Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/50

 and have hitherto displayed a strong repugnance to mixing with their Spanish and Portuguese neighbors. Roads have lately been pushed into the district inhabited by these "Jurdes," and they are beginning to learn the Castilian language and attend the fairs and markets.

Some disused rock-hewn dwellings are mentioned in Meyer's Guide-Book as existing near the ancient Klusberg in the Hartz



Mountains. Herr E. Krell describes in a German periodical a group of such dwellings, now inhabited, near the village of Langenstein in the same region. There are some twenty of them, each furnished with a door and a window, and inhabited altogether by about forty persons. The oldest of them was made about thirty years ago, by a poor, newly married couple who found the conditions of life in the village too hard. It was gradually enlarged, by patient excavation in the rock, until it has been made a comfortable and convenient dwelling. The house has a neatly kept entrance, with a hallway, a living-room on the right, in which is the only window, a bedroom on the left of the hall; in the rear a spacious store-room on the left, and a kitchen with a fireplace on the right; and behind the kitchen another bedroom. The chimney is carried up through the roof, and where it comes out above the surface of the ground is well guarded with a wall of stones. Although the back rooms are not directly lighted from without, they receive sufficient