parched corn
included among the presents Abigail made to David to appease his wrath,
as recorded in the _Bible_, 1 Samuel, xxv, 18. The _Vulgate_ translates
the Hebrew words _sein kali_ into _sata polentea_, which signify wheat,
roasted, or dried by fire.

[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF DUFOUR'S BOOK, EDITION OF 1693]

Pierre Etienne Louis Dumant, the Swiss Protestant minister and author,
is of the opinion that coffee (and not lentils, as others have supposed)
was the red pottage for which Esau sold his birthright; also that the
parched grain that Boaz ordered to be given Ruth was undoubtedly roasted
coffee berries.

Dufour mentions as a possible objection against coffee that "the use and
eating of beans were heretofore forbidden by Pythagoras," but intimates
that the coffee bean of Arabia is something different.

Scheuzer,[30] in his _Physique Sacree_, says "the Turks and the Arabs
make with the coffee bean a beverage which bears the same name, and many
persons use as a substitute the flour of roasted barley." From this we
learn that the coffee substitute is almost as old as coffee itself.

_Some Early Legends_

After medicine, the church. There are several Mohammedan traditions that
have persisted through the centuries, claiming for "the faithful" the
honor and glory of the first use of coffee as a beverage. One of these
relates how, about 1258 A.D., Sheik Omar, a disciple of Sheik Abou'l
hasan Schadheli, patron saint and legendary founder of Mocha, by chance
discovered the coffee drink at Ousab in Arabia, whither he had been
exiled for a certain moral remissness.

Facing starvation, he and his followers were forced to feed upon the
berries growing around them. And then, in the words of the faithful Arab
chronicle in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, "having nothing to eat
except coffee, they took of it and boiled it in a saucepan and drank of
the decoction." Former patients in Mocha who sought out the good
doctor-priest in his Ousab retreat, for physic with which to cure their
ills, were given some of this decoction, with beneficial effect. As a
result of the stories of its magical properties, carried back to the
city, Sheik Omar was invited to return in triumph to Mocha where the
governor caused to be built a monastery for him and his companions.

Another version of this Oriental legend gives it as follows:

The dervish Hadji Omar was driven by his enemies out of Mocha into
the desert, where t