rison
House, built in 1639 at Guilford, Connecticut. The one at Newburyport is
the most picturesque and beautiful of them all.

As social life in Boston took on a little aspect of court life in the
circle gathered around the royal governors, the pride of the wealthy
found expression in handsome and stately houses. These were copied and
added to by men of wealth and social standing in other towns. The
Province House, built in 1679, the Frankland House in 1735, and the
Hancock House, all in Boston; the Shirley House in Roxbury, the
Wentworth Mansion in New Hampshire, are good examples. They were
dignified and simple in form, and have borne the test of
centuries,--they wear well. They never erred in over-ornamentation,
being scant of interior decoration, save in two or three principal rooms
and the hall and staircase. The panelled step ends and soffits, the
graceful newels and balusters, of those old staircases hold sway as
models to this day.

The same taste which made the staircase the centre of decoration within,
made the front door the sole point of ornamentation without; and equal
beauty is there focused. Worthy of study and reproduction, many of the
old-time front doors are with their fine panels, graceful, leaded side
windows, elaborate and pretty fan-lights, and slight but appropriate
carving. The prettiest leaded windows I ever saw in an American home
were in a thereby glorified hen-house. They had been taken from the
discarded front door of a remodelled old Falmouth house. The hens and
their owner were not of antiquarian tastes, and relinquished the windows
for a machine-made sash more suited to their plebeian tastes and
occupations. Many colonial doors had door-latches or knobs of heavy
brass; nearly all had a knocker of wrought iron or polished brass, a
cheerful ornament that ever seems to resound a welcome to the visitor as
well as a notification to the visited.

The knocker from the John Hancock House in Boston and that from the
Winslow House in Marshfield are here shown; both are now in the custody
of the Bostonian Society, and may be seen at the Old State House in
Boston. The latter was given to the society by Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes.

The "King-Hooper" House, still standing in Danvers, Massachusetts,
closely resembled the Hancock House. This house, built by Robert Hooper
in 1754, was for a time the refuge of the royal governor of
Massachusetts--Governor Gage; and hence is sometimes called General
G