Alice Morse Earle was a late 19th century American historian and author. Her stories focused on colonial life in New England. She is known for her sociological detail, which makes her work invaluable to modern sociologists. In this 1894 volume she covers such diverse topics as child life, courtship and marriage customs, domestic service, home interiors, supplies of the larder, old colonial drinks and drinkers, travel, tavern, and turnpike, holidays and festivals, sports and diversions, books and book-makers, artifices of handsomeness, raiment and vesture, doctors and patients, and funeral and burial customs