It was always the old "question of bread and cheese," which has settled adversely many a good cause. Smith, however, did his best with the effeminate gentlemen who had come in Newport's latest ship. He himself shrank from no toil, no exposure. Neither danger nor labour discouraged his manhood, and with his example before them--grappling as he did with the hardest tasks--his followers were deprived of all excuse for complaint or discontent. Two very choice "gallants"--Gabriel Beadle and John Russell, "both proper gentlemen," were among the thirty whom he invited to join him in the noble art of wood-craft--felling trees, splitting them with wedges, and shaping them with hatchets into clapboards for the additional shelter needed by themselves. Meantime they were to lie in the woods at night. The _Mary & Margaret_ had brought over six mares and a horse, so these new "gentlemen" would not be forced, as were their predecessors, to bear this timber on their backs out of the forest. The novelty had its charm of pleasurable excitement.[48] "Strange were these pleasures to their conditions, yet lodging, eating, drinking, working or playing, they doing but as the President, all these things were carried so pleasantly as within a weeke they became Masters; making it their delight to heare the Trees thunder as they fell. But the Axes so oft blistered their tender fingers that commonly every third blow had a lowd Oath to drowne the Echo." Captain Smith rarely indulged in the courtly luxury of profane swearing, and was not inclined to grant privileges to others he did not allow himself. He resolved to have none of it in his Majesty's colony. As for himself he did not need it. He could command vigorous English without it; and so he set about the reformation of the "Gallants and proper Gentlemen" lately come from the English court. He adopted, as a remedial agent, a novel punishment. "He had every man's Oathes numbered, and at night for every Oath a Kan of water was powered down his Sleeve, with which every Offender was so washed (_himselfe and all_) that a man should scarce heare an Oath in a Weeke." And so, we gather, the Captain was after all sometimes overtaken, as well as other people. The narrator of this incident, Richard Pots, wishes us to make no mistake. "By this," he continues, "let no man thinke the President or these Gentlemen spent their times as common Wood-hackers at felling Trees or such like labours: or that they were pressed to anything as hirelings or common slaves; for what they did (beeing but once a little inured) it seemed they conceited it only a pleasure and a recreation. Yet thirty or forty of such Gentlemen would doe more in a day than one hundred of the rest that must be prest by compulsion."