The earliest known mention of the use of tea by Englishmen is in a letter written in 1615 by one wanderer in China to another fellow-soldier, asking for a “pot of the best sort of chaw” and also for “three silver porringers to drink chaw in.” By 1664 it appears to have been sold in England in some considerable quantity, in spite of Pepys’s oft-quoted entry in his diary in the year 1665 about tasting “thea a China drink” that he never had drunk before. Pepys was far from rich at that time, and tea may have been in frequent use for some years among persons of wealth and quality without his ever having tasted it. It quickly grew in favor in the court, the first importations all coming from the Continent, from Holland, and soon was plentiful and comparatively cheap. Among the common people and conservative country folk, however, beer still held its own at breakfast and supper until Swift’s time. New England dames followed the fashions, fancies, and tastes of their sisters in Old England as soon as their growing prosperity allowed. When in 1666 the fragrant herb cost sixty shillings a pound in England, I hardly think our frugal Pilgrim Fathers imported much tea. The first mention of tea which I have found shows that in 1690 Benjamin Harris and Daniel Vernon were licensed to sell “in publique,” in Boston, “Coffee Tee & Chucaletto.” The following year two other tea-houses were licensed. Dr. Benjamin Orman had a “Tinn Teapott” in Boston previous to his death in 1695, an article of novelty and luxury that probably few of his neighbors possessed. Though Felt, in his “New England Customs,” and Weeden, in his “Social and Economic History of New England,” both say that green tea was first advertised for sale in Boston in 1714, I find in the _Boston News Letter_ of March, 1712, “green and ordinary teas,” advertised for sale at “Zabdiel Boyltons (or Boylstons) Apothecary Shop,” and in the same year teapots and tea-tables were sold at the Swing Bridge by “Publick Outcry.” In 1713 Zabdiel Boylston had Bohea tea; in 1714 “very fine green tea, the best for color and taste,” was advertised; and in 1715 tea was sold at the Coffee House, thus showing that it was being imported in larger quantities. The taste quickly spread, and wherever there was tea there was also a teapot. Weeden says that it is strange that Judge Sewall, with all his fussing about wine, and “chokolet,” and “cyder,” and “pyes,” and cakes, and “almonds and reasons,” and oranges and figs, says naught of tea. He does speak of it; he drank at a “great and Thursday” lecture, at Madam Winthrop’s house in the year 1709, “Ale Tea & Beer,” and he does not especially note it as a rarity. I do not believe, however, though he lived until 1730, when it was sold in every Boston dry-goods, grocers’, hardware, millinery, and apothecary shop, and advertised in every Boston newspaper, that he often drank the “cup that cheers but not inebriates.” He may have regarded it