30 Bowles of Punch before the People went to meeting 3 80 people eating in the morning at 16d 6 10 bottles of wine before they went to meeting 1 10 68 dinners at 3s 10 4 44 bowles of punch while at dinner 4 8 18 bottles of wine 2 14 8 bowles of Brandy 1 2 Cherry Rum 1 10 6 people drank tea 9_d_ The six mild tea-drinkers and their economical beverage seem to put a finishing and fairly comic touch to this ordination bill. When we read such renderings of accounts we think it natural that Baron Reidesel wrote of New England inhabitants, "most of the males have a strong passion for strong drink, especially rum and other alcoholic beverages." John Adams said, "if the ancients drank wine as our people drink rum and cider it is no wonder we hear of so many possessed with devils." The cost of these various drinks was thus given about Revolutionary times in Bristol, R. I.: "Nip of Grog 6_d_ Dubel bole of Tod 2_s_ 9_d_ Dubel bole of punch 8_s_ Nip of punch 1_s_ Brandi Sling 8_d_" Flip was a vastly popular drink, and continued to be so for a century and a half. I find it spoken of as early as 1690. It was made of home-brewed beer, sweetened with sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, and flavored with a liberal dash of rum, then stirred in a great mug or pitcher with a red-hot loggerhead or hottle or flip-dog, which made the liquor foam and gave it a burnt bitter flavor. Landlord May, of Canton, Mass., made a famous brew thus: he mixed four pounds of sugar, four eggs, and one pint of cream and let it stand for two days. When a mug of flip was called for, he filled a quart mug two-thirds full of beer, placed in it four great spoonfuls of the compound, then thrust in the seething loggerhead, and added a gill of rum to the creamy mixture. If a fresh egg were beaten into the flip the drink was called "bellows-top," and the froth rose over the top of the mug. "Stone-wall" was a most intoxicating mixture of cider and rum. "Calibogus," or "bogus," was cold rum and beer unsweetened. "Black-strap" was a mixture of rum and molasses. Casks of it stood in every country store, a salted and dried codfish slyly hung alongside--a free lunch to be stripped off and eaten, and thus tempt, through thirst, the purchase of another draught of black-strap. A terrible drink is said to have been popular in Salem--a drink with a terrible name--whistle-belly-vengeance. It consisted of sour household beer simmered in a kettle, sweetened with molasses, filled with brown-bread crumbs and drunk piping hot.