The commoner. (Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-1923, July 12, 1901, Page 10, Image 10
C The Commoner, 10 frr How to Sleep. Peoplo woo sleep; they call sleep fickle or Inconstant and in .various ways abuse it. They make ridiculous proverbs which imply that there is something virtuous in short nights, as if sleep wore to bo kepi at bay. All this is wrong. Sleep is the restoration of life call it, if you please, the gov ernor of the engine. With the right sleep and enough of it the -body comes up to its work every morning new born. In the first half of life it comes up to its work a Httlo better able to do its duty than the morning before. But this is not so if the sleep has not been sound and steady. Every one will And out how much sleep is good for him. Then he will make it his duty or business to take that amount regularly. The rules as I have found them are simple. Thoy are well laid down in more than one book. Dr. Hammond's is as good as any. 1. Do not work the brain for six hours before you go to bed. Business men, so-called, are apt to violate this rule. The agents of banks and other great financial trusts think they must give daylight to their employers and then spend their evenings in memo randa and calculations about their own personal affairs. All this is wrong. You may get out of bed as early as you please and work your brain then. But you are safest if after 3 or 4 in the af ternoon you give it no hard work at all. Are there not the children to play with and novels to read and Joe Jef ferson at the theatre and the sofa to lie upon while Marion and Hugh play a duet on the piano? Do not work this poor old brain, then, which has stood by you so loyally since you got out of bed in the morning. 2. . Remember always what the bed is for and why you are in it. You are there to sleep. Not to add up figures in your head. Not to think out a let ter to your lawyer. Not to work out the best way of putting your house lots on the market. Simply you are there to sleep. 3. If you have been working the poor old brain too late, or if you have been eating a Welsh rarebit just be fore you undressed yourself, and if your head burns so that it almost sets the pillow on fire, crawl out of bed and sponge your head with cold water. At the worst soak the feet in as hot water as they will bear. You want to draw away the extra' blood from the brain. In all natural sleep there is less blood on the brain than when you are awake. I have at my bedpost a long cord with a child's flat-iron at tached to it. When my head Is too hot I hold the smooth, cold surface of the iron against the forehead to drive tho blood away. 4. People tell you to think of sheep jumping over a wall, to repro duce familiar strains of music, to hold tho eyes open and fixed on some ob ject opposito in the room. Recall tho last ridiculous vision you had before waking. B;it do not engage while in bed in any such serious matter which will again exhaust and exasperate the brain. Edward Everett Hale in Phil adelphia Press. ACTIVE BRAINS Must Have Good Food or Norvous Pros tration Surely Follows It is a lamentable fact that American brain workers do not, as a rule, know how to feed themselves to rebuild tho daily loss occasioned by active mental effort." 'This fact, coupled with the dis astrous effects Of tho alkaloids con tained in tobacco, coffee and whisky, makes a sure pathway towards nervous prostration. The remedy is simple enough. Em ploy the services of a food expert, who knows the kind of food required to re build the daily losses in tho human body. This can be done by making free . use of Grape-Nuts, tho famous breakfast food, which contains exactly the elemental principles which have an affinity for albumen and go direct ly to rebuild the gray matter in the brain, solar plexus and nerve centers throughout the body! Follow your se lection of food up with a dismissal of coffee, tobacco and whisky for fifteen days and mark the difference in your mental ability, which means every thing to the average hustling Ameri can, who must have physical and men tal strength or ho falls out in tho race for dollars. Washington's Wealth. In these days when millions are counted as nothing and millionaires aro found in almost every city, it seems strange that the property of Georgo Washington, the richest man in the United States at the time of his death, inventoried only $489,135.22. He owned 41,523 acres of land, lying in Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Penn-, sylvania, Ohio and New York, with city lots in New York, Philadelphia Washington Alexandria, Winchester and Berkley Springs. Lord Fairfax, who owned G,000,000 acres of land stretching back into Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Tennes: see, gave Washington tracts of wild land as compensation for his services as surveyor. Washington inherited even more from his brother, and his wife, she that was Martha Dandridge and afterward the Widow Custis, was a rich woman for her time. The judg ment of Washington about town sites, however, was not good. In 17G5 he laid out the town of Berkley Springs, which was christened in hon or of the governor of Virginia, and was intended and expected to be a great metropolis. Washington was so confident of its future prominence as a city that he bought a large num ber of lots in addition to those which he received as compensation for his services, and was greatly disappointed because the town did not develop. Washington expected and desired the capital ot the United States to be lo cated farther west than its present site and although he took no conspicuous part in the contest, which was bitter and prolonged, he nevertheless at tempted to manipulate matters so as to accomplish his design. In the adver tisements of land which he offered for sale in West Virginia, where he had 25,000 acres, he stated that it "was of great value on account of contiguity to the seat of government, which it is more, probable will be fixed at the mouth of the great Kanawha river." These lands were Washington's share of 200,000 acres donated by the state of Virginia to the officers and soldiers who served in the Indian war. Washington also had 5,000 acres in Green county, Kentucky. He visited that region at an early date, and set tled some of his poor relations there. It is an interesting fact that Wash ington owned the first natural gas well in this country. On his land near the Kanawha the gas issued from tho cracks in the rock at the bottom, and forced its way through the water of what was known as Burning Spring creek: It was a common amusement for Washington and his fellow sur veyors to light the gas which came through and would burn on the sur face . of the water. W. E. Curtis, in Chicago Times-Herald. Polygamy by Law- , Not many years ago a citizen of New York left his family, went to Pennsylvania, and, by constructive no tice to his wife, procured a divorce. He remarried, became the father of children by that marriage, again de serted his family and turned up in California, where ho, procured a di vorce, valid by the law of that state, and took a third wife, by whom he reared a family. In the course of time he died, own ing lands in all three of the states in which he had married. In California ho had a lawful wife and lawful children. Had he takon them to Pennsylvania, the California wife, by changing tho name of the sov ereign state in which she dwelt, would have descended from the status of a wife, given her by the highest law of the land, into the position of a woman against whom the finger of scorn could justly be pointed and Upon whom the hard hand of the law could be right fully placed. And the children, while under the humane policy of the law recognized as the offspring of the mother, would have found tho bar sin ister in their escutcheon and their father's property in Pensylvania de nied to them. Nor would the Pennsylvania wife and her offspring bo in any happier lot if thoy went toNew York. There wife No. 1 was still the valid and only wife of the much-married hus band. Her children and hers alone would be in that state legitimate. How ever pure and innocent either the sec ond or third wife, she would in New York possess and enjoy exactly the same status as belonged to those be tween whom no sort of marriage had. over occurred, and her children would be classed with the offspring of those who loved not wisely but too well. For the courts of New York say that the husband's divorce in Pennsyl vania is void and tnat the marriage relation with the first wife continued to exist. The law of Pennsylvania said the same thing about the Cali fornia divorce, and the Pennsylvania wife continued to be the wife, not withstanding the second divorce. Of course, neither Pennsylvania nor Cali fornia recognized the New York mar riage as still existing, and California explicitly annulled the Pennsylvania marriage. In the land which the hus band owned in New York his first wife took dower. In the laud which he owned in Pennsylvania the second wife took dower. The third wife took her widow's rights in the California land. It is monstrous, but it is true, that If the husband had been careful to keep his first wife out of California and Pennsylvania, his second wife out of New York and California, and his third wife out of New York and, Pennsylvania, and any two from be ing in one state at the same time, he could have continued to sustain mari tal relations with all three, and in so doing have violated no- law. Con gressman R. W. Tayler in Harper's Weekly, Great Stock Country. No bettor cattle!and sheep country in America. Cheap. rands', puro running water, and flowing wells, fine climate, np malaria, plenty of hay, 'Write for infor mation to J. O. MORROW, O'Neill, Neb. 0 How Men Die; I have found that persons of clean life, of honorable, upright, religious character, not only dor not display an indifference to the approach of death as those of grosser life do, but wel come it as a relief from care and toil. There is something about tho approach of death that reconciles men to it. The senses are dulled, the perceptive faculties are bluntedvand the end comes quietly, painlessly, like a gentle sleep. In this condition I mean on tho ap proach of death those vho retain their faculties to any degree become more or less philosophers. Thoy know that death is inevitable, that it is only a question of hours, and they accept the verdict'without any demon stration and in a philosophical way. In all my experience . I haVo never found a case in which a dying man or woman complained against the inevit able, attempted to fight its' approach or even feared It. It Is only in good health that we fear death.- When wo become, ill, when we havo sustained some injury' of a very serious nature, the fear of death seems to disappear. Dr. Andrews of Philadelphia: Who Has Seen 2,000 Deaths. Fruits of Imperialism. Not long ago I visited the town of Novara in Northern Italy. There, in a wheat-field, the farmers have ploughed up skulls of men till they have piled up a pyramid ten or twelve feet high. Over this pyramid some one has built A canopy to keep off tho rain. These were the skulls of young men of Savoy, Sardinia and Austria men of eighteen to thirty-five years of age, peasants from the farms and workmen from the shops who mot at Novara to kill each other over a matter in which they had very little concern. Further' on Frenchmen, Austrians and Italians fell together at Magenta, the hue of the blood that flowed out under the olive trees. Go over Italy as you will there is scarcely a spot not crimsoned by tho blood of France, scarcely a railway station without its pile of French skulls. You can trace them across to Egypt, to the foot of the pyramids. You will find them in Germany at Jena and Leipsic, at Lut zen and Bautzen and Austerlitz. You will find them in Russia at Moscow, in Belgium at Waterloo. "A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man," said Na poleon, and with the rest are " the skulls and bones of boys "ere evening to be trodden like the grass." Presi dent Jordan in the Popular Science Monthly. Looting in China. The accounts of the looting pub lished in England and America were not accurate, and seemed to.be mostly written by persons who had some ul terior motive in showing the soldiers of some one nation or another at their worst. I maintain that, if looting is to be looked upon as a crime, the soldiers of all nations, none excepted, disgraced themselves alike. The Russian, the British, the American, the Japanese, the French, all looted alike. Theyono and all weie looters of the very first water. Nothing, probably, was more curi ous, when Peking quieted down, than the sale by auction of the legal loot in the British legation. Regular parties went out with carts ' and brough't in what they could silks, embroideries, furs, bronzes, jewelry, jade, china vases. These were then sold every afternoon at 5 o'clock on the legation lawn, or in the first hall, and quite a considerable sum' of money was real ized by the sale of these articles. These aucljionswero well attended, mostly by British officers and missionaries, and by a few Americans: A worse thing happened. Out in the court, as one of the Chinese officials whq was escorting the visitors stood impassive, with his white tasselled hat, ;and. a long necklace of amber and jade, With pendants, the! emblem of his rank, dangling on his chest, a military officer approached him and with va bow removed the valued necklace from the Chinaman's neck, placed it round his own, andwith a "Ta-ta" and grace ful wave of the hand, walked away with it. A complaint was later mado of this to Sir Robert Hart, but, 'un fortunately, the necklace could never bo recovered. Henry Savage Landor's "China, and the Allies." ---' Raising "Pears." - The speech in the house of lords of the Bishop of Hereford on the sub ject of. gambling recalls a story told of Bishop Potter, of New York. -Tho bishop, travelling through Louisiana, addressed inquiries to his feljowrpas sengers with a view of obtaining in formation regarding the orchards and fruit interests of tho state. "Do you raise pears in Louisiana?" inquired th bishop. "We do," replied the Louis iahian, "If we havo threes or hotter.' London Financial News. , ,n :.