them into
moulds. Used in Siberia and Mongolia, where it also serves
as a medium of exchange. The Mongols place the bricks,
when testing the quality, on the head, and try to pull
downward over the eyes. They reject the brick as worthless
if it breaks or bends.

[Illustration of Japanese woman]

_TEA LEAVES_

BY JOHN ERNEST MCCANN

According to Henry Thomas Buckle, the author of "The History
of Civilization in England," who was the master of eighteen
languages, and had a library of 22,000 volumes, with an income
of $75,000 a year, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1850 (he died in
1860, at the age of thirty-nine), tea making and drinking were,
or are, what Wendell Phillips would call lost arts. He thought
that, when it came to brewing tea, the Chinese philosophers
were not living in his vicinity. He distinctly wrote that, until he
showed her how, no woman of his acquaintance could make a
decent cup of tea. He insisted upon a warm cup, and even spoon,
and saucer. Not that Mr. Buckle ever sipped tea from a saucer.
Of course, he was right in insisting upon those above-mentioned
things, for tea-things, like a tea-party, should be in sympathy
with the tea, not antagonistic to it. Still, not always; for, on one
memorable occasion, in the little town of Boston, the greatest
tea-party in history was anything but sympathetic. But let that
pass.

Emperor Kien Lung wrote, 200 years or more ago, for the benefit
of his children, just before he left the Flowery Kingdom
for a flowerier:

"Set a tea-pot over a slow fire; fill it with cold water; boil it long
enough to turn a lobster red; pour it on the quantity of tea in a
porcelain vessel; allow it to remain on the leaves until the vapor
evaporates, then sip it slowly, and all your sorrows will follow
the vapor."

He says nothing about milk or sugar. But, to me, tea without
sugar is poison, as it is with milk. I can drink one cup of tea, or
coffee, with sugar, but without milk, and feel no ill effects; but
if I put milk in either tea or coffee, I am as sick as a defeated
candidate for the Presidency. That little bit of fact is written as a
hint to many who are ill without knowing why they are, after
drinking tea, or coffee, with milk in it. I don't think that milk
was ever intended for coffee or tea. Why should it be? Who was
the first to color tea and coffee with milk? It may have been a
mad prince, in the presence of his