andria and Cairo, the
approach to the native coffee house is as dirty and as odorous as ever.
Coffee is always served in all business transactions. Nowadays, the
Egyptian women chew gum and the men smoke cigarettes, French department
stores offer bargain sales, and the hotels advertise tea dances; but the
Egyptian coffee drink is still the tiny cup of coffee grounds and sugar
that it was three hundred years ago, when sugar was first used to
sweeten coffee in Cairo.

[Illustration: COFFEE SERVICE AT A BARBER SHOP IN CAIRO]

In Portuguese East Africa, the natives prepare and drink coffee after
the approved African native fashion, but the white population follows
European customs. In the Union of South Africa, Dutch and English
customs prevail in making and serving the beverage.

_Manners and Customs in Asia_

"Arabia the Happy" deserves to be called "the Blest", if only for its
gift of coffee to the world. Here it was that the virtues of the drink
were first made known; here the plant first received intensive
cultivation. After centuries of habitual use of the beverage, we find
the Arabs, now as then, one of the strongest and noblest races of the
world, mentally superior to most of them, generally healthy, and growing
old so gracefully that the faculties of the mind seldom give way sooner
than those of the body. They are an ever living earnest of the
healthfulness of coffee.

The Arabs are proverbially hospitable; and the symbol of their
hospitality for a thousand years has been the great drink of
democracy--coffee. Their very houses are built around the cup of human
brotherhood. William Wallace,[366] writing on Arabian philosophy,
manners, and customs, says:

The principal feature of an Arab house is the _kahwah_ or coffee
room. It is a large apartment spread with mats, and sometimes
furnished with carpets and a few cushions. At one end is a small
furnace or fireplace for preparing coffee. In this room the men
congregate; here guests are received, and even lodged; women rarely
enter it, except at times when strangers are unlikely to be
present. Some of these apartments are very spacious and supported
by pillars; one wall is usually built transversely to the compass
direction of the _Ka'ba_ (sacred shrine of Mecca). It serves to
facilitate the performance of prayer by those who may happen to be
in the _kahwah_ at the appointed times.

Several rounds of coff