sweetened with sugar, for a
groat."

This was not the New England nectar or Passada which he praised so
highly and which was thus made--

"Take of Malligo Raisins, stamp them and put milk to them and put
them to a Hippocras Bag and let it drain out of itself and put a
quantity of this with a spoonful or two of Syrup of Clove
Gilly-flowers into every bottle when you bottle your Syder, and
your Planter will have a liquor that exceeds Passada, the Nectar of
the Country."

Cider was made at first by pounding the apples by hand in wooden
mortars; sometimes the pomace was pressed in baskets. Rude mills were
then formed with a hollowed log, and a heavy weight or maul on a
spring-board. Cider soon became the common drink of the people, and it
was made in vast quantities. In 1671 five hundred hogsheads were made of
one orchard's produce. One village of forty families made three thousand
barrels in 1721. Bennet wrote in 1740, "Cider being cheap and the people
used to it they do not encourage malt liquors. They pay about three
shillings a barrel for cider." It was freely used even by the children
at breakfast, as well as at dinner, up to the end of the first quarter
of the present century, when many zealous followers so eagerly embraced
the new temperance reform that they cut down whole orchards of thriving
apple-trees, conceiving no possibility of the general use of the fruit
for food instead of drink.

Charles Francis Adams says that "to the end of John Adams's life a large
tankard of hard cider was his morning draught before breakfast."

Cider was supplied in large amounts to students at college at dinner and
"bever," being passed in two two-quart tankards from hand to hand down
the commons table. It was given liberally to all travellers and
wanderers who chanced to stop at the farmer's door; to all workmen and
farm laborers; and an "Indian barrel," whose contents were for free gift
to every tramp Indian or squaw, was found in many a farmer's cellar.

A traveller in Maine just after the Revolution said that their cider was
purified by the frost, colored with corn, and looked and tasted like
Madeira.

Beverige also was drunk by the colonists. This name was applied to
various mild and watery drinks. In the West Indies the juice of the
sugar-cane mixed with water was so called. In Devonshire, water which
had been pressed through the lees of a cider-mill was called beverige.
In other parts of