afternoon, the ladies always gave them tea to drink. As soon as a
gentleman's little cup was empty, one of the ladies would fill it up
again, and it was not polite to refuse to drink all the tea that was
offered. A French prince who was in Philadelphia during the Revolution
drank twelve little cups of tea one afternoon. 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