rounds. If it
stands too long, or is boiled, more indeed is got out of it, but an
astringent, disagreeable drink is the result. The boiling of coffee
extracts all its oil and alkaloid too, and, when it is drunk with the
grounds, allows the whole nutriment to be available. Even when
strained, it is clearly more economical than tea."

Roasted coffee is a powerful deodorizer, also. This fact is familiarly
illustrated by its use in bar-rooms; and it might be made available for
other purposes.

The cost and vast consumption of coffee and tea have made the
inducements to adulterate them very great. The most harmless form, is
the selling of coffee-grounds and old tea-leaves for fresh coffee and
tea. There is no security in buying coffee ready-ground; and we always
look at the neat little packages of it in the grocers' windows with a
shudder. Beans and peas we have certainly tasted in ground coffee. The
most fashionable adulteration, and one even openly vaunted as
economical and increasing the richness of the beverage, is with the
root of the wild endive, or chicory. Roasted and ground, it closely
resembles coffee. It contains, however, none of the virtues of the
latter, and has nothing to recommend it but its cheapness. The leaves
of the ash and the sloe are used to adulterate tea. They merely dilute
its virtues, without adding any that are worth the exchange.

The coffee-tree is a native of Ethiopia or Abyssinia. Bruce tells us
that the nomad tribes of that part of Africa carry with them, in
crossing deserts on hostile expeditions, only balls of pulverized
roasted coffee mixed with butter. One of these as large as a
billiard-ball keeps them, they say, in strength and spirits during a
whole day's fatigue, better than a loaf of bread or a meal of meat. The
Arabs gave the first written account of coffee, and first used it in
the liquid form. Burton, in his "Anatomy of Melancholy," mentions it as
early as 1621. "The Turks have a drink they call coffee, (for they use
no wine,)--so named of a berry as black as soot, and as bitter, which
they sip up as warm as they can suffer, because they find by experience
that that kind of drink, so used, helpeth digestion and procureth
alacrity."

The coffee-tree reaches a height of from six to twelve feet, and when
fully grown much resembles the apple-tree. Its leaves are green all the
year; and in almost all seasons, blossoms and green and ripe fruit may
be seen on the same tree at the sa