The larger houses were built in a style equally characteristic of the age and country. A taste for ornamental masonry was considerably more prevalent in our Scottish villages about the beginning of the seventeenth century than at present. Palladio began to be studied about that period by a few architects of the southern parts of the kingdom; and some of our provincial builders had picked up from them an imperfect acquaintance with the old classical style of architecture: but as they could avail themselves of only a few of its forms, and knew nothing of its proportions, they became, all unwittingly, the founders of a kind of school of their own. And some of the houses of the old town were no bad specimens of this half Grecian half Gothic school. The high narrow gables, jagged like the teeth of a saw, the diminutive, heavily-framed windows, and chamfered rybats, remained unaltered; but there were stuck round the low doors, which still retained their Gothic proportions, imitations of Palladio’s simpler door-pieces; and huge Grecian cornices, more than sufficiently massy for halls twenty feet in height, with circular pateras designed in the same taste, and roughened with vile imitations of the vine and laurel, adorned the better rooms within. The closes leading to buildings of this superior class were lintelled at the entrance, and over each lintel there was fixed a tablet of stone, bearing the arms and name of the proprietor. A large house of this kind, on the eastern side of the street, was haunted, it was said, by a _green lady_, one of the old Scottish spectres, who flourished before the introduction of shrouds and dead linens; and another on the opposite side, by a capricious brownie, who disarranged the pieces of furniture and the platters every night the domestics set them in order, and set them in order every night they were left disarranged. Directly in the middle of the street stood the town’s cross, over the low-browed entrance of a stone vault, furnished with seats, also of stone. The formidable _jougs_ depended from one of the abutments. A little higher up was the jail, an antique ruinous structure, with stone floors, and a roof of ponderous grey slate. The manse, a mean-looking house of two low storeys, with very small windows, and bearing above the door the initials of the first Protestant minister of the parish, nearly fronted it: while the only shop of the place was situated so much lower down, that, like the houses of the earlier town, it was carried away by the sea during a violent storm from the north-east. There mingled with the other domiciles a due proportion of roofless tenements, with their red weather-wasted gables, and melancholy-looking unframed windows and doors; and, as trade decayed, even the more entire began to fall to pieces, and to show, like so many mouldering carcasses, their bare ribs through the thatch. Such was the old town of Cromarty in the year 1720. [Sidenote: THE OLD CASTLE OF THE URQUHARTS.]