There was, however, a tea made by the Texans from the leaves of a half bush, half tree, called yapon, which was said to taste wonderfully like the real. They drank it three times a day, at Captain Buster’s head-quarters, and many of the sailors followed the fashion. Yet it had a bad name. It was said, that it caused certain unpleasant medical effects, and one young gentleman, who had once taken a mug full, averred that he shortly thereafter felt a burning sensation in that part of his body where he supposed (erroneously) was his stomach.
I never could find the men whom it was said to have made sick, and I had little belief in the rumor. Yet, as I do not like tea except when ill, there was little inducement to experiment with this unknown, untried plant. Still I meant to test it, some time or other, as a matter of scientific curiosity, and if it were like the Chinese plant, to carry a handful home for the edification of tea drinkers there.
This “some time or other” did not come, probably because the material was always close at hand. The yapon grew thickly along the brook and up to the borders of the camp. It was generally from ten to twenty feet high, and as thick as a man’s arm; it had furnished us with nearly all the poles for a rustic arbor, that ran along the sunny side of the barracks, and helped to shade and cool the sick-bunks. Its branches, too, had been used to fill up in roofing the arbor, and there were leaves enough there to furnish an army with bohea.
Thus time glided away under the influence of corn coffee, till one day it was said, that the commanding officer had proclaimed corn coffee unhealthy, nay, dangerous. There were then numerous medical symptoms, all pointing forward to intermittent fever and backward to corn coffee. When a dozen men compare notes, and find that they are all afflicted in the same way, and never in their lives have been so before, it alarms them.
The surgeon was informed of this, and he thought there must be something in it, the intermittent cases had increased so unaccountably. As we thus deliberated, Colonel Sayles came up and we consulted him. The Colonel gave his facts and recommended sweet potatoes as a substitute for corn and coffee.
“Let us look at the analysis,” said the surgeon, walking into his office and taking down a big book.
“‘Corn or maize, sometimes called Indian corn. This grain is cultivated throughout the United States.’” “Yes, we know that.” “‘Its analysis shows starch, sugar, sulphate of lime.’ That must be the agent (if any) which is doing us all the damage. I really think you had better follow the Colonel’s advice and take up the sweet potatoes.”
“Let us see what the potato has in it. Doctor, who knows but that there’s some other atom to be roasted into poison there?”
“Batata, yes, ‘batata, or common potato,’ ‘seed poisonous,’ and so forth. Analysis sugar, and so forth. It has the sulphate again and more of it than there is in corn. That will never do, to say nothing of costing ten dollars a bushel.”
October was drawing toward its end when there came a “wet norther,” and with it a sharp frost, ice thick as a pane of glass—much suffering—some agues and countless colds.