door. In winter they bore the full blast of the winds that drove
across the expanse of frozen stream in front of them; in summer the
hot sun blazed relentlessly upon the low roofs. As each house stood
but a few rods from its neighbor on either side, the colony thus
took on the appearance of one long, straggling, village street. The
habitant liked to be near his fellows, partly for his own safety
against marauding redskins, but chiefly because the colony was at best
a lonely place in the long cold season when there was little for any
one to do.

Behind each house was a small addition used as a storeroom. Not far
away were the barn and the stable, built always of untrimmed logs, the
intervening chinks securely filled with clay or mortar. There was also
a root-house, half-sunk in the ground or burrowed into the slope of a
hill, where the habitant kept his potatoes and vegetables secure from
the frost through the winter. Most of the habitants likewise had their
own bake-ovens, set a convenient distance behind the house and rising
four or five feet from the ground. These they built roughly of
boulders and plastered with clay. With an abundance of wood from the
virgin forests they would build a roaring fire in these ovens and
finish the whole week's baking at one time. The habitant would often
enclose a small plot of ground surrounding the house and outbuildings
with a fence of piled stones or split rails, and in one corner he
would plant his kitchen-garden.

Within the dwelling-house there were usually two, and never more than
three, rooms on the ground floor. The doorway opened into the great
room of the house, parlor, dining-room, and kitchen combined. A
"living" room it surely was! In the better houses, however, this room
was divided, with the kitchen partitioned off from the rest. Most of