Page:Husbandman and Housewife 1820.djvu/28

 and every third dressing, put in some burnt alum over the wound—with a soft rag every time it is dressed. After the cancer is taken out make a healing salve of fresh butter, elder and a little bees wax, and you will find the place become quite well, and leave little or no scar behind. "This evidence of cure," says the Richmond Compiler, a newspaper, printed in Richmond, Vir. "has been kept a secret in a family in this state for a number of years, and has succeeded in a number of cases."

Another.

BURN half a bushel or three pecks of green old field red-oak bark to ashes, boil the ashes in three gallons of water, until reduced to one, strain that gallon off, and boil it away to a thick substance, similar to butter, apply a small quantity on a piece of silk or lint to the cancer, no bigger than the place or part affected. The medicine must be repeated every two hours, until the cancer roots are sufficiently killed, then apply healing salve with a little mercurial ointment mixed therein, and dress it twice a day until cured, which will surely be in about twenty or thirty days at farthest.

To purify Tallow for Candles.

TAKE 5-8 of tallow, and 3-8 of mutton suet, melt them in a copper chaldron, with it mix 8 ounces of brandy, one of salt of tartar, one of sal ammoniac, two of dry potash. Throw the mixture into the chaldron, make the ingredients boil a quarter of an hour then set the whole to cool. Next day the tallow will be found on the surface of the water in a pure cake. Take it out and expose it to the air for some days on canvass.