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their senses of sight and touch are keener, their senses of hearing and also of heat are rather blunter than ours. Partly owing to the genial climate, their love of beauty, and their easy existence, their dress is of a simple and graceful order. Many of their light robes and shining veils are woven from silky fibres which grow on the trees, and tinged with beautiful dyes. Bright, witty, and ingenious, as well as guileless, chaste, and happy, I can only compare them to grown-up children--but the children of a god-like race. Thanks to the purity of their blood, and the gentleness of their dispositions, together with their favourable circumstances, they live almost exempt from disease, or pain, or crime, and finally die in peace at the good old age of a hundred or a hundred and fifty years. Their voices are so pleasing, and their language is so melodious that I enjoyed hearing their talk before I understood a word of it. Moreover, their delightful manners evince a rare delicacy of sentiment and appreciation of the beautiful in life. We foreigners must have been objects of the liveliest curiosity to them, yet they never showed it in their conduct; they never stared at us, or stopped to enquire about us, but courteously saluted us wherever we went, and left us to make ourselves at home. We never saw an ugly or unbecoming gesture, and we never heard a rude, unmannerly word all the time we stayed in Womla. Some of their public buildings are magnificent; but most of their private houses are pretty one-storied cottages, each more or less isolated in a big garden, and beyond earshot of the rest. They are elegant, not to say fanciful constructions of stone and timber, generally of an oval shape, or at least with rounded outlines; but sometimes rambling, and varying much in detail. Everyone seems to follow his particular bent and taste in the fashion of his home. Many of them have balconies or verandahs, and also terraces on the roof, where the inmates can sit and enjoy the surrounding view. They are doorless, and the outer walls are usually open so that one may see inside; but in stormy weather they are closed by panels of wood, and a translucent mineral resembling glass. They are divided into rooms by mats and curtains, or partitions and screens of wood, which are sometimes decorated with paintings of inimitable beauty. The ceilings are usually of carved wood, and the floors inlaid with marbles, corals, and the richer ston
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