The following cautions in regard to calicoes are useful. Never wash them in very warm water; and change the water when it appears dingy, or the light parts will look dirty. Never rub on soap; but remove grease with French chalk, starch, magnesia, or Wilmington clay. Make starch for black calicoes with coffee-water, to prevent any whitish appearance. Glue is good for stiffening calicoes. When laid aside, not to be used, all stiffening should be washed out, or they will often be injured. Never let calicoes freeze in drying. Some persons use bran-water (four quarts of wheat-bran to two pails of water), and no soap, for calicoes; washing and rinsing in the bran-water. Potato-water is equally good. Take eight peeled and grated potatoes to one gallon of water. _To cleanse Gentlemen’s Broadcloths._—The best way, which the writer has repeatedly tried with unfailing success, is the following: Take one beef’s-gall, half a pound of saleratus, and four gallons of warm water. Lay the article on a table, and scour it thoroughly, in every part, with a clothes-brush dipped in this mixture. The collar of a coat, and the grease-spots, (previously marked by stitches of white thread,) must be repeatedly brushed. Then take the article and rinse it up and down in the mixture. Then rinse it up and down in a tub of soft cold water. Then, without wringing or pressing, hang it to drain and dry. Fasten a coat up by the collar. When perfectly dry, it is sometimes the case, with coats, that nothing more is needed. In other cases, it is necessary to dampen with a sponge the parts which look wrinkled, and either pull them smooth with the fingers, or press them with an iron, having a piece of bombazine or thin woolen cloth between the iron and the article. TO MANUFACTURE LYE, SOAP, STARCH, AND OTHER ARTICLES USED IN WASHING. _To make Lye._—Provide a large tub, made of pine or ash, and set it on a form, so high that a tub can stand under it. Make a hole, an inch in diameter, near the bottom, on one side. Lay bricks inside about this hole, and straw over them. To every seven bushels of ashes add two gallons of unslacked lime, and throw in the ashes and lime in alternate layers. While putting in the ashes and lime, pour on boiling water, using three or four pailfuls. After this, add a pailful of cold soft water once an hour, till all the ashes appear to be well soaked. Catch the drippings in a tub and try its strength with an egg. If the egg rise so as to show a circle as large as a ten-cent piece, the strength is right; if it rise higher, the lye must be weakened by water; if not so high, the ashes are not good, and the whole process must be repeated, putting in fresh ashes, and running the weak lye through the new ashes, with some additional water. _Quick-lye_ is made by pouring one gallon of boiling soft water on three quarts of ashes, and straining it. Oak ashes are best.