I have spoken of the semi-disapprobation with which my Quaker farmer declined the wine and beer offered him at my 4th of July festival. Some years after, when I found the men employed in mowing a meadow of mine at Lenox with no refreshment but "water from the well," I sent in much distress a considerable distance for a barrel of beer, which seemed to me an indispensable adjunct to such labor under the fervid heat of that summer sky; and was most seriously expostulated with by my admirable friend, Mr. Charles Sedgwick, as introducing among the laborers of Lenox a mischievous need and deleterious habit, till then utterly unknown there, and setting a pernicious example to both employers and employed throughout the whole neighborhood. In short, my poor barrel of beer was an offense to the manners and morals of the community I lived in, and my meadow was mowed upon cold "water from the well"; of which indeed the water was so delicious, that I often longed for it as King David did for that which, after all, he would not drink, because his mighty men had risked their lives in procuring it for him.[1] [1] In writing thus, I do not mean to imply that the abuse of intoxicating liquors, or the vice of drunkenness were then unknown in America. The national habits of the present day would suggest that such a change (albeit in the space of fifty years) would surpass the rapidity of movement of even that most rapidly changing nation. But the use of either beer or wine at the tables of the Philadelphians, when I first lived among them, was quite exceptional. There was a small knot of old-fashioned gentlemen (very like old-fashioned Englishmen they were), by whom good wine was known and appreciated; especially certain exquisite Madeira, of the Bingham and Butler names, the like of which it was believed the world could not produce; but this was Olympian nectar, for the gods alone; and the usual custom of the best society, at the early three-o'clock dinner, was water-drinking. Nor had the immense increase of the German population then flooded Philadelphia with perennial streams from innumerable "lager beer" cellars and saloons: the universal rule, at the time when these letters were written, was absolute temperance; the exception to it, a rare occasional instance of absolute intemperance.