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EAT BEFORE SLEEP. It is the True Way to Obtain Refreshing Slumber. To Sleep on an Empty Stomach is to Awake Exhausted. Going to bed with a well-filled stomach is the essential prerequisite of refreshing slumber, The cautious so often reiterated in old medical journals against late suppers were directed chief¬ ly to the bibulous habits of those early times. When at every late feast the guests not unseldom drank themselves under the table, or needed strong as¬ sistance to reach their couch, the canon against such indulgence was net un¬ timely. Nature and common seuse teach us that a full stomach is essential to quiet repose. Every man who has found it difficult to keep awake after a hearty dinner has answered the problem for himself. There are few animals that can be trained to rc3t until after they are fed. Man, as he comes into the world, pre - sents a condition it would be well for him to follow in all his after-life. The sweetest minstrel ever sent out of para¬ dise cannot sing an infant to sleep on an empty stomach. We have known reckless nurses to give the little ones a dose of paregoric or soothing syrup in place of its cup of milk, when it was too much trouble to get the latter, but this is the one alternative. The little stomach of the sleeping child, as it be¬ comes gradually empty, folds on itself in plaits; two of these make it restless; three will open its eyes, but by careful soothing these may be closed again; four plaits and the charm is broken; there is no more sleep in that house¬ hold until that child has been fed. It seems to us so strange that with this example before their eyes full-grown men are so slow to learn the lesson. The farmer docs it for his pig, who would squeal all night if it were not fed at the last moment, and the groom knows that his horse will paw in his stall until he has had his meal. But when lie wishes to sleep himself he never seeim to think of it. To sleep, the fulness of the blood must leave the head: to digest the eaten food the Wood must come to the stomach. Thus, sleep and digestion aro natural allies; one helps the other. Man, by long practice, will train himself to sleep on an empty stomach, but it is more the sleep of exhaustion than the sleep of refreshment. He wakes up after such a troubled sleep feeling utterly miserable until he has had a cup of coffee or some other stimulant, and he has so injured the tone of his stom¬ ach that he ha3 little appetite for break¬ fast. Whereas, one who allows himself to sleep after a comfortable meal awakes strengthened, and his appetite has been quickened by that preceding indul¬ gence.* The difficulty in recovery comes from the fact that we arc such creatures of our habits it is impossible to break away from them without persistent effort. In this case the man who has eaten nothing after 6 o’clock and re¬ tires at 10 or 11 takes to bed an empty stomach upon which the action of the gastric juices makes him uncomforta¬ ble all the night. If he proposes to try our experiment he will sit down and eat a tolerably hearty meal. He is unaccustomed to this at that hour aud has a sense of discomfort with it. U e may try it once or twice, or even long¬ er, and then he gives it up, satisfied that for him it is a failure. The true course is to begin with just one or two mouthfuls the last thing be- fore going to bed. And this should bo light food, easily digested. No cake or pastry should bo tolerated, One mouthful of cold roast beef, cold lamb, cold chicken, aud a little crust of bread tvill do to begin with, or, what is bet¬ ter yet, a spoonful or two of condensed milk (not the sweetened that comes in cans) in three times as much warm water. Into this cut half a pared peach and two or three Itttlc squares of bread, *he whole to be one-fourth or one-sixth of what would be a light lunch. Ircrcase this very gradually, until at -Uicnd of a month or six weeks the patient may indulge in a bowl of milk, ‘wo peaches, with a half hard roll or a crust of home-made bread, When peaches are gone take baked apples the milk till strawberries come, and eat the latter till peaches return again. This is the secret of our health "ad vita ity. We often work until after midnight, but eating the comfort¬ able meal is the last thing we do every night of the year. This is not an un¬ tried experiment or one depending on the testimony of i single witness.— American Analyst. They Split the Difference. Adjutant-General Mullen was in a reminiscent mood. ‘T will tell you a little experience I hal down in Louis¬ iana in 1SG2,” he said. “I was a mem¬ ber of the Connecticut Volunteers. The opposing armies ha l esme into pretty close quarters, and Confederate out- pickets, stragglers and skirmishers were around us and doing considerable mischief. Three companies of our reg¬ iment were ordered out on skirmish duty. We marched down, five paces apart, according to regulations, into a perfect morass. The water was waist S deep everywhere. ‘■I am not very tall, and found it necessary to hold up my cartridge belt to keep it from getting saturated. The Confederates were scattered through this swamp, and we took a number of prisoners without opening fire. I met with a misfortune. My foot caught be¬ neath a couple of parallel branches be¬ neath the water, aad I was securely pinioned. My companions continued on their way while I struggled hard to extricate myself from my unpleasant predicament. I finally pulled my foot out with a desperate effort, but my shoe was left behind. I could only secure it by plunging my head beneath the surface of slimy, noxious, muddy water, but it had to be done, I ha l no sooner got the shoe tied on again than a Confederate came in sight from behind some bushes. Intuitively our muskets were simultaneously raised. “Surrender!’ thundered the Coufcd- crate. ‘•Surrender yourself?’ I returned at the top of my lungs. “Then wc stood and eyed each other. Each had his gun cocked aud levelled at the other, but neither pulled a trig¬ ger. Why wo hesitated is more than I can explain. By delaying, you see, each was practically placing himself at the mercy of the other, or so it would seem. Suddenly the Confederate’s gun dropped aud I brought mine down also. 4 4 » See here, Yank,’ he began, in a much milder tone, *if I should shoot you my side wouldn’t gain much; and, again, if you should shoot me your side wouldn’t gaiu much. Now, I’ve got a wife and two babies over yonder, and if you dropped me they wouldu’t have nobody to take care of them. Now, it’s a blamed mean man what won’t split the difference. I’ll let you go il you’ll let me go, and we’ll call the thing square. What do you say?’ “Well, what should I say ? I walked over half way, aud we met and shook hands and parted, About a year after a letter came to our camp addressed to ‘Little Yankee that split the differ¬ ence.’ 1 had told him my regiment, you see, but not my name, The letter was a cordial invitation to visit the man at bis home in Louisiana, IIc wanted me too see the wife and bal>ie3 whose members had prompted him to propose to split the difference, and. I have al¬ ways regretted that I wa3 unable to ac¬ cept the invitation.”— St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Child of the Future. It is a dreadful point about these microbes that the only way to avoid having them in a virulent form is to have them in an artificial or attenuated form. The children of the future will not run through the present gamut of infantile disease, but they w ill probab- ly be subjected to inoculation with various microbes every few months, First, they will be vaccinated for small¬ pox; when they have recovered from that they will be taken to a Pasteur in¬ stitute to have a mild form of rabies. Next, they will be given a dose of the comma baccilli to prevent cholera, and so on through all the ever-growing series of disease microbes. Oh! luckless child of the future! you will never be ill and never be well; your health will never be awfully monotonous; you will never know the weariness of the first night of measles, when it was so nice to lie in mother’s lap and feel her cool hand on your forehead; you will never know the joys of convalescence, when oranges wa?e numerous and every one was kind to you because you were not well; and your end will be to die of debility. IIow glad we are that we live in the present, with all its up? and downs of health to lend variety to life and death. WILD GEESE. Exciting Onslaught Upon the Waterfowl in Iowa. Great Ingenuity Required to Overcome Their Caution. Writing from Hampton, la., a corre¬ spondent of the Chicago lit raid says: All true sportsmen know that the wild goose is the most wary of all water- • fowl, and to make a successful bag a man needs to use all his ingeuuity to overcome their caution. This fact makes the sport highly interesting to all lovers of a guu. 1 will relate you incidents of a day’s sport had by two friends ol mine, Osborn and Kratoch- vil, two of the most successful goose- hunters in northern Iowa. Leaving Hampton on a drizzly day, they drove about 15 miles northwest, and made headquarters at a hospitable farmer’s, who himself was quite a sport. The fol¬ lowing morning before daylight they were up and out in an adjacent corn¬ field. Geese were plenty, flying in all directions, but always out of reach. During the day Osborn met a party of hunters from Chapin, who were on their way home, They told him there was a field of corn about four miles north, of about ten acres in extent, in which the corn had not been picked; said no geese were there as they came by, but the ground was tracked up as though a thousand sheep had been feed¬ ing there. When night came Osborn told Kratochvil of this place, and they concluded to go there the following morning. Arising at three o’clock, and after a liasty lunch they set out for four-mile tramp through the frosty air. In cross¬ ing a Anall creek Kratochvil had the good luck to break through the ice and get wet up to the waist. This, however, was small matter with pros¬ pect of geese ahead, so ou they went. Arriving at the field at last, (after some trouble in finding it, which made them late), what a sight met their eyes— geese, gesse every where; the field was literally alive with them. Nothing could now be done but to scare them out and trust to luck for more coming in. This was done, and our sportsmen hastily constructed small bliuds to hide behind of cornstalks, and awaited the return of the game. Soon they spy a small flock fa the distance. Over they go onto their backs, and raise their heads to keep the flock in view. On thev came, steadily, and slowly, directly for them. You that have been there know how long it seems to take from the time first sighted until the flock reaches you, and as they get closer how your muscles harden, your eyes ache, and it seems as though they would never reach you. Our meu had been there before, however, and never moved until the flock was abreast of them, when up and bang, bang, four shots in rapid suc- cession, and three honkers on the ground, and a fourth, leaving the flock aad spreading his wings, sails half a mile to the westward, where he, too, tumbles dead. “Down! down!” cries Osborn, and agaiu both aro behind the blinds, while another flock is seen quite close coming from the southward. Over they come, and another broadside brings down another pair. The flock rising Hastily and circling back over the same spot to sec what had become of their companions, again placed them¬ selves under fire and three more noble birds were placed to our men’s credit. 3o it continued for a half hoar, sport fast and furious, until 21 nob’e black leeks lay on the field around them. By ibis time the flight was over, so the aunters hiding their game in a hay- jtack tramped back to their rendezvous for breakfast and sent a wagon for¬ ward to bring in the geese. Thinking they had sport enough they came home jnd enjoyed that feeling cf bliss a sportsman feels as he spreads out his bag to the view of his friends. Inriiau Signal System. The Indians of the great Western plains have now a system hardly ex¬ ceeded in efficiency by the military code of the civilized world. For many years their only means of communicating at a distance was by signal fires upon the hill tops at night, and by columns of smoke during the day. They have a method, not well known to those out¬ side the native tribes, of covering a fire until a sufficient Quantity of smoko has been accumulated, when it will sud¬ denly burst forth into a column of thick heavy smoke that cannot fail to attract attention, even at a great distance. These signal fires and smoke signals arc still in use among them, but they have besides a code of signals that is tele¬ graphed from point to point by sun flashes made with a small mirror. Their code is not known beyond their own ranks, further than that it is not a sys¬ tem of words, but that certain flashes of longer or shorter duration, or that vi- brations intermingled with steady rays, signify conditions or events that it was previously arranged they should indi¬ cate. The Indian heliograph is the small, round mirror in a metal case, which has always been an article of trade with savages all over the world. Every Indian hunter or warrior wcar3 one of these little mirrors suspended from a string around his neck, and its use is constant with him. An officer of the army who recently was acting as commissary of subsistence on an Apache reservation told me that on one occasion the stock cattle for issue to the Indians arrived unexpectedly, when ho supposed there were not more than ten Indians within twenty miles of the post, except those around headquarters. These at once put their little heliographs to use, and response? were immediately flashed from the neighboring hill-tops, and re¬ peated to those beyond. The result was that within three hours there were more than twenty-five hundred Indians at the point of issue, and others were still coming in hot haste from every di¬ rection across, the plains. — Cosmopolitan Magazine. The Gills of the Treasury Attic. Some of the queerest work of the Treasury Depart men t at Washington is done in the attic and in the basement. You can Lave no idea of the varieties of business which are carried on inside these great walls, I stood for ten rnin- utes and watched about fifty women sewing on carpets in the top loft of the Treasury. The carpet was stretched on frames like carpenters’ saw-lior es, and the girls were hav¬ ing a kind of quilting-bee in join¬ ing the widths together. All the car¬ pets of the Government, the country over, are sewed here, and if a custom- house at Cleveland or New York wants a carpet, it sends a diagram of its room to the Secretary of the Treasury and the carpet is here made aud shipped. The charwomen of the Treasury take charge of the building after the clerks have gone away and for an hour or so they turn the Department inside out. They wash the windows, They scrub the floors. And they polish up the kno Of the big front doors. They arc under the charge of a head charwoman, who receives a good round salary for watching them scrub, and they get their $240 a year for the busi¬ ness. A number of the girls of the basement sort waste paper and it takes quite a regiment to attend to this busi¬ ness. AU of the old envelopes, wrap¬ pers and scraps of paper which accumu¬ late during the day are saved and are shovelled down into the waste-paper room. This room looks like a great country cellar. Its walls are white¬ washed and one-half of the room is di¬ vided into three great bias, which are filled with throe kinds of paper. The girls arc carefully watched and they sometimes find important documents, and instances have been known of money coming down to this room. Suitable Legs and Feet. Every creature has the kind of legs and feet best suited to it. Birds living in marshes have long, slender legs like stilts and some of them arc called “stilt birds.” The huge body of the ele¬ phant stands upon four thick pillars, the stag has supports of a lighter and nimbler quality. Animals that get some, or their living in the water, as bravers, otters, swans, ducks and gee?e, p.e born with paddles on their feet. The mole, again, is born with spades on his forelegs, so that he may dig his way through the ground, and the camel has his feet carefully padded and his legs of sufficient length to lift his head high above the sand waves so that his eyes may be protectei from glare and dust. —Detroit Free Press. A Medical School Jest. Firstdoctor—Have you a skeleton? S e nd doctor—Yes. First doctor—Let’s nee it. Second doctor—Ca&’t very well; fact is. I’m wearing it under my flleda,— The Voice of the Void. I warn, like the one drop of r&la On your face, ere the storm; Or tremble in whispered refrain With your blood, beating warm. I am the presence that ever Baffles your touch's endeavor,—* Gone like the glimmer of dust Dispersed by a gust. T am the absence that taunts you. The fancy that haunts you; The ever unsatisfied guess That, questioning emptiness, Wins a sigh for reply. Nay; nothing am I, But the flight of a breath— For I am Death! •—George Lathrop in the Century . HUMOROUS. Flower girls—The miller’s daughters. Hailstones intended for publication are usually as big as hens’ eggs. When a man knows that he cannot get out of the mud his next impulse is to go in deeper. That silonce is golden is proved by" the fact that it is sometimes a very cost* ly article to buy. It was a waggish physician who ad* ; vised a mau afflicted with kleptomania to take something for it. Landlady—Will you pass the butter, Mr. Johnson? Mr. Johnson—That butter will not pass, madam? The quantity of paper that jewelers wrap around their goods strikes most people as a great waste of tissue. A sailor is considered a good skipper when he understands the ropes, The same may be said of a little girl. An American girl in Franco who wanted to save cable tolls, telegraphed to her father; i i Marseilles Tuesday.” Writing poetry is recommended as a mental exorcise. You can get physical cxeicisc by attempting to read it to tha editor. Little drops of water, Little grains of sand, Make the grocer's business The finest in the land. Foreman—What’s all that racket over there; somebody pied a form? Printer — No, sir. The towel fell on the floor, that’s all. Photographers aro the most charita¬ ble of men, for they are always anxious to take the best view of their fellow- creatures. Button manufactories canuot be very profitable for the button business is « thiug that sooner or later is bound to get into a hole. Miss Gabble—I havo had that parrol for three months now and it has neve! spoken a word. Caller—Perhaps yoU have never given it a chance. Mrs. Hardhead—That’s our milk¬ man’s wife. Mr. Hardhead—She’s very becomingly attired. Mr'. Hardhead- How so? Mr. Hardhead—She wears a watered silk. Young Wife—Oh, John, the rats have eaten all my angel cake! Hus* band—What! All of it? Young Wife —Every piece. I feel like crying. Husband—Ob, pshaw! Don’t cry over a few rats. “No,” remarked Semes by, enthusi¬ astically, “there’s nothing like the hot water cure! It will brace a man up when all other remedies fail—er—Mrs. Slimdiet, just let me have a cup of tea, is you please?” Student (writing to his father): 1 beg you, my dear father, not for a minute to think that I need this money to pay debts with. I give you my word of honor that I want It only for myself, and that there is no question of debts. * Teacher (promenading with his pupil in the field)—“Nature’s works are marvelous,” exclaimed the pupil. “Yes, indeed,” the teacher replies; “when you come to think, for an ex¬ ample, that the humblest insect has its Latin name.” Homely Women of Portugal. The Portuguese men are rather be¬ low the medium height, of olive com¬ plexion and have brilliant black eyes. For the most part they are very hand-* some. The women, on the contrary, are excessively homely, but dress in very good taste. Both gentleman and ladies copy the Parisian fashions. The prettiest women are the fisher maids, who go about the streets barefooted with their baskets of fish on their heeds, after the fashion of the Egyptian women with their pitchers of water. Some of these girls are remarkably pretty, and. strange to say, their feet are small and delicate looking and their forms grace-