ourts, this
arrangement could manifestly be applied only partially to the tall
tenement buildings. There might, it is true, exist in the middle
interior of such a block an open space or "well," with galleries
running round it at each floor, so that the inner rooms could obtain
light from that quarter. It is also to be assumed that stairs ran up
to these galleries, so that the inward rooms or flats were made
accessible in this way. Mainly, however, the light came from windows
opening on the street. If we glanced up at these from below we should
find them narrower than ours at the present day--since we have
discovered how to produce large and entirely diaphanous sheets of
glass--but probably not narrower than those of a century ago. They
were either mere openings with shutters, or, in the better houses,
were glazed with transparent material. In the brighter part of the
year they contained their boxes of flowering or other plants, and were
often provided with a shade-awning not unlike those so familiar in
Paris.

The roof of such a building was either gabled and covered with tiles
or, though perhaps less often, it was flat. The flat roof sometimes
formed a terrace, on which the plants of a "roof-garden" might be
found growing either in earthenware tubs or in earth spread over a
layer of impermeable cement. The lowest floor, level with the street,
commonly consisted of shops, which were open at full length in the
day, but were shuttered and barred at night. As with the shops which
are now built into the sides of large hotels and the like, they had no
communication with the interior of the building. Regularly, however,
they possessed a short staircase at the back or side leading to an
upper room or _entresol_, where, in the poorer instances, the
shopkeeper might actually reside. To the aristocratic Roman, with his
contempt of petty trade, "born in the shop-loft" was a contemptuous
phrase for a "son of nobody."

Meanwhile the more representative houses of the strictly Roman part of
the Roman world--that is to say, the dwellings of Romans or of
imitators of Romans, wherever they might be settled, as distinct from
the Greek and Oriental houses or from the various kinds of primitive
huts to be found among the Western provincials--were of three chief
kinds. These were the town house, the country seat, and the country
homestead. There was, of course, nothing to prevent a wealthy Roman
from building his town house exactly like a