weather because the cabin was too hard to heat to allow it to be cooled by an ice cold wet wash.

Such cold and dampness might have meant more sore throats, croup, ague or various kinds of respiratory disease, for without doctors, nurses, hospitals or drug stores, illness meant home remedies made of medicinal plants and bark gathered and dried in the summer must be used. Albert E. Smith has related some of the remedies his own mother used. Dog fennel made a good poultice for sore throat; sulphur and molasses were effective as a throat swab; wild cherry bark syrup was used for a cough and onion syrup for colds. Also the following remedy found in a number of old "Health Hints" was widely used.

Water poured over wood ashes and drained made an effective emetic; corn kernels heated thoroughly and then put in a small bag and wrapped in a warm woolen cloth were soothing for anyone suffering from toothache. There was much conversation about illness in those days. "Isn't it awful the sickness going around." There were epidemics of scarlet fever, diptheria and other diseases that sometimes stopped only after the most susceptible had succumbed. In some instances these epidemics proved fatal to as many as four and five children in one family. Wearing a bag of asafetida or carrying a buckeye or a rabbit foot had no potency against such a disaster. To hear of a case of smallpox or black diptheria brought feelings of helplessness and terror to any area in the middle of the last century.

Our pioneers and early settlers saved everything and found a use for herbs, plants and barks of trees for flavoring as well as for cures. Rose petals and rose geranium leaves were used for flavoring; hedge apples, walnut bark, roots and plants were found useful for dyes. Elderberry paste gave a fine shine to shoes and the liquid made ink for their quill pens. Different kinds of berries provided color for new and old cloth, for strips of old clothing, for braided rugs and bits of cloth for quilts. The women longed for color, for something pretty, and to make designs in their weaving.

Our present generation would marvel at the intricacies necessary to produce homespun cloth; first came the raising of the flax, picking out the short fibers needed to make a linen thread at the right stage of culture when the base of the stalk began to turn yellow about the first of July, and then preparing skeins for spinning and weaving. With all the homemade contraptions, hatchels, carder's reels and other devices with spinning wheels, which could be taken apart, sometimes a woman would jump on horseback in the early morning and with a baby on one arm and a flax wheel tied behind, would ride several

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