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Here and there we passed a whole villageful of white-washed cottages, with purplish-brown moss covering their roofs rather picturesque; and some of the slate-roofed, stone houses are nice in their way, too; I suppose distinctively Cornish. Not that I care! I'm glad Graylees Castle isn't in Cornwall, which is much too far from town.

South Ouist, dominated by the great mountain of Hecla, likewise holds a population whose Catholicism has never been broken. Facing the landing stage is an inn obtrusively modern in aspect, and a little colony of slate-roofed villas to match; but here, as at Tarbet, a few steps brought us into realms of mystery.

Saint-Romans is opposite on the other side of the river; and, in spite of the brevity of the vision, the headlong rush of the train, which seems trying to throw itself madly into the Rhone at each turning, the castle is so large, so well situated on the neighbouring hill, that it seems to follow the crazy race of the train, and stamps on your mind forever the memory of its terraces, its balustrades, its Italian architecture; two low stories surmounted by a colonnaded gallery and flanked by two slate-roofed pavilions dominating the great slopes where the water of the cascades rebounds, the network of gravel walks, the perspective of long hedges, terminated by some white statue which stands out against the blue sky as on the luminous ground of a stained-glass window.

Grain growing has become completely out-of-door work, from seeding to sending to market. The day of building two-story barns for storing and threshing wheat, barley and oats is over, I am persuaded, in this country. A quadrangle of slate-roofed cow-sheds, for housing horses and cattle, will displace the old-fashioned barns, each with its rood of roof.

"A very big house if every man had his rights," said the station-master, and waving his hand he signalled that the train should proceed. Bleak and wind-swept is the little town of Kirkby-Malhouse, harsh and forbidding are the fells upon which it stands. It stretches in a single line of grey-stone, slate-roofed houses, dotted down the furze-clad slope of the rolling moor.

Undoubtedly they are darker inside, and not so convenient to live in as the modern box-shaped, red-brick, slate-roofed cottages, which have spread a wave of ugliness over the country; but they do not offend they please the eye. They are smaller than the modern-built habitations; they are weathered and coloured by sun and wind and rain and many lowly vegetable forms to a harmony with nature.

Rows of low, gray-stone, slate-roofed cottages straggling along a single street generally narrow and crooked and extending for distances depending on the size of the place made up the average village.