An American breakfast never failed to interest foreigners, on account of the variety and abundance of its dishes. On the main lines of travel, fresh meat and vegetables were invariably served at all meals; but Indian corn was the national crop, and Indian corn was eaten three times a day in another form as salt pork. The rich alone could afford fresh meat. Ice-chests were hardly known. In the country fresh meat could not regularly be got, except in the shape of poultry or game; but the hog cost nothing to keep, and very little to kill and preserve. Thus the ordinary rural American was brought up on salt pork and Indian corn, or rye; and the effect of this diet showed itself in dyspepsia. One of the traits to which Liancourt alluded marked more distinctly the stage of social development. By day or by night, privacy was out of the question. Not only must all men travel in the same coach, dine at the same table, at the same time, on the same fare, but even their beds were in common, without distinction of persons. Innkeepers would not understand that a different arrangement was possible. When the English traveller Weld reached Elkton, on the main road from Philadelphia to Baltimore, he asked the landlord what accommodation he had. “Don’t trouble yourself about that,” was the reply; “I have no less than eleven beds in one room alone.” This primitive habit extended over the whole country from Massachusetts to Georgia, and no American seemed to revolt against the tyranny of innkeepers. “At New York I was lodged with two others, in a back room on the ground floor,” wrote, in 1796, the Philadelphian whose complaints have already been mentioned. “What can be the reason for that vulgar, hoggish custom, common in America, of squeezing three, six, or eight beds into one room?” Nevertheless, the Americans were on the whole more neat than their critics allowed. “You have not seen the Americans,” was Cobbett’s reply, in 1819, to such charges; “you have not seen the nice, clean, neat houses of the farmers of Long Island, in New England, in the Quaker counties of Pennsylvania; you have seen nothing but the smoke-dried ultra-montanians.” Yet Cobbett drew a sharp contrast between the laborer’s neat cottage familiar to him in Surrey and Hampshire, and the “shell of boards” which the American occupied, “all around him as barren as a sea-beach.” He added, too, that “the example of neatness was wanting;” no one taught it by showing its charm. Felix de Beaujour, otherwise not an enthusiastic American, paid a warm compliment to the country in this single respect, although he seemed to have the cities chiefly in mind:-- “American neatness must possess some very attractive quality, since it seduces every traveller; and there is no one of them who, in returning to his own country, does not wish to meet again there that air of ease and neatness which rejoiced his sight during his stay in the United States.”