Household, RECIPES AND USEFUL FACTS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 426, 10 April 1880, Page 3

Household, RECIPES AND USEFUL FACTS.

Cure for a Cold.—The following plan is very effectual in curing most colds, but not all: —Let a man eat next to nothing for two days, provided he is not confined to bed, for. by taking no carbon into the system by food, and by consuming the surplus, which caused his disease, by breath, he soon carries off his disease by removing the cause. This will be found more effectual if he adds copious water draughts to the protracted fasting. By the time a person has fasted one day and night he will experience a freedom from disease and a clearness of mind in a delightful cqntrast with the mental stupor and physical pain caused by colds. Or take one handful of Yarrow, half-an-6unce of ginger root, bruised, or a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper, and about three pints of water. Boil to one pint. Add a little sugar if you like. Take a good dose of medicine, and your cold will be cured by the next morning ; if not, repeat the dose. Cleaning Carpets.—Take a pail of cold water, and add to it three gills of ox-gall ; rub it into the carpet with a soft brush ; it will raise a lather, which must be washed off with clear cold water ; rub dry with a clean cloth. Fuller's earth is used for cleaning carpets, and weak solutions of alum or soda are used for reviving the colors. The crumb of a hot wheaten loaf rubbed over a carpet has been found effective.

Warts. —The best treatment is when they are ripe to pare down close, and pull out the seeds or roots with needle and tweezers. This never fails.

Baking.—A cup of water in the oven, while

baking, will prevent bread, cakes, &c, from burning. Embroidery. New linen may be embroidered more easily by rubbing it over with fine white soap ; it prevents the thread from cracking.

Brooms. —If brooms are wet in boiling suds once a week, they will become very tough, will not cut a carpet, will last much longer, and always sweep like a new broom.

Starch. —Boiled starch is much improved by the addition of a little sperm, or a little salt, or both, or a little gum dissolved.

Rust. —To remove starch or rust from flatirons, have a piece of yellow beeswax tied in coarse cloth : when the iron is almost hot enough to use, but not quite, rub it quickly with the beeswax, and then with a clean, coarse cloth. Boots and Shoes.—When boots and shoes not in use are deposited in a damp place, they become covered ordinarily with mould, which attacks the leather ; when deposited in a dry place, they become hard and wrinkled—a fact well known to all, although the remedy may not be. This double disadvantage may be avoided if the articles are first rubbed with a rag on which a few drops of oil of turpentine have been sprinkled. The oil of turpentine acts favorably as a preservative to the leather, and is a deterrent to rats and mice, whose depredations are often as injurious as those of temperature.

Precocious Children.—These precocious coached-up children are never well. Their mental excitement keeps up a flush, which like the excitement caused by strong drink in older children, looks like health, but has no relation to it. If you look at the tongues of these children you see them to be furred or covered with many red points like a strawberry, and to be too red and very dry. If you inquire into the state of the appetite, you find that the appetite is capricious; that all kinds of strange food are asked for, and that the stomach never seems to be in order. If you watch the face for long, you note that the frequent flush gives way to an unearthly paleness. If you watch the eyes, you observe that they gleam with light at onetime and are dull and depressed at another, while they never are laughing eyes. Their brightness is the brightness of thought on the strain, an evanescent and dangerous phenomenon. If you feel the muscles, they are thin and flabby, though in some instances they may be fairly covered with fat. If you inquire as tJ the sleep those children get,' you hear that it is disturbed, restless and sometimes broken. In a healthy child the Bleep comes on irresistibly at an early hour, and when the eyes are shut and the body composed, the sleep is carried out till waking time without a movement of position of the body. You ask the healthy child about his sleep, and he says that he is simply conscious of having closed: his eyes and opened them again; But these unhealthy ovelr-taught children have no such elysium. They sleep, perchance to dream ; to dream during half the night, and to be assailed with all the pressures and labors of dreams, passing through strange abodes and narrow crevices which it seems impossible t« squeeze into ; and waking in a start with the body, in what is commonly called a nightmare, and sometimes somnambulism or sleep-walk-ing. The bad sleep naturally leads to a certain over-wakeful languor the next day, but, strangely enough, it interferes with the natural advent of sleep the next night, so that sleeplessness the next night becomes a habit. The child must be read to sleep, or told stories until it is off, and thus it falls into slumber, fed with the food of dreams, worries, cares, / and wonders. In [this period of early education, the first state of what may -be fairly called the intemperance of education, the recreations that are adopted for the little scholar are often as pernicious as any-other, part of the system in which he or she is trained. During the day pastimes, a want of freshness and freedom prevails, almost of necessity inlarge towns ; and this want is often made worse than it heed to be by inattention or deficiency of knowledge. — Gentleman's Magazine. • '..; • -• ■ v.'ts •••hi >; ' : .....