Stories of American Life and Adventure | Page 9

The ladies kept giving him more,
and the poor prince did not know how to stop them until another
French gentleman told him privately that if he would lay his teaspoon
across the top of the cup no more tea would be poured in. He put the
teaspoon across the teacup as a sign that he did not wish to drink any
more.
[Illustration: A Colonial Tea Party.]
Long after tea and coffee were in use in this country they were not
known in the backwoods. The people on the frontier drank tea made
from the root of the sassafras tree or from the leaves of some wild vines.
The whole work of preparing food was done at home. When they
wanted to grind meal, they did it by pounding corn in a hole cut in the
stump of a tree. They used a large stone pounder which was tied by a
rope to a limb of a tree above. After each blow the limb would spring
back and raise the pounder. Their corn meal was sifted through a sieve
made of deerskin with little holes punched through it. They had to
make their shoes and hats and caps themselves, and to weave their cloth
at home.
A boy who lived on the west side of the Alleghany Mountains in those
days afterward wrote a book telling all about this rough life. His name
was Joseph Doddridge. He spent his boyhood in a log cabin, in constant
danger from Indians. The settlers had built a fort in the middle of the
settlement. Sometimes in the night Joseph would hear a man tapping
gently on the back window of his father's cabin. As soon as anybody
waked up, the man would whisper, "Indians!" Joseph's father would

then take down his gun. The children would be dressed in the dark as
quickly as possible. Such things as would be needed in the fort were
then picked up. Not a word was spoken, nor was any candle lighted.
Even the little children learned to be perfectly silent, and the dogs were
taught not to bark. When all was ready, the family would hurry away
along the foot path to the fort. All the other families in the settlement
would be called in the same way.
Every fall these settlers sent pack horses over the mountains. The
horses were loaded with the skins of animals. When they came back,
they carried salt, which was the one thing that could not be made in the
settlement. But the men never thought it worth while to bring home
with them tea and coffee or other unnecessary things.
When Joseph was about seven years of age, he was sent over the
mountains to school. The little boy was very much puzzled when he
first saw a house that was plastered inside. He had never in his life seen
anything but a cabin built of logs. He could not understand how a
plastered house was built. It seemed to him like something that had
grown that way.
When supper time came in this plastered house, he saw a teacup and
saucer for the first time in his life. The people in his neighborhood used
wooden bowls to drink out of. But here he saw what seemed to him to
be a little cup standing in a bigger one. He had never heard of coffee.
He only knew that the brownish-looking stuff in his cup was not milk,
or hominy, or soup. What to do with the little cups, or how to make use
of the spoon that was in them, he could not tell, so he watched the big
folks handle their cups and spoons. He drank the coffee just as they did,
but he disliked it very much. It made the tears come into his eyes to
drink it. When he got his cup nearly empty, it was filled again. He did
not dare to say that he had had enough, and he did not know what to do.
At last he saw one man turn his empty cup bottom upward in the saucer,
and lay his little spoon across the bottom of the cup. That was the
custom in those days. He saw that this man's cup was not filled any
more. So Joseph drank his coffee as quickly as possible, turned his cup
over in the saucer, and laid the spoon across the bottom. He was

delighted that he did not have to drink any more coffee.

KIDNAPPED BOYS.
In the days when our country belonged to England, white people were
brought here to be sold. Some of these were poor people who could not
get a good living in England. They came over to this country without
any money. The captain of the ship in