of the first-floor windows. In many instances, the roofs were unbroken by dormers as the garrets were used largely for storage purposes and the bedchambers were on the ground floor. If families were large, one or two bedrooms would be partitioned off in the garret, the major part, however, being reserved for the storage of grains, household effects, and various supplies. Even then, the roofs were not interrupted by windows but the light would come from windows in the gable ends beside the chimneys. In many cases the stone walls at the gable ends did not rise above the line of the eaves and the portion above that would be hung with clapboards. Of course there were instances in which houses rose to a greater height and contained second floors as a visible part of the plan. Such was the old Hoffman House in Kingston-on-Hudson, built not long after the middle of the seventeenth century. It is to be noted, also, that, in that case, the stonework in the gable ends was continued to the top of the gable and there was no wall of overlapping clapboards. The earliest houses were covered with roofs of the ordinary ridge type and presented the appearance outwardly of one-storey buildings, though in effect they often contained two floors. The gambrel roof of the Dutch houses was of later evolution and was probably suggested by force of circumstances. The gambrel construction made it possible to give more room in the garrets so that chambers could be accommodated with greater ease and there would not be so much waste room just inside the eaves, as the slope of the roof was at a steeper angle. It has been suggested that the gambrel roof came into being as an ingenious method of beating the devil around the bush, when a tax was laid upon houses of more than one storey in height. Technically and legally the gambrel roof house _was_ but one storey high although, as a matter of fact, the gambrel made it possible to have an additional storey in the roof which served all practical purposes quite as fully as though the walls had been carried up to enclose a second floor. In the older Dutch houses with gambrel roofs, the pitch is never steep and the contour presents somewhat the lines of a flaring bell.