Mrs. Charles Custis Harrison, of St. David’s, Pennsylvania, owns the mixing table in Illustration 90, and a sideboard to match it. Both pieces were inherited from Robert Morris, in whose famous mansion in Philadelphia they stood. The wood of the table is mahogany and the drawers and doors are of satinwood, finely inlaid. There is a well in the top for a bowl, in which was brewed the punch of the Philadelphia forefathers. The cover of the table is hinged, and the four shelves which show in the illustration fold flat when the cover is down. The table in Illustration 91 belongs to the Misses Garrett of Williamsburg, Virginia, and is known as a “mint julep” table, having been made for the concocting of that Southern beverage by a Baltimore cabinet-maker. There are shelves behind the door for the accessories to the julep, and for the mixing of it the top of the table is marble. CHAPTER V DESKS [Illustration] FROM 1644 to about 1670 desks appear in colonial inventories. During those years the word “desk” meant a box, which was often made with a sloping lid for convenience in writing, or to rest a book upon in reading. This box was also used to hold writing-materials and papers or books, and was sometimes called a Bible-box, from the fact that the Bible was kept in it. Illustration 92 shows two of these desks from the collection of Charles R. Waters, Esq., of Salem. The larger desk is twenty inches in length and thirteen and one-half in height, and formerly had a narrow shelf in the inside across the back. The front is carved with the initials A. W. and the date 1654. The smaller desk measures thirteen and one-half inches in length and eight in height. [Illustration: Illus. 92.—Desk-boxes, 1654.] The desk with flat top in Illustration 93 is also in the Waters collection. It measures twenty-six inches in length by seventeen in width. It is made of oak, like the smaller desk in the preceding illustration. [Illustration: Illus. 93.—Desk-box, 1650.] The next style of desk made its appearance in the inventories of about 1660, under a name with French derivation: “scrutoir,” “scriptor,” “scrittore,” “scrutor,” “scriptoire,” down to the phonetically spelled “screwtor.” About 1720 the word “bureau,” also from the French, came into use in combination with the word “desk,” or “table.” It has continued to be employed up to the present time, for the slant-top desk is even now, in country towns, called a bureau-desk. As the word “desk” seems to have been more or less in use through these early years, while for the last hundred years it has been almost entirely employed, alone or in combination with other words, I have designated as desks all pieces of furniture made for use in writing. [Illustration: Illus. 94.—Desk, about 1680.]