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I have often been inside the old Holmes house in
Cambridge.
It served as a boarding-house during our college days, but afterwards
Professor James B. Thayer rented it for a term of years, until it was finally swept away like chaff by
President Eliot's broom of reform.
The popular notion that it was a quaint-looking old mansion of the eighteenth century, which seems to have been encouraged by
Doctor Holmes himself, is a misconception.
It was a two-and-a-half story, low-studied house, such as were built at the beginning of the last century, with a roof at an angle of forty-five degrees and a two-story ell on the right side of the front door.
Doctor Holmes says:
Gambrel, gambrel; let me beg
You will look at a horse's hinder leg.
First great angle above the hoof,--
That is the gambrel; hence gambrel roof.
Now, any one who looks carefully at the picture of the old Holmes house, in
Morse's biography of the
Doctor, will perceive that this was not the style of roof which the house had,--at least, in its later years.
Doctor Holmes graduated at Harvard in 1829
