ign we are treated to:

General Grant, slowly sipping his coffee ... a full ration of that
soothing army beverage.... The general made rather a singular meal
preparatory to so exhausting a day as that which was to follow. He
took a cucumber, sliced it, poured some vinegar over it, and
partook of nothing else except a cup of strong coffee.... The
general seemed in excellent spirits, and was even inclined to be
jocose. He said to me, "We have just had our coffee, and you will
find some left for you." ... I drank it with the relish of a
shipwrecked mariner.

One of the first immediate supplies General Sherman desired from
Wilmington, on reaching Fayetteville and lines of communication in
March, 1865, was, expressly, coffee; does he not say so himself, on page
297 of the second volume of his _Memoirs_?

Still more expressly, towards the close of his _Memoirs_, and among
final recommendations, the fruit of his experiences in that whole vast
war, General Sherman says this for coffee:

Coffee has become almost indispensable, though many substitutes
were found for it, such as Indian corn, roasted, ground and boiled
as coffee, the sweet potato, and the seed of the okra plant
prepared in the same way. All these were used by the people of the
South, who for years could procure no coffee, but I noticed that
the women always begged of us real coffee, which seemed to satisfy
a natural yearning or craving more powerful than can be accounted
for on the theory of habit. Therefore I would always advise that
the coffee and sugar ration be carried along, even at the expense
of bread, for which there are many substitutes.

George Agnew Chamberlain's novel _Home_ contains a vivid description of
coffee-making on an old plantation, and could only have been written by
a devoted lover of this drink. Gerry Lansing, the American, has escaped
drowning in the river, and is now lost in the Brazilian forest. He finds
his way at last to an old plantation house:

A stove was built into the masonry, and a cavernous oven gaped from
the massive wall. At the stove was an old negress, making coffee
with shaky deliberation.... The girl and the wrinkled old woman
made him sit down at the table, and then placed before him crisp
rusks of mandioc flour and steaming coffee whose splendid aroma
triumphed over the sordidness of the scene