BRICK AND STONE. 283 



outlines of Batli Abbey I So, once more, Edin- 

 burgli, situated in the midst of a magmficent 

 stone-district and surrounded by numberless ex- 

 cellent quarries, is one of tiie handsomest and 

 best-built towns in all Europe, the front of Princes 

 Street, in particular, being a sight tliat no one who 

 has once beheld it can ever forget throughout a 

 whole lifetime. The lack of solid building-mate- 

 rials among the soft crumbling red sandstones of 

 Cheshire led to the survival in Chester of the 

 quaint old-fashioned English pargeted houses, with 

 their prettily intermixed fronts of plaster and 

 woodwork ; while many mansions, and not a few 

 churches, constructed in the same curious and 

 effective style of domestic architecture, are scat- 

 tered up and down over the face of the county. 

 In Aberd(3en, on the other hand, the local granite 

 lends its cold gray grandeur to the solemn and 

 imposing sweep of Union Street, a worthy thor- 

 oughfare for the great bleak northern city on the 

 German Ocean, with its antique colleges and its 

 gay shop-fronts, its fisher-village, and its bustling 

 busy modern quays. Everywhere we can see that 

 the local conditions have largely modified the local 

 architecture, and that where a good and plentiful 

 native building-material existed from the begin- 

 ning ready to the workman's hand, a commensurate 

 effect lias been easily produced with but little 

 expenditure of conscious effort. 



