At present the subsidiary gable is low, comparatively insignificant, and contains the door. Now the old Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and German houses of the chiefs were all originally constructed on the same principle, and the timber and plaster gable fronts of our old houses, the splendid stone and brick-gabled faces of the halls of the trade guilds in the market-place at Brussels, and the wonderful stepped and convoluted house-fronts throughout Holland and Germany, are direct descendants of the old rude oblong house of our common forefathers. We come now to another point, the gable apex. A gable, of course, is and must be an inverted _v_, [Illustration: inverted V]; but there are just three ways in which the apex can be treated. When the principals are first erected they form an _x_, [Illustration: X], the upper limbs shorter than the lower. Sometimes they are so left. But sometimes they are sawn off, and are held together by mortices into an upright piece of timber. Then the gable represents an inverted [Illustration: inverted Y]. If the ends are sawn off, and there be no such upright, then there remains an inverted _v_, but, to prevent the rotting of the ends at the apex, a _crease_ like a small _v_ is put over the juncture, [Illustration]. These are the only three variations conceivable. The last is the latest, and dates from the introduction of lead, or of tile ridges. By far the earliest type is the simplest, the leaving of the protruding ends of the principals forming [Illustration: X]. Then, to protect these ends from the weather, to prevent the water from entering the grain, and rotting them, they were covered with horse-skulls, and thus two horse-skulls looking in opposite directions became an usual ornament of the gable of a house. Precisely the same thing was done with the tie-beams that protruded under the eaves. These also were exposed with the grain to the weather, though not to the same extent as the principals. They also were protected by skulls being fastened over their ends, and these skulls at the end of the tie-beams are the prototypes of the corbel-heads round old Norman churches. Among the Anglo-Saxons the [Illustration: X] gable was soon displaced by that shaped like [Illustration: inverted Y], if we may judge by early illustrations, but the more archaic and simple construction prevailed in North Germany and in Scandinavia. To the present day the carved heads are affixed to the ends of the principals, and these heads take the place of the original skulls. The gable of the Horn Church in Essex has got an ox’s head with horns on it. [Illustration: HORNED HEAD ON CHURCH GABLE OF CHURCH, HORN-CHURCH.--_Fig. 5._]