Over the Coffee Cups.

       BLESSINGS on the man who invented sleep," exclaimed rare old Sancho Panza, in one of his moments of inspiration. Blessed, also, be the man who invented Coffee!

"Gentle is the grape's deep cluster,
But the wine's a wayward child;
Nectar this, of meeker lustre,
This, the cup that 'draws it mild.'
Deeply drink its stream divine,
Fill the cup, but not with wine."

      But who was the man who invented, or discovered Coffee? Like most things whose history dates back a thousand years, its origin is the subject of dispute. The Persians hold that Mohammed was taught to drink Coffee by no less a personage than the Angel Gabriel.

       THE Arabs say that it was discovered by a pious dervish, who in the intervals between his religious devotions, sometimes tended a flock of goats, and who noticed that after they had eaten of the leaves of a certain shrub, they jumped and gamboled and bleated in the most festive manner, and becoming curious as to the cause of their singular happiness, tried some experiments with the shrub himself, and became as merry as were his goats. Following up his new discovery with repetitions of the dose, he was charged by some of his brethren with the deadly sin of drinking intoxicants; but under the influence of the stimulant he waxed so eloquent that he induced his accusers to try a little themselves with such fascinating effect that he not only saved his own life, but was hailed as a great public benefactor.
      Possibly it might have been this same pious gentleman who is credited with bringing Coffee from Abyssinia into Arabia. If so, his name--what there was of it--has been handed down to posterity. It was Djesmal-eddin-Ebu-Agou-Alfagger.

       AMONG the first uses Coffee was put to, was to keep Mohammedans awake during their prolonged religious services; but as such aid to devotion was not considered orthodox by the more conservative priests, it was held by them to be an intoxicant, and certain passages in the Koran were interpreted as forbidding its use. In Constantantinople the coffee houses had a depressing influence on the attendance at the mosques, and there, also, this most innocent, exhilarating and nourishing product was for a time under the ban.

       COFFEE was introduced into England in 1652 by Pasqua Rossie, a Greek girl of great beauty, who was brought to that country, as a servant, by Mr. Edwards, a merchant. The new drink became so popular among his acquaintances, who flocked to the house, that in sheer self-defense he was compelled to marry the beautiful Greek to his coachman, who established the first coffee-house ever set up on English soil.
      Twenty-five years later Charles II. sought to suppress the coffee-houses because of the numerous schemes against the government concocted there, and for many years coffee and politics were closely mixed. Pope makes one of the few poetical allusions to the drink, as that

"Coffee which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes."

      In France, the Turkish minister first popularized the drink in the reign of Louis XIV., by treating visitors to it with most imposing ceremony. Black slaves in bright turbans and sky-blue gowns, entered the room, holding upon a small silk cushion a costly cup of finest porcelain into which they poured from a larger cup of gold filigree, the precious fluid, and on their knees, offered it to the guests whom their lord would honor. The black draught became amazingly popular, and coffee-houses sprang up all over Paris, although the cost of the berry, at that time, was $40 a pound. These houses became the favorite meeting places of artists and scholars, and coffee was distinctively known as the Drink of the Mind. From that day to this, it has been an indispensable adjunct of French dinners. It has had its decriers, of course, to one of which Voltaire made answer, that he knew it was a poison, "and a very slow poison," he continued, "for it has been killing me for 84 years."

       FEW persons who idly sip, or hurriedly swallow their cup of coffee have any idea of the immense quantity annually consumed by the world at large. The crop for the season of 1885-86 was 587,000 tons; 9,030,770 bags, or 1,174,000,000 lbs. Of this Brazil produces about as much as all the rest of the world put together. For the buyers of 1888 to 1893, inclusive, there was received at the port of New York from Brazil 14,868,261 bags of coffee.