often mixed with water, to prevent the injurious effects of the latter. This corrective, however much extolled, ought to be taken in very small quantities. Here, as in Britain, there are many who resort to spirituous liquors as the sovereign medicine, both in hot and in cold weather.
Strangers lodge in boarding houses, and are charged from three dollars to twenty a-week. I have got lodgings in a good one, where I find interesting company. Previous to our meals a servant rings a small hand-bell, summoning every lodger to the public room, where we all eat together. A polite, well-dressed, hostess presides.
Servants are not here so attentive to their duty as elsewhere; many of them are free blacks, slow in their motions, and often treating the most reasonable commands with neglect. Master is not a word in the vocabulary of hired people. Bos, a Dutch one of similar import, is substituted.[1] The former is used by Negroes, and is by free people considered as synonymous with slave-keeper.
This afternoon much thunder was heard. After twilight the lightning flashed incessantly, so that the illumination was almost permanent. Thunder storms in America are more frequent, more severe, and often accompanied with greater rains than in Europe. A respectable gentleman of Delaware county, in this State, told me, that during a thunder storm there, he laid his watch on the table, and found that an hour and forty-eight minutes elapsed {10} without one cessation of sound. He thinks it probable that the peal lasted about two hours, as a few minutes must have passed before the idea of noting the time suggested itself.
July 13. This evening, after dark, I was surprised to see a large object standing in the centre of one of the prin-*
- ↑ From the Dutch Baas, meaning master.—Ed.
