ngratulate the actors or to express in fistic combat
their disgust over the play or the acting. It was not uncommon, too, for
eggs to be thrown from the gallery, and both this and the rushing upon
the stage was expressly forbidden at length by the authorities of
several towns. Every class in colonial days seems to have found its own
peculiar way of enjoying itself, whether by fascinating through beauty
and brilliance the supposedly sophisticated French dukes, or by pelting
barn-storming actors with eggs and other missiles.

The limits of one volume force us to omit many an interesting social
feature of colonial days, especially of the cities. How much might be
said of the tavern life of New York City and the vicinity, how much of
those famous resorts, Vauxhall and Ranelagh, where many a device to
arouse the wonder of the fashionable guests was invented and
constructed! Then, too, much might be related about the popular "fish
dinners" of New York and Annapolis, the horse races in Virginia and
Maryland, the militia parades and pageants at Charleston. But sufficient
has been offered to prove that the prevalent idea of a dreary atmosphere
that lasted throughout the entire colonial period is false; certainly
during the eighteenth century at least, the average American colonist
obtained as much pleasure out of life as the rushing, ever-busy American
of our own day.

_XVI. Strange Customs in Louisiana_

It should be noted that most of these pleasures were in the main
healthful and normal, and, in the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon colonists at
least, made a most commendable contrast to the recreations indulged in
by the French colonists of Louisiana. There can be but little doubt that
during the last years of the eighteenth century moral conditions in this
far southern colony might have been far better. Although Louis XIV, the
Grand Monarch, had been dead practically a century, he had left as a
heritage a passion for pleasure and merry-making that was causing the
French nobility to revel in profligacy and vice. It must be admitted
that many of the French colonists in America were apt pupils of their
European relatives, while the Creole population, born of at least an
unmoral union, was, to say the least, in no wise a hindrance to
pleasures of a rather lax character. Then, too, there was the negro, or
more accurately the mulatto, who if he or, again more accurately, _she_
had any moral scruples, had little opportunity as a slave o