It was agreed that the Governor, John Winthrop, the Deputy Governor, Thomas Dudley, and all the councillors, except John Endicott, who had already settled at Salem, should build and occupy houses at Newtowne, but this agreement was never carried out. Winthrop, Dudley and Bradstreet built houses, and the General Court of the colony met alternately at Newtowne and at Boston until 1638, when it finally settled in Boston. Yet in spite of the superior advantages of Boston the new settlement evidently flourished, for in 1633 a traveller--the writer of _New England’s Prospect_--describes the village as “one of the neatest and best compacted towns in New England, having many fair structures, with many handsome contrived streets. The inhabitants, most of them, are rich and well stored with cattle of all sorts.” This is doubtless an extravagant picture and true only in comparison with some of the neighboring plantations which were not so favorably situated. Newtowne was really a crude and straggling settlement made up of some sixty or seventy log cabins or poor frame houses stretching along a road which skirted the river marshes and of which the wanderings were prescribed more by the devious channel of the Charles than by mathematical exactness. The meeting-house, built of rough-hewn boards with the crevices sealed with mud, stood at the crossing of the road with the path that led down to the river, where there was a ladder for the convenience of landing. So primitive was the place that Thomas Dudley, the chief man of the town, writing home, could say, “I have no table nor any place to write in than by the fireside on my knee.” Such was the splendor of the whilom capital of New England.