me time. When the blossom falls,
there springs from it a small fruit, green at first, red when ripe, and
under its flesh, instead of a stone, is the bean or berry we call
coffee. "It has but recently become known by Europeans that the leaves
of the coffee-plant contain the same essential principle for which the
berries are so much valued. In Sumatra, the natives scarcely use
anything else. The leaves are cured like tea. And the tree will produce
leaves over a much larger _habitat_ than it will berries." Should the
decoction of the leaves prove as agreeable as that of the berry, we
shall have a much cheaper coffee; though it remains to be proved that
they contain the essential oil as well as the cafeine.

The coffees of Java, Ceylon, and Mocha are most esteemed. The
quantities produced are quite limited. Manila and Arabia together give
less than 4,500 tons. Cuba yields 5,000 tons _per annum_; St. Domingo,
18,000; Ceylon and the British East Indies, 16,000; Java, 60,000; and
Brazil, 142,000. Yet, in 1774, a Franciscan friar, named Villaso,
cultivated a single coffee-tree in the garden of the convent of San
Antonio, in Brazil. In the estimates for 1853, we find that Great
Britain consumes 17,500 tons; France, 21,500; Germany, (Zollverein),
58,000; and the United States, about 90,000 tons. It is worth remarking
how small is the comparative consumption of tea in France. The
importation of tea for 1840 was only 264,000 kilogrammes (less than
600,000 pounds).

In Asia, coffee is drunk in a thick farinaceous mixture. With us the
cup of coffee is valued by its clearness. We generally drink it with
sugar and milk. The French with their meals use it as we do,--but after
dinner, invariably without milk (_cafe noir_). And we would suggest to
the nervous and the dyspeptic, who do not want to resign the luxury of
coffee, or to whom its effects as an arrester of metamorphosis are
beneficial, that when drunk on a full stomach its effects upon the
nerves are much less felt than when taken fasting or with the meals.

In the consumption of tea the United States rank next to Great Britain.
Tea is the chief import from China into this country. The tea-plant
flourishes from the equator to the forty-fifth parallel of latitude;
though it grows best between the twenty-third and the twenty-fifth
parallels. Probably it can be successfully cultivated in our Southern
States. Mr. Fortune considers that all varieties of tea are derived
from the sam