It should lie after it is shaken up, for two or three hours a day, in a well ventilated room. The human body is constantly giving off a perspiration; and at night more than usual, from the relaxed condition of the skin. The bed will become foul from this cause if not well aired. If the bed is in a room which cannot be spared for such a length of time, it should be put out to air two full days in the week.
In airing beds, the sun should never shine directly upon them. It is air, not heat, that they need. We have seen beds lying on a roof where the direct and reflected rays of the sun had full power, and the feathers, without doubt, were stewing, and the oil in the quill becoming rancid; so
that the bed smells worse after its roasting than before. Always air beds in the shade, and, if possible, in cool and windy days. And now, if any of our attentive housewife-readers, and we have not a few, are disposed to reward us for all this advice, let them give us a bed to sleep on, when we next visit them, made of growing feathers, from live and healthy geese, carefully picked, well cured, daily shaken up and thoroughly aired; and if we do not dream that the owner is an angel, it will be because we are too much occupied in sound sleeping.
NAIL UP YOUR BUGS.
“The words of the wise are as goads and as nails fastened by masters of assemblies.”—Solomon.
After a great pother about canker worms, peach-tree worms, and other audacious robber-worms; after smoke, salt, tar, and tansy, bands of wool, cups of oil, lime, ashes, and surgery have been set forth as remedies, to the confusion of those who have tried them bootlessly, it now appears that we are about to nail the rascals. The Boston Cultivator, contains an article “On Destroying Insects on Trees,” from which we quote:
“I did not intend to give it publicity until I had fully tested it, but as the ravages are very extensive in the West, I cannot delay giving you the experiment, hoping that some of your western readers may now give it a fair trial and report the result. I will give one case which may induce the experiment wherever the evil is felt. In conversation with a friend in Newburyport, Dr. Watson, last fall. I mentioned the experiment; he invited me to his garden, where last year a fruit-tree was infested with the
nests of caterpillar or canker-worms, as were his neighbors’ trees; he showed me a board nailed for convenience of a clothes-line upon one of the large limbs of the tree; he said he noticed a little while afterward that the nests on that limb dried up, and the worms disappeared, though the cause did not then occur to him though apparent as it will be to any scientific mind.
“Drive carefully well home, so that the bark will heal over a few headless cast iron nails, say some six or eight, size and number according to the size of the tree, in a ring around its body, a foot or two above the ground. The oxidation of the iron by the sap, will evolve ammonia, which will, of course, with the rising sap, impregnate every part of the foliage, and prove to the delicate palate of the patient, a nostrum, which will soon become, as in many cases of larger animals, the real panacea for the ills of life, via Tomb. I think if the ladies should drive some small iron brads into some limbs of any plant infested with any insect, they would find it a good and safe remedy, and I imagine in any case, instead of injury, the ammonia will be found particularly invigorating. Let it be tried upon a limb of any tree, where there is a vigorous nest of caterpillars, and watch it for a week or ten days, and I think the result will pay for the nails.”