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
the furnishings were the products of the colony and chiefly of the
family's own workmanship. The floor was of hewn timber, rubbed and
scrubbed to smoothness. A woolen rug or several of them, always of
vivid hues, covered the greater part of it. There were the family
dinner-table of hewn pine, chairs made of pine saplings with, seats of
rushes or woven underbark, and often in the corner a couch that would
serve as an extra bed at night. Pictures of saints hung on the walls,
sharing the space with a crucifix, but often having for ominous
company the habitant's flint-lock and his powder-horn hanging from the
beams. At one end of the room was the fireplace and hearth, the sole
means of heating the place, and usually the only means of cooking
as well. Around it hung the array of pots and pans, almost the only
things in the house which the habitant and his family were not able to
make for themselves. The lack of colonial industries had the advantage
of throwing each home upon its own resources, and the people develop