see for themselves and examine the building
carefully.

The aspect of the house as seen from the street is, it must be admitted,
hardly symmetrical; but it is evident also that the first design has
been much altered and added to. At one end the Arab Hall, with its dome
and "bearded" battlements, is an obvious afterthought, in great contrast
with the serious simplicity of the rest. And at the other end the glass
studio, which was added later still, is also clearly an excrescence. The
centre part was the original house, and the studio was the chief feature
of it, and very much as it is now. It is, of course, on the north side,
and the street, the south side, is occupied by small rooms which, with
their repeated small openings, offer no great scope for designing.
Still, the whole has that look of dignity which always accompanies high
finish; and the entrance, far from being commonplace, because it has
nothing quaint or surprising about it, has a certain ample serenity
which it is rare to find. The mouldings of stonework and woodwork, few
and simple as they are, are not taken out of a pattern-book, as is
usually the case, but are specially designed each for its own position.
All the refinement of a building consists in its mouldings, and no one
has designed mouldings better than Professor Aitchison. A vast
improvement has been made in this respect in the last twenty years or
so, and it is largely due to his influence. At any rate he was one of
the first and he remains the best of modern designers of mouldings.
There are some fine examples of his work in the house.

On the north the house looks into a fair-sized garden, skilfully
planted, so that it looks much larger than it is. In the mind of the
writer this aspect is intimately bound up with the recollection of
delightful Sunday mornings in summer, when he sat chatting on random
subjects with the President, who, in slippers, a so-called "land and
water hat," and a smock frock, leant back in a garden-chair and talked
as no one else could. The quiet, the sun overhead, the grass under our
feet, the green trees around us, and the house visible between them,
form an ineffaceable picture of aesthetic contentment it is a delight to
recall. It recurred every Sunday whenever the weather was fine and warm.
Then it was that there was leisure to appreciate the admirable symmetry
of the architecture; for in England it is so rare to sit out of doors
where one may look at architecture