[Sidenote: The Tables of 1776.]

At table we should have missed the thousand refinements and inventions
of French and native cooking which now lend variety to our sustenance.
The food would have been substantial and heavy and little various; the
English simplicity, probably, of barons of beef and shoulders of mutton,
and cold bread, and big plum puddings, with a relish of fruits. Were we
in fancy to journey from New York to Philadelphia or Boston, we should
be forced to rumble slowly over bad roads, through interminable forests
and by desert sea-coasts, in heavy and rudely jolting vehicles, and be
several days upon the trip.

[Sidenote: Travelling in the Olden Time.]

[Sidenote: The Wealthier Classes.]

It is a striking fact that people in the days of Washington travelled
not a whit more rapidly than people in the days of Moses or of Homer.
The chariot-rider of the Olympic games attained a speed which was,
perhaps, never equalled in Europe or America until the first railway-
train sped between Liverpool and Manchester, in 1830. In 1776, the
Americans were still mainly confined to the original occupations of the
early colonists, farming, trade, hunting, and fishing. Manufactories
there were not as yet; Lawrence and Lowell. Pittsburg, and the great
industrial New York towns, were still in the womb of the future. In
almost every household throughout the land the old-fashioned spinning-
wheel was humming under the pressure of matronly and maidenly feet, by
which the homespun garments of the time were made. While the less well-
to-do and laboring classes were content with clothing spun and knitted
at their own firesides, the wealthier people arrayed themselves with far