Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/146

 for example. We are hardly equal to their system of private dramas. They fix on the plot, the acts, the scenes, and the incidents, and then, the parts being assigned, leave each participant to fill up the words for himself or herself. Travellers say it is really astonishing with what wit and fluency they acquit themselves.

Some persons are very subject to hoarseness on every exposure, to "a frog in the throat," as it is familiarly called from the croaking sound of the voice. They will find this frequently prevented by bathing the throat night and morning in cold water, or salt and water, by gargling every morning with a weak solution of tannic acid, or alum, and by guarding against varying the protection of the throat. When the hoarseness is already present, it can be often dispersed by inhaling the fumes of iodine, or the steam from hot water poured on chlorate of potash, or by taking slowly the white of an egg, beaten up with sugar. Still more efficient, and a favorite with singers, is a tumbler of water containing five or six drops of dilute nitric acid (Acidum nitricum dilutum, U. S. P.) swallowed slowly twice a day. A lemon is often sucked for the same purpose. When the hoarseness is permanent, as it often is in clergymen and other public speakers, the use of the Turkish bath twice a week has a most excellent effect.

The training of the voice in singing is a subject of