MEDICAL.
Eglantine.—If the teeth become loosened, and the gums show a tendency to bleed on slight provocation, use a mouth-wash of tincture of myrrh; add about a teaspoonful of tincture of myrrh to half a tumblerful of water, and rinse out your mouth and wash your teeth with it. The “tincture of myrrh and borax” of the shops is made by mixing tincture of myrrh with glycerine of borax. Both these are pharmacopœial preparations.
A Japanese Girl.—In common parlance we use the term “fainting” to express any condition in which a person acutely loses consciousness and falls to the ground. The term therefore includes epilepsy, apoplexy, sunstroke, acute syncope, and the condition which you wish to know about, ordinary fainting fits, or semi-syncope. The fits, as everybody knows, occur chiefly in young women and girls who are anæmic or hysterical. They consist of a momentary weakness of the heart-beat, as the result of which the brain is insufficiently supplied with blood, and the person drops down “in a heap.” This sudden falling lowers the position of the head, and so prevents the brain from becoming anæmic. When a person faints, or feels faint, her head should be lowered; if she is sitting in a chair, her head should be forced down to her knees; if she is standing up, she should be placed upon her back. How often we see kind-hearted persons carrying a fainting girl out of church, taking care to keep her head well raised! Sal volatile, cold water and brandy are sometimes given to fainting girls, but none of these is necessary, and the brandy usually does harm. Though fainting looks very dangerous, it is really very trivial. We have never seen a death during one of these young women’s fainting fits.
Lady Babbie.—It is related of a great physician that a girl once came to him complaining, as you do, that she made horrible grimaces, moving her scalp and eyebrows about in a most absurd manner, and making herself look ridiculous. Of course he knew at once what was the matter, and said to her, “Let me see you make these grimaces.” When she had finished, he said to her, “What you have got the matter with you is of no moment, but I warn you not to let anyone see you making those grimaces, because when you do so you present a striking resemblance to Mrs. ——” (a famous criminal of the time, then “wanted” by the police), “and you may get run in if you don’t take care!” This so frightened the girl that she never made grimaces again! This curious habit can be cured, as you see. It is semi-involuntary—that is, it was originally voluntary, but from constant repetition it has become a habit. It is a habit from which you must break yourself. It is no good saying you cannot—we say you can; but you must try, and at present avoid anything which is liable to produce it. We have not asked you to do anything impossible—“to do lessons or anything of that sort”—but why do you have such an objection “to do lessons or anything of that sort?” You will find that there are more unpleasant things in life than lessons!
MISCELLANEOUS.
Rebecca.—The invention of the gamut and the lines of the stave is attributed to D’Arezzo, an Italian who flourished in the eleventh century. At the Vatican, and in the King’s Library, Paris, there are valuable copies of his famous Micrologus.
Perplexed.—We think it would be for your own happiness if you cleared up the question, as no honest man has any right to be paying his addresses to two women at once. If you have a mother, you had better let her make the inquiry.
Marguerite.—The simnel-cakes made in Lent, at Eastertide, and Christmas, in Shropshire and Herefordshire—more especially at Shrewsbury—date back to great antiquity. Herrick speaks of them in one of his epigrams, from which it appears that at Gloucester it was the custom for young people to carry simnels to their mothers on mid-Lent Sunday, called “Mothering Sunday.” In Mediæval Latin it is called siminellus, and is derived from the Latin simila, or fine flour. Like the religious signification of the hot-cross-buns, the simnel-cakes were, in early times, marked with a figure of Christ or of the Virgin Mary. The Pagan Saxons ate cakes in honour or commemoration of their goddess Eastre, and, unable to prevent people from so doing as a heathen custom, the Christian clergy had the buns marked with a cross, to remind them of our Lord and His work of redemption.
Troubled One.—We are well acquainted with the infidel argument that “the death of one man could not atone for, nor make restitution for, the sins and the debts of millions of other men.” But first, Christ was the Second Person of the Divine Trinity, and One with the Father and the Holy Ghost, and His was an infinite sacrifice for finite sin; an infinite satisfaction for finite indebtedness. Secondly, as man’s rebellion was against his Creator, and the unfulfilled obligations were to Him, his Creator had an absolute right to punish, or forgive, to claim, or to remit man’s debt on His Own terms. Thus, if He said, “I will accept man’s acknowledgment of sin and indebtedness to Me, if he offer a lamb in token thereof,” He had an indisputable right to do so; and when He accepts a Divine, and therefore infinite sacrifice, He has a right to do so. Who may presume to question it?
Two Chums.—The phrase, “Once in a blue moon” means “very rarely,” and the originator of the phrase exaggerated what it was designed to mean, as it expresses not rarity only, but impossibility of occurrence, as there is no such thing as a “blue” moon, any more than a personage correctly designated “Blue Beard.”