While freely acknowledging his follies at this time, he was able to say that he was addicted to no vices. His usual custom was to rise with the dawn, when his bird studies would begin, in the early hours which are best for this purpose. According to his own account, Audubon was extremely abstemious in his youth, for he declared that he had lived on fruits, vegetables and milk, with only an occasional indulgence in game and fish, and that he had not swallowed a single glass of wine or spirits until his wedding day. This was the more remarkable in a youth coming from a country which flowed with good wine, where school children are still served with watered wine for lunch, and where the cooks, as Goldsmith believed, could concoct seven different dishes out of a nettle-top, and who, if they had enough butcher's meat (a want that has since been abundantly supplied), would be the best purveyors in the world. Audubon attributed his iron constitution to this simple regimen, which had been followed, he said, from his earliest recollection, though he admitted that while in France it was extremely annoying to all about him; for this reason he would not dine out when his peculiar habits were likely to be the subject of unpleasant comment. To follow this account of himself: Pies, puddings, eggs, milk and cream, was all I cared for in the way of food, and many a time I have robbed my tenant's wife, Mrs. Thomas, of the cream intended to make butter for the Philadelphia market.... All this time I was as fair and rosy as a girl, though as strong, indeed stronger than most young men ... and why have I thought a thousand times, should I not have kept to that delicious mode of living, and why should not mankind in general be more abstemious than mankind is?[90] William Gifford Bakewell, a younger brother of Lucy, has left this interesting record of a visit paid to "Mill Grove" in the summer of 1806: