Notwithstanding the obscurity which thus envelops the date of the foundation of Vondervotteimittis, and the derivation of its name, there can be no doubt, as I said before, that it has always existed as we find it at this epoch.  The oldest man in the borough can remember not the slightest difference in the appearance of any portion of it; and, indeed, the very suggestion of such a possibility is considered an insult.  The site of the village is in a perfectly circular valley, about a quarter of a mile in circumference, and entirely surrounded by gentle hills, over whose summit the people have never yet ventured to pass.  For this they assign the very good reason that they do not believe there is anything at all on the other side.

Round the skirts of the valley (which is quite level, and paved throughout with flat tiles), extends a continuous row of sixty little houses.  These, having their backs on the hills, must look, of course, to the centre of the plain, which is just sixty yards from the front door of each dwelling.  Every house has a small garden before it, with a circular path, a sun-dial, and twenty-four cabbages.  The buildings themselves are so precisely alike, that one can in no manner be distinguished from the other.  Owing to the vast antiquity, the style of architecture is somewhat odd, but it is not for that reason the less strikingly picturesque.  They are fashioned of hard-burned little bricks, red, with black ends, so that the walls look like a chess-board upon a great scale.  The gables are turned to the front, and there are cornices, as big as all the rest of the house, over the eaves and over the main doors.  The windows are narrow and deep, with very tiny panes and a great deal of sash.  On the roof is a vast quantity of tiles with long curly ears.  The woodwork, throughout, is of a dark hue and there is much carving about it, with but a trifling variety of pattern for, time out of mind, the carvers of Vondervotteimittiss have never been able to carve more than two objects —­ a time-piece and a cabbage.  But these they do exceedingly well, and intersperse them, with singular ingenuity, wherever they find room for the chisel.

The dwellings are as much alike inside as out, and the furniture is all upon one plan.  The floors are of square tiles, the chairs and tables of black-looking wood with thin crooked legs and puppy feet.  The mantelpieces are wide and high, and have not only time-pieces and cabbages sculptured over the front, but a real time-piece, which makes a prodigious ticking, on the top in the middle, with a flower-pot containing a cabbage standing on each extremity by way of outrider.  Between each cabbage and the time-piece, again, is a little China man having a large stomach with a great round hole in it, through which is seen the dial-plate of a watch.