Home Made Toilet Soap

1896

The subscriber who requested a recipe for toilet soap will find the following excellent:

Boil together slowly, for one hour, two pounds of pure beef tallow, two of washing soda, one pound of salt and one ounce each of gum camphor, oil of bergamot and borax; stir it often; let it stand until cold, then warm it over, so that it will run easily, and turn into moulds dipped in cold water. Like all soaps, it improves with age.

An oatmeal soap that softens the skin may be economically made from bits of castile and glycerine soap, if these are allowed to accumulate when they get too small for toilet purposes. Make a saturated solution of pulverized borax and cut into it all the bits of soap, boiling until they are dissolved and the mixture as thick as cream; stir into the mass oatmeal enough to make a thick, but soft, paste, mingling with the meal a little sulphur and pulverized camphor, stir until it cools somewhat, but is still soft enough to pour into a mould or moulds. — New York Herald.


Women In Austrian Prisons

In Austria, a woman, no matter what she may do, is never regarded or treated quite as a criminal.

She may rob, burn, kill — set every law at defiance, in fact, and break all the commandments in turn — without a fear of ever being called upon to face the gallows. She is not even sent to an ordinary prison to do penance for her sins; the hardest fate that can befall her, indeed, is to be compelled to take up her abode for a time in a convent. There the treatment meted out to her is not so much justice seasoned with mercy as mercy seasoned, and none too well, with justice.

Even in official reports she is an "erring sister" — one who has, it is true, strayed from the narrow path, but quits involuntarily. — Cornhill Magazine.

Girl Tramp Likes Road's Philosophy

1915

Pretty, Convent Bred and of Good Family, Irene Lane Prefers "Freedom"

St. Louis, Mo., (special) — An attractive girl with every indication of education, but with hair cut close to her head and a strange masculine carriage and manner of speaking has provided an interesting study for the police of this city. She gives her name as Irene Lane, admits that her real name, if known would "astonish the east" and boasts of the fact that she is and has been for more than a year a "tramp." Not a common tramp, but an associate of the leaders of the tramp world.

"Miss Lane" was arrested on Monday by a policeman who saw her running near the railroad tracks. She was dressed in feminine attire for the first time in many months, and as she jumped over the railroad ties, ran up a coal pile and dragged herself quickly up by the handles of a freight car the policeman decided that there was something strange about the matter and decided to investigate.

"Miss Lane" went to police headquarters without complaint, and when there amazed the police officials with her description of the life she had been living and of the philosophy which she had developed in her contact with "the road."

She explained that she was a convent graduate and readily convinced her questioners of it. Tired of teaching school and instructing class after class of foreign pupils in the use of English she said, she had made an arrangement with a young man of her acquaintance who was in ill health to take "a fling about the country in the open." He became discouraged after a few weeks, she explained.

—The Bayard Advocate, Bayard, Iowa, January 7, 1915, page 7.