If, in laughing at such discontent, you laugh in advance at your son, your son’s son’s son, and so forth to the last descendant of your entire family, this is a matter which I do not decide.  It will depend upon the road humanity chooses to take.  If it continues as it is going, some coffee-want or other will forever strew it with thorns.

Had he said, “Chocolate is forbidden me,” or tea, or English ale, or madeira, or strawberries, you would have found his misery equally absurd.

The great Alexander is said to have wept because he found no more worlds to conquer.  The man who bemoans the loss of a world and the man who bemoans the loss of coffee are to my mind equally unbalanced and equally in need of forgiveness.  The desire for a cup of coffee and the desire for a crown, the hankering after the flavor or even the fragrance of the drink and the hankering after fame, are equally mad and equally—­human.

If history is to be believed, Adam possessed all the advantages and comforts, all the necessities and luxuries a first man could reasonably demand....  Lord of all living things, and sharing his dominion with his beloved, what did he lack?

Among ten thousand pleasures, the fruit of one single tree was forbidden him.  Good-by content and peace!  Good-by forever all his bliss!

I acknowledge that I should have yielded to the same temptation; and he who does not see that this fate would have overtaken his entire family, past and to come, may have studied all things from the Milky Way in the sky to the milky way in his kitchen, may have studied all stones, plants, and animals, and all folios and quartos dealing therewith, but never himself or man.

As we do not know the nature of the fruit which Adam could not do without, it may as well have been coffee as any other.  That it was pleasant to the eyes means no more than that it was forbidden.  Every forbidden thing is pleasant to the eyes.

“Of what use is it all to me?” said Adam, looking around him in Eden, at the rising sun, the blushing hills, the light-green forest, the glorious waterfall, the laden fruit-trees, and, most beautiful of all, the smiling woman—­“of what use is it all to me, when I dare not taste this—­coffee bean?”

“And of what use is it all to me?” said Mr. Caillard, and looked around him on the Lueneburg heath:  “coffee is forbidden me; one single cup of coffee would kill me.”

“If it will be any comfort to you,” I said, “I may tell you that I am in the same case.”  “And you do not despair at times?”—­“No,” I replied, “for it is not my only want.  If like you I had everything else in life, I also might despair.”

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I WAS VERY LITTLE

There was a time, when I, an urchin slender,
Could hardly boast of having any height. 
Oft I recall those days with feelings tender;
With smiles, and yet the tear-drops dim my sight.

Within my tender mother’s arms I sported,
I played at horse upon my grandsire’s knee;
Sorrow and care and anger, ill-reported,
As little known as gold or Greek, to me.