Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/386

370 take stimulants at all hours, and only the other day a nobleman told me that, visiting a certain house, his valet came into his bedroom at ten in the morning bringing a pint of champagne. On his telling him he did not want it, his valet said, "If your lordship does not drink it, they will think you are ill!" "His lordship" did not drink it, but the champagne did not go down to frighten his host. I imagine gout must be a permanent institution in that household, and that the family vault must be as well stocked as the wine-cellar.

In the summer acidulated drinks are the most grateful to the palate, and in the August number of this journal last year I gave a number of these in an article called Beverages for Hot Weather. There can be no doubt that the most refreshing beverage in summer, and certainly the most harmless, is the properly made cup of tea; but, alas! how seldom does the ordinary English household in England get a properly made cup of tea or coffee! The first cup may be by chance drinkable, or it may have infused half an hour, and therefore contain all the tannin and other disagreeable and injurious products of the leaf. Now, while on the subject of tea, I should like to give a rational and sensible mode of making it for breakfast or other meal with which it may be taken. Any one walking up or down Shaftesbury Avenue, W., will see in a window half a dozen cups that he might reasonably imagine had been bequeathed the establishment by Goliath of Gath. These teacups are called magnums, and they hold exactly a pint, and one of them is sufficient, therefore, or more than sufficient, for a breakfast. To secure a delicious cup of tea, the proper quantity should be put into the teapot according to the number of people requiring a supply, and when it has infused nine or ten minutes—not longer—the magnum, as it is called, should be filled. This being sufficient, and equal to two large breakfast cups, is of uniform strength and flavor throughout. Its contents will please the most fastidious taste and suit the most delicate stomach. In the summer time it should be sweetened with saccharine instead of sugar, and flavored with a little cream. Some prefer tea with a squeeze of lemon-juice in it, and in this way it is possibly more wholesome and suitable as a cooling beverage.

It would occupy too great a space in a short article like this to give the most suitable fruits and vegetables for the summer months to the different conditions of the system. In a dietetic work I wrote some two years ago this subject was fully discussed, more particularly in relation to those of corpulent, gouty, and rheumatic habit of body.

Three quarters of the ailments that humanity is subject to