addition to water, carbonic acid gas and other used up products are constantly thrown off by the skin.

Then again the flattened cells or scales of the scarf or extreme outside skin are being constantly cast off, but by contact with the clothing and mixed with oily secretions of the skin they form a thin crust, as it were, which covers the whole body. This attracts the floating dust, ever present in the atmosphere, and the result is that healthy life is disturbed, more than a proper share of work is thrown on the lungs, kidneys and other eliminating organs, the blood is not properly purified and disorders of the skin are induced. The whole surface of the body from head to foot should be cleansed, at least once a day. Neglect of personal cleanliness is by no means confined to the poorer classes. There are numbers of well-to-do people who seldom or never wash, and to whom the "morning tub" is an unknown auxiliary to health and comfort. Yet it takes very little time, expense or trouble to secure ablution of the body of some sort. A hand-basin, a sponge, a shallow bath or flat tub, a piece of good white soap with no excess of alkali, a couple of gallons of water, and a towel, are all that are required; and the whole process need not occupy more than five minutes. Even rubbing the body first with a dry towel will, in most cases, keep the skin sufficiently clean during the week and promote healthy reaction, provided a warm bath, with a good soaping, is taken at the close of the week. A good flesh brush is also a valuable adjunct.

Infants should always be bathed in warm water, and if cold water is ever used the transition should be very gradual, and only tried in the summer time. Indeed, there is no doubt that a great many children contract a strong aversion to cold water, because they have injudiciously and thoughtlessly been subjected to the cold bath at periods when they were unable to bear it. A convenient time for taking a bath is just after getting out of bed in the morning or just before going to bed. This latter time is appropriate, as a bath is found to be very refreshing after severe or prolonged exercise of any kind.

In drying the skin, various kinds of towels may be used, but the effects produced by friction will be all the more beneficial if the skin can tolerate a rough towel. Flesh-gloves or hair-gloves can also be used to advantage.

As to the time spent in bathing, much depends on the kind of bath and the condition and constitution of the bather. Three minutes is quite sufficient for the cold sponge bath or cold plunge. In the tepid

or warm bath the period may be prolonged to ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.

EVERY BODY LIKES HER.

There is a type of girl that every body likes. Nobody can tell exactly why, but after you have met her you turn away

and say: "Don't you like Miss Grosvenor?"

to some other woman

Now, the reason you

like her is a subtle one; without knowing all about her you feel just the sort of a girl she is.

joy and pleasure all over the world.

She is the girl who appreciates the fact that she cannot always have the first choice of every thing in the world.

She is the girl who is not aggressive and does not find joy in inciting aggressive people.

She is the girl who has tact enough not to say the very thing that will cause the skeleton in her friend's closet to rattle his bones.

She is the girl who, whether it is warm or cold, clear or stormy, finds no fault with the weather.

She is the girl who, when you invite her to any place, compliments you by looking her best.

She is the girl who is sweet and womanly to look at and listen to, and who doesn't strike you as a poor imitation of a demimondaine.

She is the girl who makes this world a pleasant place because she is so pleasant herself.

And, by and by, when you come to think of it, isn't she the girl who makes you feel she likes you, and therefore, you like her?-Boston Globe.

LAUGHTER.

Tears and laughter are part of the universal language of human kind-the language of looks. Since Babel, men, dispersed over the face of the world, do not understand one another's speech. But this one inarticulate language remains intelligible to all mankind; it requires no interpreter, it is legible to those to whom even "the three R's" are still a mystery; infants newly-born seem to bring some understading of it with them into the world; it may be read by a black man in the face of a white; it would have been apprehended in Robinson Crusoe, by his man Friday on the desert

island; it is even in some degree legible by a marvelous instinct by the lower animals in the face of man. For a strong man can flash a spiritquelling command out of the bodily windows of his soul, his eyes, into the half-waking "spirit of a beast." A Borrow can thereby assert his authority "by right divine" over an enraged dog. It is a touching proof of that deep underlying unity, which, amidst all their infinite differences, binds together in the deeper regions of their being all the far separated races and families of Adam's children, that all men do in this way, understand one another's looks. If I land on an unknown island, whose inhabitants speak a language in the ordinary sense of that word quite unintelligible to me, and yet see there a human face, whatever be its color or shape, lighted with a smile, or trembling into tears, my heart, if it is not dead within me, will answer to what I call its expression, though I cannot in the least tell how I gather any such knowledge from that sight. We may plead, therefore, for the deep interest of these two phenomena, tears and laughter, on this ground among others, that they are part of the universal and distinctive characteristics of our brother men, of every race and clime. Laughter is visible principally in that mystic borderland between matter and spirit, "the human face divine." How it does so, who shall say? For what is a face? It is a region but a few square inches in extent; and yet this is all the instrument, or much the principal one, with which in the mystic process of Nature, all the varieties of thought, feeling, emotion, of which we become aware in looking at another human being, are in some way or other effectively conveyed to us. Its component parts have, it is true, a marvellous power of ceaseless, most subtle movement—a most important attribute. "That," says Lord Bacon (essay on Beauty) "is the best part of beauty which a picture cannot express; no, nor the first sight of the life, decent" (i. e., becoming) "and gracious motion." Still, it is thought this apparently simple instrument, a face, that in some way or other, thought, feeling, emotion, are expressed to a degree really marvellous. And who knows not the actual light (is it physical, or is it spiritual, in its essence? we cannot say) that may flash into our souls from the lines of flowing round the mouth, the dancing gleams in the lengthening eyes; the innumerable twinklings and beamings of the countenance, when it is really laughing.

Still, it is not only in the face, or even in the domain of sight, that the spiritual condition which causes laughter is perceptible in others. The blind, who never looked upon a face, yet know of laughter in

others through that other bodily doorway into the presence chamber of the soul, the ear; and the feelings called up in the soul of the blind by peals of laughter (peals as of some gladsome and brilliant bells in the spirit-world), must be much the same as those stirred in those deprived of hearing by the sight of a laughing face, and of the shaking sides—the arms, it may be, flung into the air, the head thrown back, or the hands enthusiastically rubbed together-of one who is undergoing that strange seizure rightly called a fit-for a true fit or physical seizure it is of laughter. Whatever it may be in its inmost nature and central spring in the soul, its effects are general over the whole body. Probably there is not the remotest corner, or little inlet of the minute blood-vessels (life-vessels) of the body, that does not feel some wavelet from great convulsion shaking the central man. The blood moves more lively-probably its chemical, electric, or vital condition is distinctly modified-it conveys a different impression to all the organs of the body as it visits them on that particular mystic journey when the man is laughing, from what it does at other times. And so, we doubt not, a good laugh may lengthen a man's life, convey a distinct stimulus to the vital forces. And the time may come when physicians, attending more closely than at present unfortunately they are apt to do, to the innumerable subtle influences which the soul exerts upon its tenement of clay, shall prescribe to a torpid patient "so many peals of laughter, to be undergone at such and such a time," just as they now do that far more objectionable prescription, a pill, or an electric or galvanic shock; and shall study the best and most effective method of producing the required effect in each patient.-The Family Doctor.

NECESSITY OF NATURAL SLEEP.

Dr. Talcott, Medical Superintendent of the Middletown (N. Y.) Insane Asylum, in a late report, makes some valuable suggestions upon the subject of sleep and sleeplessness. Neither tongue nor pen can too emphatically warn against the dangers which arise from loss of sleep. "If the goddess of sleep fails to respond when we appeal to her for tender and soothing caresses," writes the Doctor, "then, indeed, we are not only harassed in heart, but broken in brain, and made bankrupt in body and mind." The choroid plexuses are the delicate fringings of blood vessels which project into the brain. At night and under favorable conditions they swell and guard the brain.

from all disturbances; but when these sentinels of the brain are enfeebled by too great toil, physical disease or mental weariness, they fail to do their work and the antagonist of sleep enters. In the brains of patients who have died insane, there has been found marked disease of these vessels.

One of the most efficient treatments for sleeplessness is massage. This treatment is described in full in the Superintendent's report. The free and indiscriminate use of narcotics is mentioned as one of the most frequent causes of insanity. They are principally used by the overworked, the worrying and discontented. Carlyle says, "The race of life has become intense; the runners are treading on each other's heels; woe to him who stops to tie his shoe strings." Dr. Talcott suggests a remedy in these words: "National decay can be averted only by a general reform in our methods of living, and foremost in the line of reform rises a grim and persistent demand for necessary and recuperative sleep."

OVER EATING.

The habit of over eating is far too common, even with those persons who practice moderation in other ways. The day laborer may habitually indulge in an amount of food without injury, which would seriously affect a person of a less active mode of life, because his heavy work burns off the excess of food; but in most cases the excess of food is not carried off by a so-called bilious attack, and then, if there is no work to burn up the supply, what happens? In some constitutions dyspepsia, in others an ever-increasing bulk; now this bulk disinclines to exertion, so that with increase of bulk less work is done, while there is a growing disinclination to exertion-even a repugnance in extreme cases to any form of exercise. These cases are among the most difficult the physician can treat, for the sufferer, though he may wish for relief, lacks the energy to find it. As a rule, stoutness is connected with errors of diet-errors of excess, perhaps oftener than people are prepared to admit, but often to errors of kind.

CAPACITY FOR FOOD OF INFANTS.

Dr. H. L. Emmet has recently been making some observations upon this subject, measuring with great care the stomachs of children in