As soon as they had definitely settled upon a location, the colonists went to work building their town. They began to prepare timber as early as the 23d of December, but the inclemency of the season and the distance every thing was to be transported--there were no trees standing within an eighth of a mile of the present Leyden Street--made the work painfully laborious and the progress slow. On the twenty-eighth day the company was consolidated into nineteen families, the single men joining some household in order to lessen the number of houses to be built. They then staked out the ground, giving every person half a pole in breadth and three in length. Each head of a family chose his homestead by lot, and each man was required to build his own house. By Tuesday, the 9th of January, the Common House wanted nothing but the thatch to be complete; still, although it was only twenty feet square, the weather was so inclement that it took four days to cover it. They could seldom work half the week. [Illustration: SITE OF THE COMMON HOUSE.] Captain Smith says, in 1624, the town consisted of two-and-thirty houses and about a hundred and eighty people. The Common House is believed to have stood on the south side of Leyden Street, where the abrupt descent of the hill begins. In digging a cellar on the spot, in 1801, sundry tools and a plate of iron were discovered, seven feet below the surface of the ground. This house is supposed to have served the colonists for every purpose of a public nature until the building of their fortress on Burial Hill. Mourt calls it their rendezvous, and relates that a few days after completion it took fire from a spark in the thatch. At the time of the accident Governor Carver and William Bradford were lying sick within, with their muskets charged, and the thatch blazing above them, to their very great danger. In this Common House the working parties slept until their dwellings were made ready. It was worth living two hundred years ago to have witnessed one street scene that took place here. John Oldham, the contentious, the incorrigible, dared to return to Plymouth after banishment. He had, with Lyford, tried to breed a revolt among the disaffected of the colony. A rough and tough malignant was Oldham, fiercely denouncing the magistrates to their teeth when called to answer for his misdeeds. He defied them roundly in their grave assembly. Turning to the by-standers, he exclaimed: "My maisters whar is your harts? now show your courage, you have oft complained to me so and so; now is ye tyme if you will doe any thing, I will stand by you."