Deep Breathing Helped One Sufferer With Insomnia

1908

Troubled All His Life

"I have been troubled with insomnia all my life," remarked the nervous man, "and like most people similarly afflicted I have tried all the familiar dodges to induce sleep. The results were never particularly satisfactory in the way of producing the desired effect until one night I thought I had actually found a sleep-inducer when I chanced to grasp one of the rods at the head of my bed with both hands and practically hung the weight of my body on them. That sent me to sleep and it did the same thing for a few times, when to my extreme disappointment, I found it had ceased to work.

"I was as badly off as recently, until one night, when I had a bad cough, as well as an attack of sleeplessness. I tried the well-known remedy of trying to send myself off into the land of nod by taking long deep breaths. What it did to me, and has done several times since, was not to only send me to sleep, but to stop my cough. Just why it did so is not of much consequence. That it did so is the thing that concerns me most."


Poetry Wins Bandit's Heart

Prof. Bliss Perry tells a story to illustrate the advantages of literary wisdom. A friend, he says, was traveling in French mountains when on a lonely road he was stopped by highwaymen, his life threatened, and his valuables demanded. His literary instincts were to the fore, even in his extremity and half unconsciously he burst forth with an appropriate couplet, quoted from some obscure French poet.

"Hold!" cried the leader of the highwaymen. "My comrades, this gentleman is acquainted with the works of our friend, M. So-and-So! He is, then, our brother."

The purse was returned, courtesies extended, and the traveler and three bandits adjourned to an inn near by and spent a pleasant evening. — Boston Herald.