Page:Nye's History of the USA.djvu/137

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CONTRASTS WITH THE PRESENT DAY.
133

day and the days they had to go and see their "sick sisters."

Some cloth-weaving was indulged in, and homespun was the principal material used for clothing. Mrs. Washington had sixteen spinning-wheels in her house. Her husband often wore homespun while at home, and on rainy days sometimes placed a pair of homemade trousers of the barn-door variety in the Presidential chair.

Money was very scarce, and ammunition very valuable. In 1635 musket-balls passed for farthings, and to see a New England peasant making change with the red brother at thirty yards was a common and delightful scene.

The first press was set up in Cambridge in 1639, with the statement that it "had come to stay." Books printed in those days were mostly sermons filled with the most comfortable assurance that the man who let loose his intellect and allowed it to disbelieve some very difficult things would be essentially——well, I hate to say right here in a book what would happen to him.

BOOKS FILLED WITH ASSURANCES OF
FUTURE DAMNATION.

The first daily paper, called The Federal Orrery, was issued three hundred years after Columbus discovered America. It was not popular, and