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invoice shows 1584 packs; a single Pennsylvania importation was valued at forty-four pounds sterling. We know that cards were distributed and sold in stores from Portsmouth and Albany to Charleston and as far back as the Shenandoah Valley, where Daniel Morgan, later a major general under Washington, spent his hilarious youth, drinking rum, playing cards, and running up gambling debts. From these facts we can appreciate what Peter du Bois meant when he wrote of his days at Wilmington: "I live very much retired for want of a social set, who will drink claret and smoke tobacco till four in the morning; the gentlemen of this town might be so if they pleased, but an intollerable itch for gaming prevails in all companies. This I conceive is the bane of society and therefore I shun the devotees to cards and pass my hours chiefly at home with my pipe and some agreeable author." Henry Laurens, a merchant, mentions the case of a young man in his countinghouse, who had given his note to a card sharper and was with difficulty rescued from "the gaping pickpockets" who had "followed him like a shadow." Gaming for high stakes was a wellknown failing of the Vassall family, and because of his love for reckless play Henry undoubtedly

hastened his bankruptcy. But this vice was not confined to the quality, for negroes and street boys, from Salem to Charleston, gambled in the streets at "pawpaw" and dice; and "huzzlecap" or pitching pennies was so common as to call forth protests and grand jury presentments in an effort to abate what was justly deemed a public nuisance.

The use of tobacco was general in every class of societ and in every locality. Even women of the lower classes smoked, for there is a reference to one who had a fit, dropped a "coal" from her pipe, and was burned to death. For smoking and chewing, tobacco was either cut and dried or else was made up into "pigtails," as the small twisted ropes or braids were called, though "paper tobacco," put up in paper packages, was coming into favor. Tobacco was smoked only in pipes, either the fine long glazed pipes of clay imported from England and commonly called "churchwardens," or in Indian pipes of red pipestone, often beautifully carved. Probably the Dutch and Germans continued to use in America their old-country porcelain pipes with pendulous stems, and it is more than likely that wooden and cob pipes were in fashion in the rural districts. Cigars were not known in America until after 1800. Though in early advertisements snuff

was recommended as medicinal, the taking of snuff came to be as much a matter of social custom as of pleasure: to the rich merchant and planter the snuffbox was an article of decoration and its proper use a matter of etiquette. Snuff was usually imported in canisters and bladders and occasionally in bottles; but there were snuff factories in Philadelphia and New York, and the father of Gilbert Stuart was a snuff maker in Rhode Island.

In addition to the diversion to be obtained from drinking, smoking, and gambling, which may be called the representative colonial vices, there were plenty of amusements and sports which absorbed the attention of the colonists, North and South. The woods and waters offered endless opportunity in summer for fishing and in winter for such timehonored pursuits as hunting, fowling, trapping, and fishing through the ice. John Rowe of Boston was a famous and untiring fisherman; thousands of other enthusiasts played the part of colonial Isaak Waltons; and there was a fishing club on the Schuylkill as early as 1732. Fishing rods, lines, sinkers, and hooks were commonly imported from England.

The woods were full of such big game as elk, moose, black bears, deer, lynxes, pumas or panthers (sometimes called "tigers"), gray wolves,

and wildcats; and there was an abundance of such smaller animals as foxes, beavers, martens or fishers, otters, weasels, minks, raccoons, and muskrats or "musquashes," as they are still called in rural New England. These animals were killed without regard for the future of the species. Sometimes the settlers even resorted to the wasteful and unsportsmanlike method of burning the forests, so that the larger animals began to disappear from the Eastern regions. Buffaloes, for instance, were formerly found in North Carolina as far east as Craven County, but in the upcountry of South Carolina it was said that three or four men with dogs could kill twenty of these animals in a day. In this same State the last elk had been killed as early as 1781. Nor was the case otherwise with the smaller game and fowl. Wooden decoys and camouflaged boats aided in the destruction of the ducks; caged pigeons were used to attract the wilder members of the species, which were shot in large numbers, particularly in New England; and so unlicensed had the destruction of the heath hen become in New York that in 1708 the province determined to protect its game by providing for a closed season. Thus early did the movement for conservation begin in America.

The sport of hunting led to the improvement of firearms and to the introduction of the English custom of fox-hunting. Guns, which had formerly been clumsy and unreliable, were now perfected to such a degree that we find references to a gun which would repeat six times, a chambered gun, a double-barreled gun, and a "neat birding piece, mounted with brass." Rifles, which were common, were used for target practice as well as for hunting. Rifle matches were arranged in Virginia on muster days, and in Connecticut shooting at a mark for a money prize was a favorite diversion on training days. Both the Virginians and the New Yorkers were skillful fox-hunters and very fond of riding to hounds, for which they imported their foxes from England.

In the South the two leading sports were horse racing and cockfighting, though the former was an absorbing passion in all the colonies. Cockfighting - so well illustrated in Hogarth's famous engraving, which may well have been on many a colonial wall after 1760 was a sport which had been brought to America from England and which had lost none of its brutality in the transfer. From Annapolis to Charleston the local rivalry was intense. We read, for example, that a main of cocks

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