House and Garden 
care to cultivate the friendship of the brawny 
Scot, who was a “gude fighter” and useful 
in dealing with England. Hence we see 
flamboyant tracery instead of our English 
perpendicular in the windows of Melrose 
and other stately abbeys, and the style of the 
humbler domestic architecture assimilates 
more nearly to the chateau of France than to 
the manor-house or farmstead of rural Eng¬ 
land. I have before me the photograph of a 
cottage at Greville, in Normandy, in which 
strange diversity in our rural habitations. Go 
down to the deep cleft of Polperro in Corn¬ 
wall, which looks like a witches’ cauldron as 
the wind flaws catch the eddying chimney 
reek from the grey cottages that cling to the 
valley sides, so that one can hardly distin¬ 
guish living rock from built wall, save where 
the flashes of light gleam on white-washed 
walls. It is a land of color, this rugged, 
beautiful Cornwall, where the tossing purples 
ol the channel meet with the whiteness of 
A SOUTH DEVON COTTAGE 
the great peasant painter, Jean Francois 
Millet, was born. It might have been a 
Lowland cottage in Scotland, the resemblance 
is so striking. 
In comparing styles of building, it is, per¬ 
haps, wise to remember that like circum¬ 
stances and like materials may produce like 
results without any actual interchange of 
ideas or architectural intercourse or connec¬ 
tion. 
Nature and art combined have produced a 
their white walls; flaming cactuses wind 
their coils within the window frames, and the 
fuchsia and tamarisks scarcely quiver in the 
breathlessness of the valley in summer time. 
The old post office at Tintagel, with its quaint 
gable and porches, is a good example of a 
Cornish house. Granite is the usual stone 
for building purposes. “The ancient manner 
of Cornish building,” wrote Richard Carew 
in 1602, “was to plant their houses lowe, to 
lay the stones with mortar of lyme and sand, 
x 37 
