The infrequency of verandas or other roofed-over outdoor space is noticeable to the visitor from America, to whom this seems a very modest luxury, if not a necessity for ordinary comfort. In many cases where verandas now exist, they are additions to the house as first built. The original occupant and builder of these houses found indoors cooler and more comfortable in hot weather than any veranda, as screening against insects was then unknown. If he preferred outdoors, the shade of a tree or the north side of the house was sufficient. The sunshine was welcome in the winter to warm and dry the house, and in summer the prevailing wind was from the south and equally desirable. Many of the houses of the nineteenth century have verandas screened by shutters or lattice, some two-story ones. These are more common perhaps in the towns, where the houses were more crowded and the shade trees fewer. They seem more tropical or West Indian in character than the earlier houses, peculiarly Bermudian, and have a quite different interest. A few are shown in the photographs. Bermuda from its earliest history as a proprietary settlement by the Virginia Company, throughout its development to its present condition as a self-governing Colony, has been uninterruptedly English. What tradition there is that has been an influence in its buildings is English. Some of the waved and stepped gable ends suggest at first sight a contact with Spanish America, but similar forms of gables in the domestic architecture of England, adapted to Bermudian materials, might well have produced the same result. Though known to exist by the Spaniards before the English settled there, it was never occupied by them, and there seems no warrant for assuming there was Spanish influence at any time in the Islands. Slave labor, cheap and plentiful, but unskilled, seems also to have been a contributory influence in the older houses, both in their planning and building and still more markedly in road building. Deep cuts through rock, and extensive building of substantial walls, that in the present day would be out of proportion in cost for the advantage gained, are frequent. Even the more modest smaller houses, with their dependent outhouses, butteries and garden walls, all in massive masonry, create an appearance of permanence and solidity, that is striking to one accustomed to the flimsier frame construction so common in modern America. Through the general mechanical progress of the world and particularly through modern means of transportation and consequent contact with the outside world, Bermuda has no longer its isolation, and has lost perhaps much that was picturesque and interesting in the life that formerly existed there, and which naturally and without conscious effort had its expression and reflection in the architecture of its dwellings.