Perchance the violets o'er my dust
Will half betray their buried trust,
And say, their blue eyes full of dew,
"She loved you better than you knew."

* * * * *


COFFEE AND TEA.

Facts, and figures representing facts, are recognized as stubborn
adversaries when arrayed singly in an argument; in aggregate, and in
generalizations drawn from aggregates, they are often unanswerable.

To the nervous reader it may seem a startling, and to the reformatory
one a melancholy fact, that every soul in these United States has
provided for him annually, and actually consumes, personally or by
proxy, between six and seven pounds of coffee, and a pound of tea;
while in Great Britain enough of these two luxuries is imported and
drunk to furnish every inhabitant, patrician or pauper, with over a
pound of the former, and two of the latter.

Coffee was brought to Western Europe, by way of Marseilles, in 1644,
and made its first appearance in London about 1652. In 1853, the
estimated consumption of coffee in Great Britain, according to official
returns, was thirty-five million pounds, and in the United States, one
hundred and seventy-five million pounds, a year.

Tea, in like manner, from its first importation into England by the
Dutch East India Company, early in the seventeenth century, and from a