"Whitehall," the home of Bishop Berkeley, and a group of old houses on Thames Street at Newport, may be said to represent the second period of our colonial architecture,--_i.e._, the first quarter of the eighteenth century. They are entirely of frame construction, covered over the boarding with thick clap-boards, with beaded edges, put on with wrought nails, and the roofs covered with split shingles of a better class than those previously used. In houses of this period brick began to take the place of stone for chimneys, and the gambrel roof--a form of construction whose history so far has eluded the researches of the student--seems to have originated in the colonies: it continued in favor for a hundred years or more, and gradually developed into a well-proportioned architectural structure, with richly-moulded cornice and well-designed dormers. It had many advantages: the framing was simple and strong, and the attic rooms possessed all the height and floor-space obtainable in the modern French roof, so called, while avoiding the disagreeable box-like appearance of the latter. The window-frames of these early eighteenth-century houses were made of plank, mortised and pinned together, the sills and caps being often moulded and a bead run around the inner edge of the frames. The sashes were heavy and glazed, with small squares of very inferior glass set in wide muntins. In one of these old houses we find an attempt to modify the gambrel into the hipped roof, a type which became highly developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the earlier examples this roof, instead of being truncated and hipped in all around, with a railing above the crown moulding, was simply hipped in on the lower part, being turned up at the ends, forming small gables. The dwellings of this class form a connecting-link between the second and third periods, which may be said to have commenced about 1730, when the growing commercial importance of the seaport towns and the rapid accumulation of wealth induced a more lavish and elegant style of living.