Falmouth Gazette and Weekly Advertiser · 23 February 1785

CP-1785-001

Vinegar and Water sweetened with sugar or molasses

Scan 860 × 507 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

4. Vinegar and Water sweetened with sugar or molasses, is the best drink that can be contrived in warm weather. I beg leave to recommend this wholesome drink to reapers in a particular manner. It is pleasant and cooling.

Vinegar and water consti…tuted the only drink of the soldiers of the Roman republic, and it is well known that they marched, and fought in a warm climate, and beneath a load of arms that weighed sixty pounds. Boaz a wealthy farmer in Palestine, we find treated his reapers with nothing but bread dipped into vinegar.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 5.6 to 10 times magnification on 25 October 2026. The long s is set throughout this page and has been transcribed as a modern s. No character the type sets as a long s has been read as an f, and no f has been read as a long s; where the two could not be told apart the word was left unread rather than guessed. The clipping is a crop of body type. It carries no masthead, no folio line, no running head and no page number, so neither the publication name nor the printing date can be confirmed from the page itself. Both come from the hand-typed slide label and are recorded here unchanged. The clipping has no headline and no dateline: it is item 4 of a numbered list of advice on harvest drinks, and the headline field holds the item’s own opening words. Nothing has been composed to fill it. The elision marked in “consti…tuted” is one line of type lost to a crease at the column turn; the word is certain from both halves and the break is marked rather than silently closed. The clipping begins mid-sentence at the top (“and more generous by a few glasses of wine.”) and ends mid-sentence at the foot (“Say not that---spirits have become necessary in harvest from habit and”), so the excerpt stops at the last complete sentence. “Boaz a wealthy farmer in Palestine” is set without a comma after Boaz and is kept as printed; the triple hyphen in “that---spirits” is the paper’s. This clipping has no internal date evidence of any kind.

Context added by this archive

Palestine here is the Book of Ruth, not a place anyone lives in: Boaz and his reapers, cited by an American agricultural writer as a precedent for giving farm labourers vinegar instead of rum. The whole contemporary country is absent from the sentence that names it.

Cite this clipping