Crossword-Solution: SWITCHEL 8 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 16

What care I, if, unaware that my chimney, as a free citizen of this free land, stands upon an independent basis of its own, people passing it, wonder how such a brick-kiln, as they call it, is supported upon mere joists and rafters? What care I? I will give a traveler a cup of switchel, if he want it; but am I bound to supply him with a sweet taste? Men of cultivated minds see, in my old house and chimney, a goodly old elephant-and-castle.

Captain Poke said he thought, on the whole, he was perfectly safe, as he was much accustomed to the use of the word “switchel”; but he thought it might be very well to go before some consul as soon as the ship anchored, and enter a formal protest of our ignorance of all these niceties, lest some advantage should be taken of us by the reptiles of lawyers; that he in particular was not a bachelor, and that Miss Poke would be as furious as a hurricane, if by accident, he should happen to forget himself.

Water, thickened with oatmeal, or made spicy with vinegar and ginger, "switchel," as it is called, served to quench the thirst.

Switchel was a drink similar to beverige, but when served out to sailors was strengthened by a little vinegar and rum.

Switchel, I may explain to my young readers, is a drink much used by farmers, and those who have to work in hot fields often take a jug of it along, especially if they are far from good drinking water.