Though mild, these drinks were intoxicating. One could "get fox'd e'en with foolish matheglin." Old James Howel says, "metheglin does stupefy more than any other liquor if taken immoderately and keeps a humming in the brain which made one say he loved not metheglin because he was wont to speak too much of the house he came from, meaning the hive."

Bradford tells of backsliders from Merrymount who "abased themselves disorderly with drinking too much stronge drinke aboard the Freindshipp." This strong drink was metheglin, of which two hogs-heads were to be delivered at Plymouth. But after it was transferred to wooden "flackets" in Boston, these Friendship merrymakers contrived to "drinke it up under the name leackage" till but six gallons of the metheglin arrived at Plymouth.

"Cyder famed" was made at an early date from the fruitful apple-trees so faithfully planted by Endicott, Blackstone, and other settlers. Cider was cheap enough; Josselyn wrote, "I have had at the tap houses of Boston an ale-quart of cyder spiced and 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—

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