This failing was not confined to Devonshire. My father notes in his diary, 7 August 1847, at Dinan in Brittany:--“The apples thick beyond conception, and the priests already praying to avert the evil consequences they apprehend from the plenty and cheapness of cider.” He writes to my grandmother from Dinan, 15 August 1847:--“The apples are so abundant this year that the country will almost be drowned in cider. How they will consume it all, is a wonder, for they export none. The lower orders are drunk, it seems, a great deal of their time. The priests always pray for a bad apple crop as the only hope of saving the people from perpetual drunkenness.” A former rector of Lustleigh was remonstrating with a man one afternoon for reeling through the village very drunk. But the man had his reply:--“Ay, ’tbe all very fine for you to talk, but you goes home to dinner late, and us doesn’t see you after.” On the whole, less harm is done by cider than by tea; but cider gets more blame, as its ill effects are visible at once, whereas tea works its mischief slowly. Nobody says anything against tea-drinking now; but Parson Davy in his _System of Divinity_, vol. xix, page 235, which he printed at Lustleigh in 1803, spoke with indignation of “the immeasurable use of that too fashionable and pernicious plant, which weakens the stomach, unbraces the nerves, and drains the very vitals of our national wealth; to which nevertheless our children are as early and as carefully enured, from the very breast, as if the daily use of it were an indispensable duty which they owed to God and their country.” And in his _Letter to a Friend concerning Tea_, published in 1748, John Wesley spoke of tea-drinking as tea-drinkers speak of drinking alcohol now:--“wasteful, unhealthy self-indulgence”--“no other than a slow poison”--“abhor it as a deadly poison, and renounce it from this very hour.” My grandfather had a new cider-press in 1842, and I had a new one in 1901. He set up his in what is now the potting-shed, and I set up mine in what is now the donkey’s house, but shifted it in 1904 to its present place in what had hitherto been the stables. The cider-press of 1901 is quite unlike the cider-press of 1842, and is practically the same as the wine-presses that are used in France. With three men at work, it will turn 800 lbs. of apples into 60 gallons of cider in about two hours. The old press was not so quick or clean, but was more picturesque.