ordinarily called--has been distinguished from the barn or byre
by roughcast and whitewash, which, as the inhabitants are not
hasty in renewing it, in a few years acquires by the influence of
weather a tint at once sober and variegated. As these houses
have been, from father to son, inhabited by persons engaged in
the same occupations, yet necessarily with changes in their
circumstances, they have received without incongruity additions
and accommodations adapted to the needs of each successive
occupant, who, being for the most part proprietor,
was at liberty to follow his own fancy, so that these humble
dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of
Nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to
have grown than to have been erected--to have risen, by an
instinct of their own, out of the native rock--so little is there
in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty."

"These dwellings, mostly built, as has been said, of rough unhewn
stone, are roofed with slates, which were rudely taken
from the quarry before the present art of splitting them was
understood, and are therefore rough and uneven in their surface,
so that both the coverings and sides of the houses have furnished
places of rest for the seeds of lichens, mosses, ferns and flowers.
Hence buildings, which in their very form call to mind the
processes of Nature, do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb,
appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of
things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields, and
by their colour and their shape affectingly direct the thoughts
to that tranquil course of nature and simplicity along which the
humble-minded inhabitants have through so many generations
been led. Add the little garden with its shed for bee-hives, its