itting joints. We are too apt to estimate the value and beauty of
a stone house by the amount of labor lavished on its exterior, as if the
chisel possessed the power to make the joints more impenetrable, and
bestowed an endurance commensurate with the story of expense that it
tells. So long as we build well and honestly, with a proper regard to
protection from the weather, in a substantial and workmanlike manner,
good taste and sound sense will uphold the use of quarried rock, and
discover a permanent strength and power in this Cyclopean masonry that
elaborately finished surfaces and delicately wrought ornaments fail to
express.

[Illustration: FIG. 78.--_First Floor._]

Dressed in squared blocks and hammered lines, stone becomes an expensive
building material, and preference is then given to something else less
costly; but if used in its quarried form, irregular in size and shape,
it becomes, wherever conveniently obtained, among the economical
materials used for building, and is unsurpassed for its impressiveness
and durability. No paint is required to preserve it from the weather,
and no color is so good as the color of the stone; time softens its
tints, and the clambering vine that lays hold of the massive walls is a
decoration beyond the resources of architecture.

[Illustration: FIG. 79.--_Second Floor._]

"If a building," says Mr. Ruskin, "be under the mark of average
magnitude, it is not in our power to increase its apparent size by any
proportionate diminution in the scale of its masonry; but it may be
often in our power to give it a certain nobility by building it of massy
stones, or, at all events, introducing such into its make. Thus it is
impossible that there should ever be majesty in a cottage built of
brick; but there is a marked element of sublimity in the rude and
irregular piling of the rocky walls of the mountain cottages of Wales,
Cumberland, and Scotland.

"And if the nobility of this confessed and natural masonry were more
commonly felt, we should not lose the dignity of it by smoothing
surfaces and fitting joints. The sums which we waste in chiselling and
polishing stones, which would have been better left as they came from
the quarry, would often raise a building a story higher.

"There is also a magnificence in the natural cleavage of the stone to
which the art must indeed be great, that pretends to be equivalent; and
a stern expression of brotherhood with the mountain heart from which it