Part 90 (1/2)

3. _With the hand_ apply cool or tepid water to the entire person every six to twenty-four hours. The electricity from the hand _equalizes_ the circulation. Rub dry with a soft towel. A coa.r.s.e scrubbing-cloth (even a hemlock board) does nicely for a hog, but do not apply such to human beings. It is quite unnatural.

4. Do not sleep in any garment at night worn during the day. Have your windows open as wide as you will, and bars to keep out flies and mosquitos. Keep a sheet over the limbs, to exclude the hot air from the surface.

5. Eat fruits, and but little meats. You will find, as a general rule, all ripe fruit healthy in its season. I have lived in the South several years, and know whereof I affirm.

6. And above all--_keep cool_!

KNICKKNACKS.

_More Truth than Poetry._--The following conversation between a colored prisoner and a temperance lecturer who was in search of facts to fortify his positions and ill.u.s.trate his subject, explains itself:--

”What brought you to prison, my colored friend?”

”Two constables, sah.”

”Yes; but I mean, had intemperance anything to do with it?”

”Yes, sah; dey wuz bofe uv 'em drunk, sah.”

_Humble Pie._--The humble pie of former times was a pie made out of the ”umbles” or entrails of the deer; a dish of the second table, inferior, of course, to the venison pastry which smoked upon the dais, and therefore not inexpressive of that humiliation which the term ”eating humble pie”

now painfully describes. The ”umbles” of the deer are usually the perquisites of the gamekeeper.

_Increase of Insanity._--Insanity in England is rapidly increasing. In 1861, when the population was 19,860,701, there were 36,702 lunatics, being nineteen in every ten thousand persons. In 1871, with a population of 22,704,108, there were 56,735 lunatics, or twenty-five out of every ten thousand persons. Of these lunatics 6,110 were private patients.

_Error of Diagnosis._--”Doctor,” said a hard-looking, brandy-faced customer a few days ago to a physician! ”Doctor, I'm troubled with an oppression and uneasiness about the breast. What do you suppose the matter is?”

”All very easily accounted for,” said the physician; ”you have water on the chest.”

”Water! Come, that'll do very well for a joke; but how could I get water on my chest when I haven't touched a drop in twenty years? If you had said brandy, you might have hit it.”

_Ferocity of a Wasp._--A lady at Grantham observed a wasp tearing a common fly to pieces on the breakfast table. When first noticed the wasp grasped the fly firmly, and had cut off a leg and a wing, so that its rescue would have been no kindness. The wasp was covered with a basin until it should receive a murderer's doom; and when the basin was removed for its execution, nothing was seen of the fly but the wings and a number of little black pieces.

Madame Regina Dal Cin, a famous surgeon of Austria, having performed one hundred and fifty successful operations in the city hospital at Trieste, was rewarded by the munic.i.p.al authorities with a letter of thanks and a purse of gold.

_A Cool Student._--In the Quartier Latin, Paris, a student was lying in bed, to which he had gone supperless, trying to devise some means to raise the wind; suddenly, in the dead of night, his reveries were disturbed by a ”click.” Stealthily raising himself in bed, he saw a burglar endeavoring to open his desk with skeleton keys. The student burst into fits of laughter; the frightened thief, astounded, inquired the cause of his glee.

”Why, I am laughing to see you take so much trouble to force open my desk and pick the lock to find the money which I cannot find though I have the key.” The thief picked up his implements, politely expressed his regret for having uselessly disturbed him, and transferred his talents and implements to some more Californian quarter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BURGLAR AND STUDENT.]