to be
well provided for, either by an advantageous post, or a sufficient
quantity of land. In the houses of persons of quality likewise,
there are pages, called _Itchoglans_, who receive the coffee from
the stewards, and present it to the company with surprising
dexterity and address, as soon as the master of the family makes a
sign for that purpose, which is all the language they ever speak to
them.... The coffee is served on salvers without feet, made
commonly of painted or varnished wood, and sometimes of silver.
They hold from 15 to 20 china dishes each; and such as can afford
it have these dishes half set in silver ... the dish may be easily
held with the thumb below and two fingers on the upper edge.

[Illustration: SERVING COFFEE TO A GUEST.--AFTER A DRAWING IN AN EARLY
EDITION OF "ARABIAN NIGHTS"]

In his _Relation of a Journey to Constantinople in 1657_, Nicholas
Rolamb, the Swedish traveler and envoy to the Ottoman Porte, gives us
this early glimpse of coffee in the home life of the Turks:[40]

This [coffee] is a kind of pea that grows in _Egypt_, which the
_Turks_ pound and boil in water, and take it for pleasure instead
of brandy, sipping it through the lips boiling hot, persuading
themselves that it consumes catarrhs, and prevents the rising of
vapours out of the stomach into the head. The drinking of this
coffee and smoking tobacco (for tho' the use of tobacco is
forbidden on pain of death, yet it is used in _Constantinople_ more
than any where by men as well as women, tho' secretly) makes up all
the pastime among the _Turks_, and is the only thing they treat one
another with; for which reason all people of distinction have a
particular room next their own, built on purpose for it, where
there stands a jar of coffee continually boiling.

It is curious to note that among several misconceptions that were held
by some of the peoples of the Levant was one that coffee was a promoter
of impotence, although a Persian version of the Angel Gabriel legend
says that Gabriel invented it to restore the Prophet's failing
metabolism. Often in Turkish and Arabian literature, however, we meet
with the suggestion that coffee drinking makes for sterility and
barrenness, a notion that modern medicine has exploded; for now we know
that coffee stimulates the racial instinct, for which tobacco is a
sedative.