and through the nostrils
reached the palate with anticipatory touch. It was sweetened with
dark, pungent syrup and was served black in a capacious bowl, as
though one could not drink too deeply of the elixir of life. Gerry
ate ravenously and sipped the coffee, at first sparingly, then
greedily.... Gerry set down the empty bowl with a sigh. The rusks
had been delicious. Before the coffee the name of nectar dwindled
to impotency. Its elixir rioted in his veins.

In the _Rosary_, Florence L. Barclay has a Scotch woman tell how she
makes coffee. She says:

Use a jug--it is not what you make it in; it is how ye make it. It
all hangs upon the word fresh--freshly roasted--freshly
ground--water freshly boiled. And never touch it with metal. Pop it
into an earthenware jug, pour in your boiling water straight upon
it, stir it with a wooden spoon, set it on the hob ten minutes to
settle; the grounds will all go to the bottom, though you might not
think it, and you pour it out, fragrant, strong and clear. But the
secret is, _fresh, fresh, fresh_, and don't stint your coffee.

Cyrus Townsend Brady's _The Corner in Coffee_ is "a thrilling romance of
the New York coffee market."

Coffee, Du Barry, and Louis XV figure in one scene of the story of _The
Moat with the Crimson Stains_, as told by Elizabeth W. Champney in her
_Romance of the Bourbon Chateaux_.[354] It tells of the German
apprentice Riesener, who assisted his master Oeben in designing for
Louis XV a beautiful desk with a secret drawer, which it took ten years
of unremitting industry to execute. At the end, Riesener was to be
accepted by his master as a partner and a son-in-law. Little Victoire,
who loved to sit in a punt and trail her doll in the waters of the
Bievre to see to what color its frock would be changed by the dyes of
the Gobelin factory, was then only five, and Madam Oeben twenty-three.
As the years rolled by, Riesener grew to love the mother and not the
daughter, who, meanwhile, shot up into a slim girl, not of her mother's
beauty, but of a loveliness all her own. Then there was a quarrel
because the young apprentice thought the master should have resented the
suggestion of M. Duplessis that his wife pose in the nude for the
statuettes which were to hold the sconces on the king's desk; and
Riesener left in a fine youthful frenzy, vowing he would never return
while the _maitre_ lived.