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One can form an idea of the appearance of the narrow streets by imagining the oldest houses that one has seen in Switzerland all closely packed together houses at the most three stories high, with gabled roofs, ground-floors a step or two below the level of the roadway, and huge arched doors studded with great iron nails, and looking strong enough to resist a battering-ram.
Down the length of it runs a wide green, shaded by spreading trees, and on either side, tree-shaded, too, and each in its own little plot, gabled houses of that simple, graceful architecture of our forefathers. Some of these had fluted pilasters and cornices, the envy of many a modern architect, and fan-shaped windows in dormer and doorway.
The Chateau was a long, heavy structure of stone, gabled and pointed in the style of the preceding century strong enough for defence, and elegant enough for the abode of the Royal Intendant of New France.
'Twas proof of this, when the hardy-in-fight a hand laid down, arm and shoulder, all, indeed, of Grendel's gripe, 'neath the gabled roof. MANY at morning, as men have told me, warriors gathered the gift-hall round, folk-leaders faring from far and near, o'er wide-stretched ways, the wonder to view, trace of the traitor.
As I recall the place the green dell below; the spires of pine; the sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings of life amid the slumber of the mountains I slowly awake to a sense of admiration, gratitude, and almost love.
Beyond the wire cage, in which the canary spent his involuntarily celibate life, an ancient microphylla rose-bush, with a single imperfect bud blooming ahead of summer amid its glossy foliage, clambered over a green lattice to the gabled pediment of the porch, while the delicate shadows of the leaves rippled like lace-work on the gravel below.
But it became more and more the custom for the devout to erect such buildings for his special use and even in his lifetime they assumed the proportions of monasteries . The people of Vesâlî built one in a wood to the north of their city known as the Gabled Hall. It was a storied house having on the ground floor a large room surrounded by pillars and above it the private apartments of the Buddha.
Before him rose a white Westmoreland farm, with its gabled porch and moss-grown roof, its traditional yews and sycamores; while to his left, and above the farm, hung a mountain-face, dark with rock, and purple under the evening shadows a rich and noble shape, lost above in dim heights of cloud, and, below, cleft to the heart by one deep ghyll, whence the golden trees in the glittering green of May descended single or in groups, from shelf to shelf, till their separate brilliance was lost in the dense wood which girdled the white farmhouse.
Among the most treasured of Nuremberg's relics is the low-ceilinged, gabled house near the Thiergärtnerthor, in which Albert Dürer lived and died, in the street now called after his name. The works of art which he presented to the town, or with which he adorned its churches, have unfortunately, with but few exceptions, been sold to the stranger.
After a quarter of a mile these gave place to an abrupt, grass covered slope, whose top had been smoothed and levelled by the hand of man, and from which on the far side rose the castle of Inverashiel, its stout and ancient framework disguised and masked by the modern addition to the building which faced the approach; a mass of gabled and turreted stonework in the worst style of nineteenth century architecture which in Scotland often took on a shape and semblance even more fantastically repulsive than it assumed in the south.
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