ly, before you can count
ninety, build together a chair or a bedstead. I have often slept soundly
and safely on bedsteads made of these thin leaf-sticks no bigger around
than a child's finger. The sticks are full of "spring" so one does not
need a wire mattress, nor have I ever known one of them, if made honestly,
to become a _folding bed_ under a restless sleeper as they say happens
sometimes in New York hotels!

Although the old man in our picture is waited on by the younger Arab (who
is perhaps the keeper of the cafe), yet I know he is not rich. Do you
notice his toil-worn hands and the patch on the shoulder of his long
overcoat? I fancy too his pretty vest, so carefully buttoned by more than
a dozen cloth buttons, is a little torn on one side; nor has he a fine
girdle like the rich shopkeepers.

[Illustration: SABBACH-KUM BIL KHEIR!]

Extremes meet in the picture and three countries widely apart on the map
are brought close together. Of course, you know the coffee is the real
Yemen article, which coming first from Mocha on the Red Sea, is still
called by that Arabian name. The curious pipe with its round bottom,
carved head-piece and long stem, is used everywhere in Arabia and is
generally called _"nargeelie,"_ which is the Indian name for cocoanut. The
bowl of the pipe is in fact an empty cocoanut shell; the stem once grew in
the jungle and perhaps tigers brushed past it; now it is pierced to draw
smoke.

The curious pipe is from India, the tobacco first came from America but
the coffee is Arabian. Let us listen to the story of the cup of coffee: In
a book published in 1566 by an Arab scholar on the virtues of coffee it is
stated that a knowledge of coffee was first brought to Arabia from
Abyssinia about the year 1400 by a pious man whose tomb is still venerated
in Yemen. The knowledge of coffee spread from Yemen in south Arabia over
the whole world. In 1690 Van Hoorne, a general of the Dutch East India
company, received a few coffee seeds from the Arabs at Mocha and planted
them in Batavia on the island of Java. In this way Mocha coffee has become
the mother of Java and of all other kinds of coffee sold at your grocers'.
Nothing can be more beautiful than the green hills and fertile gardens in
the Arabian coffee country. The coffee berry grows on an evergreen tree of
about eighteen feet high; its leaves are a beautiful dark, shining green
and the blossom of the tree is pure white with a most delicate and
fragr