with a slow fire; when dissolved, put six or eight pounds of clean snow with it; and after having boiled them together well for three hours, (or until it shews a lather on its surface,) add a wine glass of fine salt, and let it get cold; when it will be found the finest soap, and to weigh as much as the snow did originally.

AN IMPROVEMENT IN CANDLES.

A plan for improving mould Candles and the quantity of their light is introduced by a writer in Spofford's American Magazine, for October, 1815, viz: "Place a small straw of rye or oats in the centre of the wick, the ends of which may be stopped by being dipped in some bees wax or bayberry tallow, to prevent the cavity being filled with tallow in the mould or in dipping. Clipping the lower end opens the straw which is easily opened at the upper end by clipping off a little piece; and on being lighted, the extra labour is not to be regretted."

The following receipt is inserted at this point because it is too good to be lost, rather than because it comes strictly under the head of Small Economies. Yet "old shoes that are worn out" are so carefully specified that perhaps our classification is justified after all. It is found in the Almanac for 1804:

To prevent Crows pulling up Indian Corn.

A farmer has communicated to the Editor a sure method to prevent Crows visiting corn fields, which he has practised for some years, and has ever been attended with the desired effect. As those mischievous birds have been very troublesome for some years past to many farmers, the following method is thought worthy the public

attention.

Take three or four old shoes, that are worn out, and fill the toes of them with sulphur, or the roll of brimstone broken small, make a fire with chips, or any small dry wood in or near the middle of your corn field on a flat rock, or on the bare mould, (a

rock being preferable) after planting your corn field, then lay the toes of the shoes on the fire and let them continue until the leather be burnt through, and the brimstone has taken fire; then after sticking down poles of ten or twelve feet in length at each corner of your field, and inclining them towards the centre, make a string fast to the heal quarters of each shoe, and tie it fast to the top ends of the poles, letting the strings extend half way down, and when swinging, not to interfere with the poles; and no crows will alight on your field that season.

If anything will keep crows out of a cornfield, surely it must be this combination of brimstone, charred leather, and gibbeted shoes!

INDIAN SUMMER AND THE COMET

HE Farmer's Calendar for May, 1818, affords an exhilarating item:

TH

Planting time is close by and we begin to think of Indian dumplings and puddings. Be not discouraged about raising corn. Uncle Jethro says that the good old Indian summers will return again. He is a great philosopher and astronomer, and ascribes our frosty seasons, which have been so troublesome of late, to the spots in the sun, which however he says, will soon be entirely obliterated. The tail of the comet is shortly to pass over the sun's disk, like a dusting brush, and they will be seen no more.

Indian summer is as familiar a phrase as can well be imagined, and the thing itself is confidently expected by all of us when late autumn comes round. The history of the term, however, is obscure enough; but much light is thrown upon it by Mr. Albert Matthews in a learned paper published by the United States Weather Bureau.1

The earliest example of the term which Mr. Matthews has discovered occurs in Major Ebenezer Denny's Journal under the date of October 13, 1794: "Pleasant weather. The Indian summer here. Frosty nights."2 The diarist must surely have used a phrase that was perfectly familiar to him, and of course he adds no explanation, his entry being intended for his own eye alone. Four years later, in June, 1798, Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, describing the pre

1 The Term Indian, Summer, Monthly Weather Review for January and February, 1902.

2 Military Journal, Memoirs Hist. Soc. of Penn., VII, 402.

ceding winter at Hartford, Connecticut, remarks: "About the beginning of January the weather softened considerably, and continued mild for several days. Most people supposed the Indian summer was approaching (a week or fortnight of warm weather, which generally takes place about the middle of January), but, instead of this, there succeeded to these pleasant days a delightful fall of snow, about a foot in depth, which was bound down by an incrustation of hail, and prevented from blowing in heaps by the winds which followed." In 1803 the French traveller Volney, who visited America between 1795 and 1798, mentioned the Indian summer as occurring towards November and equated it with the "St. Martin's summer" of the French.2 These are the only writers of the eighteenth century, so far as we know, who employ the term Indian summer at all. They are, however, quite independent of each other, and their testimony establishes one fact beyond peradventure: the phrase was common among the people in the last decade of that century. The presumption is that it had been in use a good while, and we are not surprised therefore to learn that in 1809 Dr. Shadrach Ricketson, of New York, wrote of the name as "long known in this country." Five more examples have been discovered by Mr. Matthews before 1820, to which that from the Almanac for 1818 may now be added as a sixth. From this time the term becomes frequent. Its picturesqueness and agreeable associations commended it to writers of every grade and it was soon established in literature on both sides of the Atlantic. It lent itself readily to figurative applications. As early as 1830 De Quincey wrote of the great Bentley: "An Indian summer crept stealthily over his closing days; a summer

1 Medical Repository, II, 282.

2 Tableau du Climat et du Sol des États-Unis d'Amérique, Paris, 1803, I, 283.

3 Medical Repository, Second Hexade, VI, 187.