city, and edged away in privacy apart from the great thoroughfares
connecting the manufacturing centre with other districts of the country.
Its houses are venerable, standing generally in ancient gardens; and
save that the beauty and tranquillity of the spot have led to the
erection of a few pleasant modern villas, dotting it here and there,
whoever treads the one echoing street of the Alton for the first time,
feels that two centuries must have brought very little external change
to the objects by which he is surrounded. In this pristine place, the
short-spiked steeples, and the broad-slated roof of the old cathedral of
St. Machar may be seen rising over a cluster of fine old trees which top
the sloping bank of the winding Don, from the opposite shore of which
the whole scene--comprehending the river, the sloping banks, the trees,
and the gray old church--makes a very perfect landscape, rather English
than Scottish in its aspect.

"A near approach develops something very peculiar in the character of
this edifice. It bears throughout unmistakable marks of age, but none of
decay. It is gray with the weather-wearing of centuries, but it displays
none of the mouldering vestiges of Time's decaying fingers; nor yet has
it that prim air of good keeping which shows, in treasured antiquities,
that careful hands have sedulously restored each feature that age may
have injured. It is clear that the completeness of detail--the clean
outlines, the hard, unworn surfaces--are characteristics of innate
strength, and connect themselves with the causes of a certain northern
sternness and rigidity in the general architectural designs.

"The secret of all these peculiarities is to be found in the nature of
the material, which is granite--the same that has handed down to us,
through thousands of years, the cold, stony eyes of the sphynx,
precisely as the chisel last touched them--and retains, to the wonder