materials in which they were compelled to work, bricks, granite and pine, chiefly pine; for the esthetic possibilities of the proverbially square brick, are slight, and granite, unless laboriously wrought, is scarcely suitable for the lighter forms of classic design. So they embellished their brick walls by means of some diversity in the arrangements of the visible mortar joints, and kept to simple shapes in such stone as they employed. Then, to this substantial construction, they applied wooden cornices, porches, pediments, porticoes and balustrades, — the designs for which were taken from the "Builders' Guides" and "Architects' Assistants," which supplied the architectural law and gospel of the period.
      The earliest attempts appear to have been imitations of the classic orders, in something near their original proportions; and these as applied, usually misapplied, to their simple, homely, utilitarian buildings had, in the vernacular, a "stubbed" or squatty effect, to say nothing of the incongruity of attaching a fragment of a "heathen" temple to the abiding place of a