50. I am getting up a
collection of curiosities, and to any of your readers that will send me
a specimen I will send them full directions for making and using a
plating machine like mine that will plate gold, silver and nickel. Send
small pieces of stones, ores, shells, wood, leaves of trees, plants,
etc. Anything small will do. What I want to get is as many different
specimens from as many different places all over the country as I can.
Address

MISS M. F. CASSEY.
OBERLIN, OHIO.

The Night Cap.

In a late letter to the August Constitution Jas. R. Randall discourses
thus pleasantly of the efficiency of the night cap in producing sleep:

About 9 o'clock at night we boarded the sleeping coach for Washington.
Just before retiring for the night my mind, somehow or other, reverted
to an editorial article recently published in the New York Times, half
serious, half earnest, concerning the latest theory of an English
physician as to the prepotent cause of insomnia and nervous disorders
generally. It may be remembered that to the abandonment of the night cap
of our grandfathers (the cotton or flannel article, not the alcoholic)
was attributed the modern tendency of sleeplessness that make even a
philosopher like Herbert Spencer more or less of a crank. What I wanted,
and wanted as the fellow did his pistol in Texas, was first-class
slumber, just such unmitigated repose as occasionally comes to a highly
organized baby, unvexed by colic or pure cussedness. I began to think
that perhaps that British doctor was right, and that, if it were
possible, I would return to the neglected custom of my ancestors. Just
at that moment I plunged my hand into my coat pocket and pulled out a
silk smoking-cap--a pretty thing, wrought for me long ago by the dainty,
delicate, deft fingers of one who now rests in the graveyard at Augusta.
This cap was the very thing. I placed it reverently upon my head, with
an act of faith, and lay down. The result was magical. Never since I was
a boy can I remember to have experienced so perfect and delicious a
repose. Not a dream rippled the surface of my calm brain, and I awakened
hours afterward with a sense of satisfaction that must be a foretaste of
heaven itself. An incipient headache had vanished. Powers of mind that
had been dulled were restored to animation and keenness. Not a trace of
irascibility remained; but in its place came trooping the sweet angels
that Father Faber says con