may be still in store for us, and as colds and coughs may return, we beg to make friendly offer of the following probatum est recipe, quite a popular cure in this part of the country for every form of winter influenza. Cure or no cure, the recipe has at all events the merit of being extremely simple, and to thousands of our readers very readily available at any time. Take a pint--say a tumblerful--of sea water that has been heated to the boiling-point, without having been allowed actually to boil. Sprinkle over it some pepper, rather more plentifully than you do in your soup; drink this as hot as you can bear it as you step into bed at night. Next day your cold and cough will have disappeared like an unpleasant dream. You may be weak, but you will, upon the whole, be well! We cannot personally vouch for the efficacy of this draught, but we find that many people here invariably resort to it as a ready and popular cure for their colds, and they speak highly of its virtues, and, contrary to what one would expect, of its comparative pleasantness and palatability as well. A sensible old man whom we questioned on the subject a few days ago, and a firm believer in the efficacy of this "saline" draught, told us in confidence that the rationale of the thing consisted in the fact that it immediately acted as a powerful sudorific; and that to this, he thought, was to be attributed the thoroughness as well as the rapidity of the cure. Probably he was right. It is a simple, cheap, and readily available remedy at all events, and dwellers by the sea-side might do worse than give it a trial at a pinch, when more orthodox remedies have failed, or are not ready to hand. One grand thing about it is the certainty that, if it does no good, it cannot possibly do harm. Another old man in our neighbourhood, still hale and active, though in his eighty-fourth year, told us lately that he never took a dose, not a ha'penny's worth, of medicine, druggist's or doctor's stuff in his life. "Whenever I felt out of sorts," he continued, "I just went down to the sea and drank a good large draught of salt water; that was always my medicine, and it never once failed to do me good." So that there may be more virtue in sea water as a curative agent in bronchial and stomachic ailments than the world generally wots. And if so, how consoling the thought that this druggist's shop is never shut; the supply is exhaustless, and no charge!