handle when filled with punch, was passed up and down as
freely as though it were a loving-cup, and all drank from its brim. At
college tables, and even at tavern boards, where table neighbors might
be strangers, the flowing bowl and foaming tankard was passed serenely
from one to another, and replenished to pass again.

Leather was perhaps the most curious material used. Pitchers, bottles,
and drinking-cups were made of it. Great jugs of heavy black leather,
waxed and bound, and tipped with silver, were used to hold metheglin,
ale, and beer, and were a very substantial, and at times a very handsome
vessel. The finest examples I have ever seen are here represented. The
stitches and waxed thread at the base and on the handles can plainly be
perceived. They are bound with a rich silver band, and have a silver
shield bearing a date of gift to Samuel Brenton in 1778; but they are
probably a century older than that date. They are the property by
inheritance of Miss Rebecca Shaw, aged ninety-six years, of Wickford,
Rhode Island.

The use of these great leather jacks, in a clumsier form than here
shown, led to the amusing mistake of a French traveller, that the
English drank their ale out of their boots. These leather jugs were
commonly called black jacks, and the larger ones were bombards. Giskin
was still another and rarer name.

Drinking-cups were sometimes made of horn. A handsome one has been used
since colonial days on Long Island for "quince drink," a potent mixture
of hot rum, sugar, and quince marmalade, or preserves. It has a base of
silver, a rim of silver, and a cover of horn tipped with silver. A
stirrup-cup of horn, tipped with silver, was used to "speed the parting
guest." Occasionally the whole horn, in true mediaeval fashion, was used
as a drinking-cup. Often they were carved with considerable skill, as
the beautiful ones in the collection of Mr. A. G. Richmond, of
Canajoharie, New York.

Gourds were plentiful on the farm, and gathered with care, that the
hard-shelled fruit might be shaped into simple drinking-cups. In
Elizabeth's time silver cups were made in the shape of these gourds. The
ships that brought "lemmons and raysins of the sun" from the tropics to
the colonists, also brought cocoanuts. Since the thirteenth century the
shells of cocoanuts have been mounted with silver feet and "covercles"
in a goblet shape, and been much sought after by Englishmen. Mounted in
pewter, and sometimes in silver, o