Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 March 1883 — Nature’s Wash-Room. [ARTICLE]

Nature’s Wash-Room.

Nature’s gifts are widely and variously distributed. In one place the elements of things are given to be made available by labor; elsewhere, she provides things ready for man’s use. To gain our bread, the seed must first be sown and months after the grain harvested, threshed and ground. But the native of the Pacific Isles plucks his bread from the breadfruit tree. Our druggist, with his acids, concocts the cooling soda-water; but in a tiny, rocky isle in the middle of Clear lake, California, there is a perpetual soda-fountain from which gushes better soda-water than the chemist can produce. Perhaps nature foresaw the overworked and not over-strong housewife to whom “washing-day” is a dread and burden, when she established here and ther enatural wash-tubs and washing-ma-chines and, in some places, even provided reatly-made soap. In the Yellowstone National Park the family washing is easily disposed of. The soiled bedding and clothing is put into a stout bag which is hung in one of the boiling springs *md left there while the party wander fibout sight-seeing. When taken out the clothes are so clean and white that no rinsing is necessary. On one occasion a party hung their bag of clothes in the basin of the geyser called “Old Giant,” and, wandering off, were absent longer than they intended to be. While they were away, the “giant” spouted, and the garments were thrown high in the air. torn into shreds and scattered. Some time afterward, bits of the blanket and other cloth were found petrified, and some of these petrefactions are still exhibited.

Voltaire, 120 veahe ago, said that “before the beginning of the nineteenth century Christianity will have disappeared from the earth.” In 1880, the date appointed for the extermination of Christianity, there were 24,000,000 En-glish-speaking people, and of these 14,000,000 were Protestants, 5,500,000 Romanists. Next year is the centenary of organic American Methodism, and it .is proposed that all the Methodist sects shall unite in a celebration. It is probable that all will join in this demonstration except the Methodist Protestants, who constitute a body that seceded in 1830 on the question of episcopacy.