We are so accustomed to thinking of the old New England houses as structures covered with clapboards that we are in danger of forgetting what is underneath this outer coat. In fact, it is safe to say that the majority of people do not know what is underneath, and many would be greatly surprised if they did. After all, the clapboard casing is a disguise, and the people of New England are so thrifty and, as a rule, have been so careful to keep their buildings in good condition that the clapboards hide the traces of age that would otherwise be visible and put the oldest buildings on a par with those of later date. The clapboard casing masques different things beneath its surface. If we rip it off many of the oldest buildings, we shall find behind it nothing more nor less than an old English half-timber house, built precisely as were the half-timber or “black and white” houses in the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts. The exigencies of climate soon made it evident that such a mode of structure was not altogether suited to the rigorous winters of New England and then, too, something must be attributed to the desire on the part of subsequent owners to follow prevalent fashion which prescribed the clapboard jackets. In houses of more recent date, of course, the clapboard shell may be regarded as an integral part of the structure but, in the earlier buildings, it is nothing but a masque, put on at a later date, to protect the walls and give added warmth when the first-adopted method of wall building was found insufficient, or in some cases, perhaps, to comply with the dictates of a passing fancy. Whenever this clapboarding is torn off for repairs, original conditions become obvious and may readily be studied. The writer has seen such old houses, when partly denuded of their clapboard casing, reveal typical half-timber constructional methods, similar in every particular to the methods pursued by the half-timber builders in England. The cills, the studs, the diagonal timbers and all the other parts of the frame are set and joined, tenoned and pinned, just as they were in England and the spaces between the studs are “pugged” with rough brick or stones and coarse clay stiffened with chopped straw, also in the time-honoured English manner. It is quite possible that in some instances the spaces between the studs may have been “pugged” with “wattle and dab”--thick clay daubed on a loose mesh of interwoven wattles or withes--for the tradition of this process certainly crossed the Atlantic and appeared in some of the early clay chimneys of Connecticut.