While we build our houses facing the street, with most of their ornament intended to be seen by those who pass by, the Greek did all he could to shut out completely all connection with the street. He never had ground floor windows facing the street, and his house looked like a dead wall with a strong door in it, furnished with a knocker and a handle. This door opened outward, which made it safer for those within, but when they were coming out they used to knock inside lest passers-by might be thrown down when the door was pushed open. Richer houses did not open directly on the street, but on a porch which was not regarded as part of the house. Directly inside the hall door was a narrow hall with a porter’s lodge opening off it, in which a slave sat, who was put to that work or to that of attending boys, when not useful for anything else. You passed through the hall or passage into an open square court, which was the center of the house, and was surrounded by a covered colonnade or cloister. The various men’s rooms and the dining room opened upon this cloister. The same general plan was adopted by the Romans, and inherited by the modern Italians, so that most Italian palaces in Genoa, Florence, and elsewhere are built in this way. Opposite the entrance was a second door, which led from the court into the women’s apartments, and here was situated the bed chamber of the master and mistress of the house. In richer houses the women’s rooms were built round a second court like the first. But more commonly they did not occupy so much room, and were often placed on a second story, raised over the first at the back part of the building, with a staircase going up from the court. The Greeks preferred living on the ground floor, and their houses were not lofty blocks, like those of our streets. The bed rooms and sitting rooms round the court were usually small and dark, being mostly lighted only through their door into the cloister. The upper story had windows. The roof, which was tiled, like ours, was so flat as to allow people to walk upon it. The pantries and store rooms were generally at the back of the house, and near them the kitchen, which alone was supplied with a chimney. The other rooms seldom required a fire, and, if necessary, were heated with braziers of hot coke, or charcoal. The covered way upon which they opened made them cool in summer. Of course the palaces of early kings and the country houses of the rich Attic nobles had larger rooms and courtyards than ordinary city houses, but their plan was not different. Homer describes their halls as ornamented by plates of bright metal on the walls—a fashion preserved in the house of Phocion at Athens, and of which we still have traces in the so-called treasure house of Atreus, near Mycenæ. Fresco painting and rich coloring on the walls did not come into fashion till the fourth century B. C., and then became so common that we find almost all the houses in Pompeii, which was really a Greek