14 HOME AND GARDEN 



From beginning to end there was no contract. 

 The usual specifications were made out and were priced 

 by a London firm, and as the total came out not 

 greatly in excess of what the house might cost, the 

 builder was set to work, with the understanding that 

 certain reductions should be made where we could as 

 the work went on, and it was arranged that he should 

 send in all accounts for payment at the end of every 

 month, and that he should receive in addition a sum 

 of ten per cent, on the whole amount of the cost. 



The architect has a thorough knowledge of the 

 local ways of using the sandstone that grows in our 

 hills, and that for many centuries has been the building 

 material of the district, and of all the lesser incidental 

 methods of adapting means to ends that mark the 

 well-defined way of building of the country, so that 

 what he builds seems to grow naturally out of the 

 ground. I always think it a pity to use in any one 

 place the distinctive methods of another. Every part 

 of the country has its own traditional ways, and if 

 these have in the course of many centuries become 

 " crystallised " into any particular form we may be 

 sure that there is some good reason for it, and it 

 follows that the attempt to use the ways and methods 

 of some distant place is sure to give an impression as 

 of something uncomfortably exotic, of geographical 

 confusion, of the perhaps right thing in the wrong 

 place. 



For I hold as a convincing canon in architecture 



