Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/193

 next room, and winds up with a plunge into cold water. The peasants, it is said, indulge the national taste in this wise: they have enormous clay stoves in which they sit until thoroughly sweated, and then, naked as they are, rush out of the house and roll in the snow; and this in the midst of a Russian winter, with the thermometer ever so far below zero!

Our own Indians have always been partial to just such a bath. They build a small lodge of skins, heat a number of stones, and pile them in the centre, then, shutting close the apertures, dash water on the stones until the lodge is filled with the hot vapor. After they have enjoyed this a while, they start on a full run for the nearest brook or pond, and plunge in its cool waves. This they look upon as "big medicine," and a specific for all diseases under the sun.

All these methods have the objection that one must breathe the hot air into the lungs. A simple and easy method of taking a Russian bath on a small scale at home, but a method quite as efficient as any other, is this: seat yourself unclothed on a cane-bottomed chair, under which you place a very hot brick on a plate. Wrap a large blanket around you from the neck downward, inclosing the chair, and carefully close the borders. Pour from time to time a little hot water on the brick, and the body will soon be in an atmosphere of highly heated vapor. If a dry-air bath is preferred, place a spirit lamp under the chair, and arrange the