But of course this is a world wherein doctors sound solemn tocsins to pleasure. You go to them and they almost invariably admonish you to quit smoking tobacco and drinking coffee, to have your teeth pulled and your tonsils uprooted. Some years ago I myself suffered from chronic indigestion. I was on a meticulous diet which lacked meat and coffee and I was about ready to accuse coffee alone of all my indispositions. But I met a hardy old codger of eighty who drank eight cups of strong coffee daily and had but recently reduced his consumption from a normal dozen and his vigor, which he attributed to seventy years of strong coffee, greatly heartened me. I knew what the doctor would say. I didn’t smoke. Teeth and coffee alone were left. So I went soberly to the expert in exodontia. He at first demurred and insisted that I had no teeth meriting destruction. But I was desperate. I insisted. So he X-rayed around, finally selected an inoffensive and courteous molar and drew it. The shock or something proved beneficial. At least I had no more indigestion and even learned how to drink two cups of strong coffee and go to sleep on the draft. This is the final step in expert coffee drinking. When you can perform that feat and outwit your imagination you have come into the inner circle of The Sacred Coffee Drinkers’ Conclave. But I remained curious. I wondered why doctors said drink no coffee. I determined to find out something about this. Botany didn’t get me very far. It simply declared “Coffee is the product of a rubiaceous plant indigenous to Abyssinia of the _genus_ coffea; there are about twenty-five known species, of which coffea Arabica is the most important commercially.” History was slightly more productive. It appeared coffee drinking was of respectable age and that the substance derived its name from K’hawah, or Kaffa, an Abyssinian Province, and that there it was employed as a stimulant for centuries before its introduction into Arabia. The Arab physician Khayes, who lived 850-922 A. D., wrote on coffee and knowledge of the plant arrived in Europe by the late sixteenth century. It is most interesting to remember that these Arabian Mohammedans used coffee as an anti-soporific during prolonged religious ceremonies. Yet the beverage at first underwent violent protest because strictly orthodox and conservative priests held it to be intoxicating and hence under the ban of the Koran. At Constantinople certain dervishes also held that after roasting coffee had become a kind of coal which the Prophet had denounced as inedible. Thereupon the coffee houses were closed. But a lenient mufti later proved to the satisfaction of the faithful that roasted coffee was not coal and they were reopened.