and Bohea mark the three stages of increasing size and coarseness in the leaves.  Black tea is of the lowest kind, with the largest leaves.  In gathering the choicer varieties, we are told on credible authority that “each leaf is plucked separately; the hands are gloved; the gatherer must abstain from gross food, and bathe several times a day.”  Many differences in the flavor and color of green and black teas are produced by art.  Mr. Fortune says of green tea, that “it has naturally no bloom on the leaf, and a much more natural color.  It is dyed with Prussian blue and gypsum.  Probably no bad effects are produced.  There is no foundation for the suspicion that green tea owes its verdure to an inflorescence acquired from plates of copper on which it is curled or dried.  The drying-pans are said to be invariably of sheet-iron.”  We drink our tea with milk or sugar, or both, and always in warm infusion.  In Russia, it is drunk cold,—­in China, pure; in Ava, it is used as a pickle preserved in oil.

It would be improper not to notice, finally, the moral effect of coffee- and tea-drinking.  How much resort to stronger stimulants these innocent beverages prevent can be judged only by the weakness of human nature and the vast consumption of both.

* * * * *

MEN OF THE SEA.

When the little white-headed country-boy of an inland farmstead lights upon a book which shapes his course in life, five times out of six the volume of his destiny will turn out to be “Robinson Crusoe.”  That wonderful fiction is one of the servants of the sea,—­a sort of bailiff, which enters many a man’s house and singles out and seizes the tithe of his flock.  Or rather, cunning old De Foe,—­like Odusseus his helmet, wherewith he detected the disguised Achilles among the maids-of-honor,—­by his magic book, summons to the service of the sea its predestined ones.  Why is it, but from a difference in blood and soul, that the sea gets its own so surely?  The farmer’s sons grow up about the fireside, do chores together, together range the woods for squirrels, woodchucks, chestnuts, and sassafras, go to the same “deestrick-school,” and succeed to the same ambitions and hopes.  Reuben, the first-born, comes in due time to the care of the paternal acres and oxen.  Simeon, Dan, Judah, Benjamin, and the rest, grow up and emigrate to Western clearings.  Levi, it may be, pale, thoughtful Levi, sees other fields “white to harvest,” and struggles up through a New England academy- and college-education, to find a seat in the lecture-rooms of Andover, and to hope for a pulpit hereafter.  But Joseph, the pet and pride of the household,—­what becomes of him?  Unlucky little duck! why could he not go “peeping” at the heels of the maternal parent with his brother and sister biddies?  Why must he be born with webbed toes, and run at once to the wash-tub, there to make nautical experiments with walnut-shells?