Notice the following examples of general description:—­

1.  Around every house in Broeck are buckets, benches, rakes, hoes, and stakes, all colored red, blue, white, or yellow.  The brilliancy and variety of colors and the cleanliness, brightness, and miniature pomp of the place are wonderful.  At the windows there are embroidered curtains with rose-colored ribbons.  The blades, bands, and nails of the gayly painted windmills shine like silver.  The houses are brightly varnished and surrounded with red and white railings and fences.

The panes of glass in the windows are bordered by many lines of different hues.  The trunks of all the trees are painted gray from root to branch.  Across the streams are many little wooden bridges, each painted as white as snow.  The gutters are ornamented with a sort of wooden festoon perforated like lace.  The pointed facades are surmounted with a small weathercock, a little lance, or something resembling a bunch of flowers.  Nearly every house has two doors, one in front and one behind, the last for everyday entrance and exit, the former opened only on great occasions, such as births, deaths, and marriages.  The gardens are as peculiar as the houses.  The paths are hardly wide enough to walk in.  One could put his arms around the flower beds.  The dainty arbors would barely hold two persons sitting close together.  The little myrtle hedges would scarcely reach to the knees of a four-year-old child.

2.  Ginseng has a thick, soft, whitish, bulbous root, from one to three inches long,—­generally two or three roots to a stalk,—­with wrinkles running around it, and a few small fibers attached.  It has a peculiar, pleasant, sweetish, slightly bitter, and aromatic taste.  The stem or stalk grows about a foot high, is smooth, round, of a reddish green color, divided at the top into three short branches, with three to five leaves to each branch, and a flower stem in the center of the branches.  The flower is small and white, followed by a large, red berry.  It is found growing in most of the states in rich, shady soils.

3.  As a general proposition, the Scottish hotel is kept by a benevolent-looking old lady, who knows absolutely nothing about the trains, nothing about the town, nothing about anything outside of the hotel, and is non-committal regarding matters even within her jurisdiction.  Upon arrival you do not register, but stand up at the desk and submit to a cross-examination, much as if you were being sentenced in an American police court.

Your hostess always wants twelve hours’ notice of your departure, so that she can make out your bill—­a very arduous, formidable undertaking.  The bill is of prodigious dimensions, about the size of a sheet of foolscap paper, lined and cross-lined for a multitude of entries.  When the account finally reaches you, it closely resembles a design for a cobweb factory.  Any attempt to decipher the various hieroglyphics is useless—­it can’t be done.  The only thing that can be done is to read the total at the foot of the page and pay it.