cheap, though hardly comfortable, for we are in the "tierra fria" now, and the mornings and evenings in winter are often bitterly cold.
But the churches! Is it possible that they can belong to these wretched filthy little cottages.

As black Sam, our driver, a runaway Texan slave, suggested, it looked as though the villagers might pull down their houses and locate themselves and their families in their churches.

We thought of Mr.Ruskin, who has somewhere expressed an earnest desire that all the money and energy that England has wasted in making railroads, had been spent in building churches; and we wished he had been here to see his principles carried out.
I have travelled on rough roads in my time, but on such a road as this never.