It is plausibly maintained that the climate of this particular locality creates an actual necessity for the use of this beverage.  Often, during the earlier part of my residence there, I was besought by friends, with manifestation of deepest concern, to use beer instead of water, with the remark that the climate made this a necessary measure of security against the prevalent typhus and typhoid fevers:  a conviction which seems to be deeply seated in the minds of the people.

Aside from all this, there is an almost total want of the pleasant beverages used in our families.  Tea is as good as unknown in Old Bavaria, its use being confined to those who have been in England, or have learned it of the English, and not one woman in twenty thousand can prepare it.  Let the word tea be erased from our vocabulary, and from our minds all the cheerful associations which it awakens, and there passes from our hearts none can tell how much of that which we most fondly cherish there,—­the family of both sexes, and occasionally some neighbors and friends, seated around the table,—­the gently stimulating narcotic diffusing a charm over the whole social being, and communicating itself to the vocal machinery.  Fanatical reformers have proclaimed its injurious effects; and it may have such; but they are a thousand times compensated by its value as a bond of union to the elements of the domestic circle.  The tea-table has been the butt of many a jest and sarcasm, as a fountain of gossip and slander.  This may be true; but the security it furnishes against the dissipation of the elements of the social circle outweighs thousands of such trifles, and we half suspect that this objection was originated, and is mischievously propagated, by those who are already developing a love for other beverages.  If Cowper, with the “sofa” assigned as his subject, could sing so beautifully of all things social and domestic, what might he not have done with the tea-table—­the rallying-point of social life to so many who never had a sofa—­for his theme?

From the general use of coffee in the cities and large towns of Germany, we have inferred its general use by the peasantry; but even this is quite limited, in Upper Bavaria at least; it is found only where the influence of city-life has penetrated.  Sometimes a peasant woman has a little hid in her chest, from which she stealthily prepares and drinks a cup when her husband is away; but it is little used.  This article was brought into Western Europe in the seventeenth century, and found beer in possession of Germany.  The monks are said to have preached against the use of coffee, as anticipating, by the dense black smoke which arose from burning it, the “fumes of hell.”  It came from Turkey, and at that day the Turk was still the hereditary dread of all the peoples on the middle and upper Danube.  He was next thing to the Devil; and what came direct from the former could be but recent from the latter.