The first tavern at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was kept by a deacon of the church, afterwards, steward of Harvard college; and the relation of tavern and meeting house did not end with their simultaneous establishment, but they continued the most friendly neighbors. Licenses to keep houses of entertainment were granted with the condition that the tavern must be near the meeting-house--a keen contrast to our present laws prohibiting the sale of liquor within a certain distance of a church. Those who know the oldtime meeting house can fully comprehend the desire of the colonists to have a tavern near at hand, especially during the winter services. Through autumn rains and winter frosts and snows the poorly built meeting house stood unheated, growing more damp, more icy, more deadly, with each succeeding week. Women cowered shivering, half-frozen, over the feeble heat of a metal footstove as the long services dragged on and the few coals became ashes. Men stamped their feet and swung their arms in the vain effort to warm the blood. Gladly and cheerfully did the whole crowd troop from the gloomy meeting house to the cheerful tavern to thaw out before the afternoon service, and to warm up before the ride or walk home in the late afternoon. It was a scandal in many a town that godly church members took too freely of tavern cheer at the nooning; the only wonder is that the entire congregation did not succumb in a body to the potent flip and toddy of the tavern-keeper. In mid-summer the hot sun beat down on the meeting house roof, and the burning rays poured in the unshaded windows. The tap-room of the tavern and the green trees in its dooryard offered a pleasant shade to tired church-goers, and its well sweep afforded a grateful drink to those who turned not to the tap-room. There are ever back-sliders in every church community; many walked into the ordinary door instead of up the church alley. The chimney seat of the inn was more comfortable than the narrow seat of the "pue." The general court of Massachusetts passed a law requiring all inn-keepers within a mile of any meeting house to clear their houses "during the hours of the exercise." "Thus," Mr. Field says wittily, "the townsmen were frozen out of the tavern to be frozen in the meeting house." Our ancestors had no reverence for a church save as a literal meeting house, and it was not unusual to transform the house of God into a tavern. The Great House at Charlestown, Massachusetts, the official residence of Governor Winthrop, became a meeting house in 1633, and then a tavern, the Three Cranes, kept by Robert Leary and his descendants for many years. It was destroyed in June, 1775, in the burning of the town.