“The common houses,” according to Edward E. Lambert, the antiquary, “at first were small, of one storey with sharp roofs, and heavy stone chimneys and small diamond windows.” Many of the early dwellings also had two floors. One type of these small houses commonly found in Massachusetts and Connecticut consisted of two rooms with a chimney between them. The house door opened into a small entry containing the staircase, opposite the door and carried up beside the chimney. The chimney was the core around which the house was built and projected above the middle of the ridgepole. Each room had a fireplace. To this type of house was frequently added a lean-to across the whole rear and this addition usually accommodated the kitchen. Sometimes the lean-to was incorporated in the plan when the house was built. In either case, the long, narrow lean-to room contained a fireplace which generally had a flue in the central chimney. When dwellings of this description had two rooms on the ground floor, one would be the kitchen and general living room and the other the parlour containing the “best bed,” an arrangement alluded to in a previous paragraph; where there was the additional lean-to room for the kitchen, the two other rooms would be living room and parlour. In northern Rhode Island there was another common type that contained one room, at the end of which “was a vast stone chimney which appeared on the outside of the house.” Beside the fireplace and in the offset made by the chimney jamb, was a winding staircase--in the earliest houses it was sometimes a ladder--leading to the upper room or loft, as the case might be. An amplification of this “stone-end” type of house was occasionally found with _two_ rooms placed side by side and a fireplace in each room in relatively the same position. That these types of floor plan were part of the common English architectural heritage we shall presently see by comparison with subsequent chapters. The position of the chimney served to all intents as an exterior indication of the internal plan of the house. Of course, many departures from these two original plans are to be met with in the early Colonial houses of New England but it will usually be found that such departures are due to later additions to a structure based, in the first instance, on one or the other of them.