Double and "thribble" bowls of punch were commonly served, holding respectively two and three quarts each, and many existing bills show what large amounts were drunk. Governor Hancock gave a dinner to the Fusileers at the Merchants' Club, in Boston, in 1792. As eighty dinners were paid for I infer there were eighty diners. They drank one hundred and thirty-six bowls of punch, besides twenty-one bottles of sherry and a large quantity of cider and brandy. An abstract of an election dinner to the General Court of Massachusetts in 1769, showed two hundred diners, and seventy-two bottles of Madeira, twenty-eight bottles of Lisbon wine, ten of claret, seventeen of port, eighteen of porter, fifteen double bowls of punch and a quantity of cider. The clergy were not behind the military and the magistrates. In the record of the ordination of Rev. Joseph McKean, in Beverly, Mass., in 1785, these items are found in the tavern-keeper's bill:

The six mild tea-drinkers and their economical beverage seem to put a finishing and fairly comic touch to this ordination bill. When we read such renderings of accounts we think it natural that Baron Reidesel wrote of New England inhabitants, "most of the males have a strong passion for strong drink, especially rum and other alcoholic beverages." John Adams said, "if the ancients drank wine as our people drink rum and cider it is no wonder we hear of so many possessed with devils."

The cost of these various drinks was thus given about Revolutionary times in Bristol, R. I.:

Flip was a vastly popular drink, and continued to be so for a century and a half. I find it spoken of as early as 1690. It was made of home-brewed beer, sweetened with sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, and flavored with a liberal dash of rum, then stirred in a great mug or pitcher with a red-hot loggerhead or hottle or flip-dog, which made the liquor foam and gave it a burnt bitter flavor.

Landlord May, of Canton, Mass., made a famous brew thus: he mixed four pounds of sugar, four eggs, and one pint of cream and let it stand for two days. When a mug of flip was called for, he filled a quart mug two-thirds full of beer, placed in it four great