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HERBS.

All herbs should be carefully kept from the air.  Herb tea, to do any good, should be made very strong.

Herbs should be gathered while in blossom.  If left till they have gone to seed, the strength goes into the seed.  Those who have a little patch of ground, will do well to raise the most important herbs; and those who have not, will do well to get them in quantities from some friend in the country; for apothecaries make very great profit upon them.

Sage is very useful both as a medicine, for the headache—­when made into tea—­and for all kinds of stuffing, when dried and rubbed into powder.  It should be kept tight from the air.

Summer-savory is excellent to season soup, broth, and sausages.  As a medicine, it relieves the cholic.  Pennyroyal and tansy are good for the same medicinal purpose.

Green wormwood bruised is excellent for a fresh wound of any kind.  In winter, when wormwood is dry, it is necessary to soften it in warm vinegar, or spirit, before it is bruised, and applied to the wound.

Hyssop tea is good for sudden colds, and disorders on the lungs.  It is necessary to be very careful about exposure after taking it; it is peculiarly opening to the pores.

Tea made of colt’s-foot and flax-seed, sweetened with honey, is a cure for inveterate coughs.  Consumptions have been prevented by it.  It should be drank when going to bed; though it does good to drink it at any time.  Hoarhound is useful in consumptive complaints.

Motherwort tea is very quieting to the nerves.  Students, and people troubled with wakefulness, find it useful.

Thoroughwort is excellent for dyspepsy, and every disorder occasioned by indigestion.  If the stomach be foul, it operates like a gentle emetic.

Sweet-balm tea is cooling when one is in a feverish state.

Catnip, particularly the blossoms, made into tea, is good to prevent a threatened fever.  It produces a fine perspiration.  It should be taken in bed, and the patient kept warm.

Housekeepers should always dry leaves of the burdock and horseradish.  Burdocks warmed in vinegar, with the hard, stalky parts cut out, are very soothing, applied to the feet; they produce a sweet and gentle perspiration.  Horseradish is more powerful.  It is excellent in cases of the ague, placed on the part affected.  Warmed in vinegar, and clapped.

Succory is a very valuable herb.  The tea, sweetened with molasses, is good for the piles.  It is a gentle and healthy physic, a preventive of dyspepsy, humors, inflammation, and all the evils resulting from a restricted state of the system.

Elder-blow tea has a similar effect.  It is cool and soothing, and peculiarly efficacious either for babes or grown people, when the digestive powers are out of order.

Lungwort, maiden-hair, hyssop, elecampane and hoarhound steeped together, is an almost certain cure for a cough.  A wine-glass full to be taken when going to bed.