Milk of lime is one of the best disinfectants for use in this country. It is cheap, and it not only disinfects waste matter, but destroys bad odors. It is powdered quicklime dissolved in water, about one liter of quicklime to four liters of water. Another very cheap, but reliable, disinfectant is made by dissolving three drams of mercury bichloride with three drams of ammonium chloride in a bucket of water. This mixture can always be kept in the house and a tabo or two of it thrown down the closet seat whenever the latter is used. It must be kept where little children cannot meddle with it; but a child need not be very old to be wise enough to use it when necessary and not to meddle with it. Children, as well as grown people, should feel in honor bound to take good care of the house and to fight against dirt and disease when these attack it. The bathroom and water-closet of our house should be kept as clean as can be. They should be swept and washed every day, and no soiled clothing or towels should be allowed to lie about. Our enemies, the mosquitoes, are very fond of hiding about soiled clothing or that which has been worn and is not soiled enough to be sent to the laundry. Soiled garments should be washed as soon as possible after they are taken off. Right here lurks one of the greatest foes to health in this country. People are too careless about the way their garments are washed. The clothes often lie for several days in baskets or bags before going to the laundry or being washed. This is bad, as germs breed quickly among them. It is harmful for clothes to be washed in pools or canals. The water of standing pools or even of the canals in the city is, more often than not, full of disease germs. [Illustration: CLOTHES DRYING ON THE GROUND. ] To make matters worse, the clothes, when washed, are laid out on the grass to dry. All sorts of tiny creeping things are here; so that while the garments look white and clean, they may be full of wriggling life from the water and from the ground,—creatures too small to be seen without a microscope, yet the cause, many times, of the unpleasant skin diseases so common in this climate. The laundry work of the family ought to be done at home, and the clothes should be hung upon lines to dry. In other countries clothes are boiled after first being washed with soap, but this is not possible here; probably it never will be possible. Yet clothes can be washed with soap and water and then leached,—that is, rinsed in lye water. Wood ashes are easy to get, and lye water—that is, water in which the ashes have been soaked—will destroy all germs. The clothes rinsed in it are as safe as those which have been boiled. [Illustration: THE BEST WAY TO DRY CLOTHES. ]