The Canton mail. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 18??-1882, 1875-12-11
Tea and Coffee.

! Lea ana COHeo n1aOe THEIR n1OueSt
first appearance in Great Britain before
our continental neighbors had tasted
the fragrance of the Mocha berry, or
inhaled the aroma of the Chinese leaf
Next to the English the Dutch are the
chief European consumers of tea; and
after the Dutch, in this respect, come
the Russians. Tea, in becoming cheap,
has sensibly deteriorated in quality;
and, indeed, the rarer varieties were
always estimated among the Chinese
themselves at prices which to us would
appear fabulous or fantastic. 1t may
be added that the colorless 1.Manda-
rim" leaf, which is weighed out with
trembling care, as though it were gold
dust, would not please the majority of
barbarian buyers. Belgium is the
great coffee-drinking country of the
West, as Morocco is the one African
kingdom where tea is in demand. In
France, also, coffee is held in almost SUI
perstitious reverence for its powers as
stimulant. The French soldier, on a
campaign, regards his early ration of
black coffee as much as necessity of
life rs he does the loaf of ammunition
bread that he straps to his knapsack,
and officers of high rank have been
known to pronounce it "the life of the
army"
Broadly speaking, the western Mo-
hammedan nations adhere to coffee,
while the extreme east-including not
merely China, but Japan, Thibet and
Tartary- faithful to tea.
Chocolate is the drink of Central and
cocoa of Southern America. The
Polish peasant-whose climate does
not lend itself to wine growing, as do
those of his neighbors of Hungary and
Wallachi, and who has not the Russian
moujik's liking for brick tea, or for the
sour beer called quass-is scarcely cog
infant of any beverage save fiery corn
brandy. The consumption of beer
throughout the Flemish speaking prov
inces of Belgium is very great; but so
soon as we mingle with a race whose
language is the Walloon dialect of old
French, we find that beer gives place
to gin. The cider-drinking districts of
Normandy and Brittany aresurrounded
by a belt of country in which the peo-
pie set small store by the apple wine,
so dear to the dwellers on the coast.
In spite of the very considerable
yield of French, German and italian
vineyards, there are undeniably more
beer drinkers on the continent of Eu-
rope than consumers of wine. The
merits of the beverage vary much more
than seems to warrant the degree of
favor with which it is regarded. Thus
the beer of Belgiilm-which, with the
one exception of the so-called barley
beer, is brewed from wheat of inferior
quality, from oats and rye-is neither
very palatable nor very wholesome
while it may confidently he pronounced
that throughout the south, at least, of
Germany, all beer is excellent in quail
ty, those of Vienna and of Munich de-
servedly taking the highest rank. Even
in Italy the beer of Milan completes, |
not unsuccessfully, with the wine of the
Tuscan valleys and the Lombard plains,
and Spain and Portugal, perhaps the
most sober of European countries, are
the only ones in which malt finds no
patrons. The British Empire in India
may, in a measure, be said to be
founded on beer, since the most strin-
gent economist would scarcely propose
to suppress the heavy annual outlay for
that bitter ale without which the health
of European troops stationed there
could not be preserved.