Stage-coach and Tavern Days. Earle Alice Morse

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СКАЧАТЬ and hat, a heavy spencer (which was a man’s wear in those days); and, like a true Indian, always wore a blanket over her shoulders in winter. She was mahogany-red of color, with coarse black hair, high cheek-bones, and all the characteristic features of her race. Her great strength and endurance made her the most desired farm-hand in the township to be employed in haying time, in wall-building, or in any heavy farm work. Her fill of cider was often her only pay for some powerful feat of strength, such as stone-lifting or stump-pulling. At her leisure times in winter she made and peddled baskets in true Indian fashion, and told improbable and baseless fortunes, and she begged cider at the tavern, and drank cider everywhere. “The more I drink the drier I am,” was a favorite expression of hers. Her insolence and power of abuse made her dreaded for domestic service, though she freely entered every home, and sat smoking and glowering for hours in the chimney corner of the tavern; but in those days of few house-servants and scant “help,” she often had to be endured that she might assist the tired farm wife or landlady.

      A touch of grim humor is found in this tale of her – the more humorous because, in spite of Apostle Eliot and her Christian forbears, she was really a most godless old heathen. She tended with care her little garden, whose chief ornament was a fine cherry tree bearing luscious blackhearts, while her fellow-townsmen had only sour Morellos growing in their yards. Each year the sons of her white neighbors, unrestrained by her threats and entreaties, stripped her tree of its toothsome and beautiful crop before Sarah Boston could gather it. One year the tree hung heavy with a specially full crop; the boys watched eagerly and expectantly the glow deepening on each branch, through tinted red to dark wine color, when one morning the sound of a resounding axe was heard in Sarah’s garden, and a passer-by found her with powerful blows cutting down the heavily laden tree. “Why, Sarah,” he asked in surprise, “why are you cutting down your splendid great cherry tree?” – “It shades the house,” she growled; “I can’t see to read my Bible.”

      A party of rollicking Yankee blades, bold with tavern liquor, pounded one night on the wooden gate of the old Grafton burying-ground, and called out in profane and drunken jest, “Arise, ye dead, the judgment day is come.” Suddenly from one of the old graves loomed up in the dark the gigantic form of Sarah Boston, answering in loud voice, “Yes, Lord, I am coming.” Nearly paralyzed with fright, the drunken fellows fled, stumbling with dismay before this terrifying and unrecognized apparition.

      Mrs. Forbes ends the story of Sarah Boston with a beautiful thought. The old squaw now lies at rest in the same old shadowy burial place – no longer the jest and gibe of jeering boys, the despised and drunken outcast. Majestic with the calm dignity of death, she peacefully sleeps by the side of her white neighbors. At the dawn of the last day may she once more arise, and again answer with clear voice, “Yes, Lord, I am coming.”

       CHAPTER V

      “KILL-DEVIL” AND ITS AFFINES

      Any account of old-time travel by stage-coach and lodging in old-time taverns would be incomplete without frequent reference to that universal accompaniment of travel and tavern sojourn, that most American of comforting stimulants – rum.

      The name is doubtless American. A manuscript description of Barbadoes, written twenty-five years after the English settlement of the island in 1651, is thus quoted in The Academy: “The chief fudling they make in the island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Divil, and this is made of sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor.” This is the earliest-known allusion to the liquor rum; the word is held by some antiquaries in what seems rather a strained explanation to be the gypsy rum, meaning potent, or mighty. The word rum was at a very early date adopted and used as English university slang. The oldest American reference to the word rum (meaning the liquor) which I have found is in the act of the General Court of Massachusetts in May, 1657, prohibiting the sale of strong liquors “whether knowne by the name of rumme, strong water, wine, brandy, etc., etc.” The traveller Josselyn wrote of it, terming it that “cursed liquor rhum, rumbullion or kill-devil.” English sailors still call their grog rumbowling. But the word rum in this word and in rumbooze and in rumfustian did not mean rum; it meant the gypsy adjective powerful. Rumbooze or rambooze, distinctly a gypsy word, and an English university drink also, is made of eggs, ale, wine, and sugar. Rumfustian was made of a quart of strong beer, a bottle of white wine or sherry, half a pint of gin, the yolks of twelve eggs, orange peel, nutmeg, spices, and sugar. Rum-barge is another mixed drink of gypsy name. It will be noted that none of these contains any rum.

      In some localities in America rum was called in early days Barbadoes-liquor, a very natural name, occasionally also Barbadoes-brandy. The Indians called it ocuby, or as it was spelled in the Norridgewock tongue, ah-coobee. Many of the early white settlers called it by the same name. Kill-devil was its most universal name, not only a slang name, but a trading-term used in bills of sale. A description of Surinam written in 1651 says: “Rhum made from sugar-canes is called kill-devil in New England.” At thus early a date had the manufacture of rum become associated with New England.

      The Dutch in New York called the liquor brandy-wine, and soon in that colony wherever strong waters were named in tavern lists, the liquor was neither aqua vitæ nor gin nor brandy, but New England rum.

      It soon was cheap enough. Rev. Increase Mather, the Puritan parson, wrote, in 1686: “It is an unhappy thing that in later years a Kind of Drink called Rum has been common among us. They that are poor and wicked, too, can for a penny make themselves drunk.” From old account-books, bills of lading, grocers’ bills, family expenses, etc., we have the price of rum at various dates, and find that his assertion was true.

      In 1673 Barbadoes rum was worth 6s. a gallon. In 1687 its price had vastly fallen, and New England rum sold for 1s. 6d. a gallon. In 1692 2s. a gallon was the regular price. In 1711 the price was 3s. 3d. In 1757, as currency grew valueless, it was 21s. a gallon. In 1783 only a little over a shilling; then it was but 8d. a quart. During this time the average cost of molasses in the West Indies was 12d. a gallon; so, though the distillery plant for its production was costly, it can be seen that the profits were great.

      Burke said about 1750: “The quantity of spirits which they distill in Boston from the molasses which they import is as surprising as the cheapness at which they sell it, which is under two shillings a gallon; but they are more famous for the quantity and cheapness than for the excellency of their rum.” An English traveller named Bennet wrote at the same date of Boston society: “Madeira wine and rum punch are the liquors they drink in common.” Baron Riedésel, who commanded the foreign troops in America during the Revolution, wrote of the New England inhabitants: “Most of the males have a strong passion for strong drink, especially rum.” While President John Adams said caustically: “If the ancients drank wine as our people drink rum and cider, it is no wonder we hear of so many possessed with devils;” yet he himself, to the end of his life, always began the day with a tankard of hard cider before breakfast.

      The Dutch were too constant beer drinkers to become with speed great rum consumers, and they were too great lovers of gin and schnapps. But they deprecated the sharp and intolerant prohibition of the sale of rum to the Indians, saying: “To prohibit all strong liquor to them seems very hard and very Turkish. Rum doth as little hurt as the Frenchman’s Brandie, and in the whole is much more wholesome.” The English were fiercely abhorrent of intemperance among the Indians, and court records abound in laws restraining the sale of rum to the “bloudy salvages,” of prosecutions and fines of white traders who violated these laws, and of constant and fierce punishment of the thirsty red men, who simply tried to gratify an appetite instilled in them by the English.

      William Penn wrote to the Earl of Sutherland in 1683: “Ye Dutch, Sweed, and English have by Brandy and Specially Rum, almost Debaucht ye Indians all. When Drunk ye most Wretched of Spectacles. They had been very Tractable but Rum is so dear to them.”

      Rum formed the strong intoxicant of all popular tavern drinks; many are СКАЧАТЬ