after-dinner cup.

At the beginning of the last year of his life, he fell into a
custom of taking, immediately after dinner, a cup of coffee,
especially on those days when it happened that I was of his party.
And such was the importance that he attached to his little pleasure
that he would even make a memorandum beforehand, in the blank paper
book that I had given him, that on the next day I was to dine with
him, and consequently "_that there was to be coffee_." Sometimes in
the interest of conversation, the coffee was forgotten, but not for
long. He would remember and with the querulousness of old age and
infirm health would demand that coffee be brought "upon the spot."
Arrangements had always been made in advance, however; the coffee
was ground, and the water was boiling: and in the very moment the
word was given, the servant shot in like an arrow and plunged the
coffee into the water. All that remained, therefore, was to give it
time to boil up. But this trifling delay seemed unendurable to
Kant. If it were said, "Dear Professor, the coffee will be brought
up in a moment," he would say, _"Will be!_ There's the rub, that it
only _will_ be." Then he would quiet himself with a stoical air,
and say, "Well, one can die after all; it is but dying; and in the
next world, thank God, there is no drinking of coffee and
consequently no waiting for it."

When at length the servant's steps were heard upon the stairs, he
would turn round to us, and joyfully call out: "Land, land! my dear
friends, I see land."

Thackeray (1811-1863) must have suffered many tea and coffee
disappointments. In the _Kickleburys on the Rhine_ he asks: "Why do they
always put mud into coffee aboard steamers? Why does the tea generally
taste of boiled boots?"

In _Arthur's_, A. Neil Lyons has preserved for all time the atmosphere
of the London coffee stall. "I would not," he says, "exchange a night at
Arthur's for a week with the brainiest circle in London." The book is a
collection of short stories. As already recorded, Harold Chapin
dramatized this picturesque London institution in _The Autocrat of the
Coffee Stall_.

In General Horace Porter's _Campaigning with Grant_, we have three
distinct coffee incidents within fifty-odd pages; or explicitly, see
pages 47, 56, 101; where, deep in the fiercest snarls of The Wilderness
campa