The oaken timbers for the framing of houses were riven and hewn into shape and dressed down with an adz. Rafters and joists were sometimes treated thus and in other cases were sawn. The great summer beams and oftentimes the studs, too, were finished with stopped chamfers along the edges. The spaces between the studs, as noted in Chapter III, were at first filled with “pugging” of stone or brick and clay mixed with chopped straw and then plastered over in the manner of the “black and white” or half timber work in England. Whether the wall spaces between the studs were ever stopped with “wattle and dab”--an old English filling of clay, plastered over a kind of loose basketwork of interwoven wattles or withes--the writer is unable to say with certainty. It is not at all improbable that the stud spaces were sometimes so filled and it is quite certain that some of the early Connecticut chimneys were constructed in this manner. The survival of “wattle and dab” work in New England in any form is an interesting instance of the persistence and continuity of craft traditions. Clapboards were made chiefly of oak or pine and were nailed horizontally to the outside of the studs. They were usually feather edged and lapped, the upper over the lower. Although it is not impossible that there was some precedent in England for the use of clapboards nailed horizontally on the outside of the studding, it is highly probable that the practice of applying them in this manner in New England was first dictated by climatic necessity as a remedy and afterwards became incorporated as an essential part of frame construction. In some parts of New England, especially in Rhode Island and portions of Connecticut, studs between the posts were dispensed with and vertical boarding of oak or pine, usually more than an inch thick, was nailed to the cills and girts. This vertical boarding, for which, also, there seems to have been an English precedent, was generally, though not invariably, covered outside either with horizontal clapboards or with long shingles.