extending
over the second story. A few of these are still standing: The
White-Ellery House, at Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1707, is here
shown. This "overhang" is popularly supposed to have been built for the
purpose of affording a convenient shooting-place from which to repel the
Indians. This is, however, an historic fable. The overhanging second
story was a common form of building in England in the time of Queen
Elizabeth, and the Massachusetts and Rhode Island settlers simply and
naturally copied their old homes.

The roofs of many of these new houses were steep, and were shingled with
hand-riven shingles. The walls between the rooms were of clay mixed with
chopped straw. Sometimes the walls were whitened with a wash made of
powdered clam-shells. The ground floors were occasionally of earth, but
puncheon floors were common in the better houses. The well-smoothed
timbers were sanded in careful designs with cleanly beach sand.

By 1676 the Royal Commissioners wrote of Boston that the streets were
crooked, and the houses usually wooden, with a few of brick and stone.
It is a favorite tradition of brick houses in all the colonies that the
brick for them was brought from England. As excellent brick was made
here, I cannot believe all these tales that are told. Occasionally a
house, such as the splendid Warner Mansion, still standing in
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is proved to be of imported brick by the
bills which are still existing for the purchase and transportation of
the brick. A later form of many houses was two stories or two stories
and a half in front, with a peaked roof that sloped down nearly to the
ground in the back over an ell covering the kitchen, added in the shape
known as a lean-to, or, as it was called by country folk, the linter.
This sloping roof gave the one element of unconscious picturesqueness
which redeemed the prosaic ugliness of these bare-walled houses. Many
lean-to houses are still standing in New England. The Boardman Hill
House, built at North Saugus, Massachusetts, two centuries and a half
ago, and the two houses of lean-to form, the birthplaces of President
John Adams and of President John Quincy Adams, are typical examples.

The next roof-form, built from early colonial days, and popular a
century ago, was what was known as the gambrel roof. This resembled, on
two sides, the mansard roof of France in the seventeenth century, but
was also gabled at two ends. The gambrel roof had a cer