ces require your continuance there for any
time,) for the moment your body becomes cold, it is in a state likely to
absorb the infection, and give you the disease. Nor visit a sick person,
(especially if the complaint be of a contagious nature) with an empty
stomach; as this disposes the system more readily to receive the
contagion. In attending a sick person, place yourself where the air
passes from the door or window to the bed of the diseased, not betwixt
the diseased person and any fire that is in the room, as the heat of the
fire will draw the infectious vapour in that direction, and you would
run much danger from breathing in it.

SILK DYES. Silk is usually dyed red with cochineal, or carthamus, and
sometimes with Brazil wood. Archil is employed to give silk a bloom, but
it is seldom used by itself, unless when the colour wanted is lilac.
Silk may be dyed crimson, by steeping it in a solution of alum, and then
dyeing it in the usual way in a cochineal bath. Poppy colour, cherry,
rose, and flesh colour, are given to silk by means of carthamus. The
process consists merely in keeping the silk as long as it extracts any
colour, in an alkaline solution of carthamus, into which as much lemon
juice has been poured, as is sufficient to give it a fine cherry red
colour. Silk cannot be dyed a full scarlet; but a colour approaching to
scarlet may be given to it, by first impregnating the stuff with
murio-sulphate of tin, and afterwards dyeing it in equal parts of
cochineal and quercitron bark.

SILK STOCKINGS. To clean silk stockings properly, it is necessary first
to wash them in a lukewarm liquor of white soap, then to rinse them in
clean water, and wash them again as before. They are to be washed a
third time in a stronger soap liquor, made hot and tinged with blueing,
and rinsed in clean water. Before they are quite dry, they are to be
stoved with brimstone, and afterwards polished with glass upon a wooden
leg. Gauzes are whitened in the same manner, only a little gum is put in
the soap liquor before they are stoved.

SILKS CLEANED. The best method of cleaning silks, woollens, and cottons,
without damage to their texture and colour, is to grate some raw
potatoes to a fine pulp in clean water, and pass the liquid matter
through a coarse sieve into another vessel of water. Let the mixture
stand till the fine white particles of the potatoes are precipitated;
then pour off the liquor, and preserve it for use. The art