of coffee_. The coffee being put into the water, the coffee-pot should be
covered up, and left for two hours surrounded with hot cinders, so as to
keep up the temperature, without making the liquor boil. Occasionally
stir it, and after two hours' infusion, remove it from the fire, and
allow it a quarter of an hour to settle, and when perfectly clear, decant
it. Isinglass, or hartshorn shavings, are sometimes used to clarify
coffee; but by this addition you lose a great portion of its delicious
aroma.

Coffee in England is generally _over-roasted_, and to this fault arise
all the inconveniences which are so often attributed to coffee, but which,
in reality, are produced by the imperfect modes of its preparation.--_From
the Coffee-Drinker's Manual, translated from the French_.


_Ivy_.

Attached to the officers' barracks at Winchester, is a very fine
specimen of ivy; its trunk has been severed off to a height of more than
two feet from the ground, yet it has for years continued in healthy
vegetation.--_Gard. Mag_.


_Parasite Sycamore_.

In Kinmel Park, Denbighshire, is an oak tree, which, twenty or thirty
years ago, lost one of its largest branches by the wind, and a partial
decay was the consequence; a key from a neighbouring sycamore fell into
the fracture, which, vegetating, has formed for the old mutilated oak a
new head. This parasite appears to have so completely seated itself, that,