The approach to it
from the railway presents nothing very striking,--a few church-towers,
and one or two tall steeples; and the houses first seen are of modern and
unnoticeable aspect. Getting into the interior of the town, however, you
find the streets very crooked, and some of them very narrow. I saw one
place where it seemed possible to shake hands from one jutting storied
old house to another. There were whole streets of the same kind of
houses, one story impending over another, such as used to be familiar to
me in Salem, and in some streets of Boston. In fact, the whole aspect of
the town--its irregularity and continual indirectness--reminded me very
much of Boston, as I used to see it, in rare visits thither, when a
child.
These Coventry houses, however, many of them, are much larger than any of
similar style that I have seen elsewhere, and they spread into greater
bulk as they ascend, by means of one story jutting over the other.
Probably the New-Englanders continued to follow this fashion of
architecture after it had been abandoned in the mother country. The old
house built, by Philip English, in Salem, dated about 1692; and it was in
this style,--many gabled, and impending. Here the edifices of such
architecture seem to be Elizabethan, and of earlier date. A woman in
Stratford told us that the rooms, very low on the ground-floor, grew
loftier from story to story to the attic.
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