The easiest way in housekeeping and cooking

You do not want your water to be a solution or tincture of dead leaves, dead frogs and insects, or stray mice or kittens ; and this it must be, now and again, if not covered sufficiently to exclude such chances, tliough not the ai7', which must be given free access to it. As to hard and soft water, the latter is always most desirable, as soft water extracts the flavor of tea &nd coflfee far better than hard, and is also better for all cook- ing and washing purposes. Hard water results from a superabundance of lime ; and this lime " cakes '* on the bottom of tea-kettles, curdles soap, and clings to every thing boiled in it, from clothes to meat and vegetables (which last are always more tender if cooked in soft water ; though, if it be too soft, they are apt to boil to a porridge). DRAINAGE AND WATEB-SUPPLT. 33 Washing-soda or borax will soften hard water, and make it better for all household purposes ; but rain-water, even if not desired for drinking, will be found better than any softened by artificial means. If, as in many towns, the supply of drinking-water for many families comes from the town pump or pumps, the same principles must be attended to. A well in Golden Square, London, was noted for its especially bright and sparkhng water, so much so that people sent from long distances to secure it. The cholera broke out ; and all who drank from the well became its victims, though the square seemed a healthy location. Analysis showed it to be not only alive with a species of fungus growing in it, but also weighted with dead organic matter from a neigh- boring churchyard. Every tissue in the living bodies which had absorbed this water was inflamed, and ready to yield to the first epidemic ; and cholera was the natural outcome of such conditions. Knowledge should guard against any such chances. See to it that no open cess- pool poisons either air or water about your home. Sunk at a proper distance from the house, and connected with it by a drain so tightly put together that none of the con- tents can escape, the cesspool, which may be an elaborate, brick-lined cistern, or merely an old hogshead thoroughly tarred within and without, and sunk in the ground, becomes one of the most important adjuncts of a good garden. If, in addition to this, a pile of all the decaying vegetable matter — leaves, weeds, &c. — is made, all dead cats, hens, or puppies finding burial there ; and the whole closely covered with earth to absorb, as fresh earth has the power to do, all foul gases and vapors ; and if at intervals the pile is wet through with liquid from the 3 34 JDBAINAGE AND WATEB-SUPPLT. cesspool, the richest form of fertilizer is secured, and one of the great agricultural duties of man fulfilled, — that of " returning to the soil, as fertilizers, all the salts produced by the combustion of food in the human bod3\"