The inn was built of stone -- of course, everybody's house on the Continent,
from palace to hovel, is built of that dismal material, and as a rule it is
as square as a box and odiously plain and destitute of ornament; it is formal,
forbidding, and breeds melancholy thoughts in people used to friendlier and
more perishable materials of construction. The frame house and the log house
molder and pass away, even in the builder's time, and this makes a proper bond
of sympathy and fellowship between the man and his home; but the stone house
remains always the same to the person born in it; in his old age it is still
as hard, and indifferent, and unaffected by time as it was in the long-vanished
days of his childhood. The other kind of house shows by many touching signs
that it has noted his griefs and misfortunes and has felt for them, but the
stone house doesn't -- it is not of his evanescent race, it has no kinship with
him, nor any interest in him.
- "Down the Rhone," in Europe and Elsewhere
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