“They do not eat soups, and do not serve up ragouts at their dinners, but boiled and roast, and much vegetables. They drink nothing but cider and Madeira wine with water. The dessert is composed of preserved quinces and pickled sorrel. The Americans eat the latter with the meat. They do not take coffee immediately after dinner, but it is served three or four hours afterward with tea; this coffee is weak, and four or five cups are not equal to one of ours; so that they take many of them. The tea, on the contrary, is very strong. Breakfast is an important affair with them. Besides tea and coffee, they put on table roasted meats, with butter, pies and ham; nevertheless they sup, and in the afternoon they again take tea. Thus the Americans are almost always at table; and as they have little to occupy them, as they go out little in winter, and spend whole days alongside their fireside and their wives, without reading and without doing anything, going to table is a relief and a preventive of _ennui_. Yet they are not great eaters.” On the 5th of March, 1781, General Washington arrived in Newport. Blanchard thus records his first impressions of the commander-in-chief: “His face is handsome, noble and mild. He is tall--at the least, five feet eight inches (French measure). In the evening I was at supper with him. I mark, as a fortunate day, that in which I have been able to behold a man so truly great.” After the war came a period of great business depression, in which Newport heavily shared. The British, during their occupation of the town, had done much to injure it. Nearly a thousand buildings were destroyed by them on the island; fruit-and shade-trees were cut down, the churches were used [Illustration: LIFE MASK OF WASHINGTON. MADE BY HOUDON IN 1785.] as barracks, and the Redwood Library was despoiled of its more valuable books. Commerce was dead; the suppression of the slave-trade reduced many to poverty, and the curse of paper money--to which Rhode Island clung after other States had abandoned it--poisoned the very springs of public credit. Brissot de Warville, in the record of his journey “performed” through the United States in 1788, draws this melancholy picture of Newport at that time: “Since the peace, everything is changed. The reign of solitude is only interrupted by groups of idle men standing, with folded arms, at the corners of the streets; houses falling to ruin; miserable shops, which present nothing but a few coarse stuffs, or baskets of apples, and other articles of little value; grass growing in the public square, in front of the court of justice; rags stuffed in the windows, or hung upon hideous women and lean, unquiet children.” Count Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, writing ten years later, calls the place “_cette ville triste et basse_,” and further ventures on this remarkable criticism of its salubrity: