nse.

Every coffee-roasting and coffee-serving place shall be closed, and
dealers and hotel-keepers are to get rid of their coffee supplies
in four weeks. It is only permitted to obtain from the outside
coffee for one's own consumption in lots of fifty pounds. House
fathers and mothers shall not allow their work people, especially
their washing and ironing women, to prepare coffee, or to allow it
in any manner under a penalty of one hundred dollars.

All officials and government employees, to avoid a penalty of one
hundred gold florins, are called upon closely to follow and to keep
a watchful eye over this decree. To the one who reports such
persons as act contrary to this decree shall be granted one-half of
the said money fine with absolute silence as to his name.

This decree was solemnly read in the pulpits, and was published besides
in the usual places and ways. There immediately followed a course of
"telling-ons", and of "coffee-smellings", that led to many bitter
enmities and caused much unhappiness in the Duchy of Westphalia.
Apparently the purpose of the archduke was to prevent persons of small
means from enjoying the drink, while those who could afford to purchase
fifty pounds at a time were to be permitted the indulgence. As was to be
expected, the scheme was a complete failure.

While the king of Prussia exploited his subjects by using the state
coffee monopoly as a means of extortion, the duke of Wuerttemberg had a
scheme of his own. He sold to Joseph Suess-Oppenheimer, an unscrupulous
financier, the exclusive privilege of keeping coffee houses in
Wuerttemberg. Suess-Oppenheimer in turn sold the individual coffee-house
licenses to the highest bidders, and accumulated a considerable fortune.
He was the first "coffee king."

But coffee outlived all these unjust slanders and cruel taxations of too
paternal governments, and gradually took its rightful place as one of
the favorite beverages of the German people.

[Illustration: KOLSCHITZKY, THE GREAT BROTHER-HEART, IN HIS BLUE BOTTLE
CAFE, VIENNA, 1683

From a lithograph after the painting by Franz Schams, entitled "Das
Erste (Kulczycki'sche) Kaffee Haus"]

CHAPTER IX

TELLING HOW COFFEE CAME TO VIENNA

_The romantic adventure of Franz George Kolschitzky, who carried "a
message to Garcia" through the enemy's lines and won for himself
the honor of being the first to teach