Bryant
very much accord, in a few particulars they differ, as, I suppose,
must be the case in almost any two individuals. Mr. Bryant never takes
coffee or tea. I regularly take both, find the greatest refreshment in
both, and never experienced any deleterious effects from either,
except in one instance, when, by mistake, I took a cup of tea strong
enough for ten men. On the contrary, tea is to me a wonderful
refresher and reviver. After long-continued exertion, as in the great
pedestrian journeys that I formerly made, tea would always, in a
manner almost miraculous, banish all my fatigue, and diffuse through
my whole frame comfort and exhilaration, without any subsequent evil
effect.
I am quite well aware that this is not the experience of many others,
my wife among the number, on whose nervous system tea acts
mischievously, producing inordinate wakefulness, and its continued
use, indigestion. But this is one of the things that people should
learn, and act upon, namely, to take such things as suit them, and
avoid such as do not. It is said that Mithridates could live and
flourish on poisons, and if it be true that tea or coffee is a poison,
so do most of us. William Hutton, the shrewd and humorous author of
the histories of Birmingham and Derby, and also of a life of himself,
scarcely inferior to that of Franklin in lessons of life-wisdom, said
that he had been told that coffee was a slow poison, and, he added,
that he had found it very slow, for he had drunk it more than sixty
years without any ill effect My experience of it has been the same.
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