Some three months ago an uncle of mine from Albany, N. Y., was visiting at our house, and we were talking of plated ware, which he is engaged in manufacturing, and to gratify my curiosity he made a plating machine and replated our knives, forks, spoons and caster. It only cost $4, and it did the work perfectly. Some of our neighbors saw what we had plated, and wanted me to do some plating for them. Since then I have worked twenty-two days, clearing in that time $94.34. At almost every house I got from $2 to $3 worth of plating to do, and such work is most all profit. This business is as nice for ladies as it is for gentlemen, being all indoor work, and any one can do it. My brother, although he worked two days longer than I did, only made $91.50. I am getting up a collection of curiosities, and to any of your readers that will send me a specimen I will send them full directions for making and using a plating machine like mine that will plate gold, silver and nickel. Send small pieces of stones, ores, shells, wood, leaves of trees, plants, etc. Anything small will do. What I want to get is as many different specimens from as many different places all over the country as I can. Address MISS M. F. CASSEY. OBERLIN, OHIO. The Night Cap. In a late letter to the August Constitution Jas. R. Randall discourses thus pleasantly of the efficiency of the night cap in producing sleep: About 9 o'clock at night we boarded the sleeping coach for Washington. Just before retiring for the night my mind, somehow or other, reverted to an editorial article recently published in the New York Times, half serious, half earnest, concerning the latest theory of an English physician as to the prepotent cause of insomnia and nervous disorders generally. It may be remembered that to the abandonment of the night cap of our grandfathers (the cotton or flannel article, not the alcoholic) was attributed the modern tendency of sleeplessness that make even a philosopher like Herbert Spencer more or less of a crank. What I wanted, and wanted as the fellow did his pistol in Texas, was first-class slumber, just such unmitigated repose as occasionally comes to a highly organized baby, unvexed by colic or pure cussedness. I began to think that perhaps that British doctor was right, and that, if it were possible, I would return to the neglected custom of my ancestors. Just at that moment I plunged my hand into my coat pocket and pulled out a silk smoking-cap--a pretty thing, wrought for me long ago by the dainty, delicate, deft fingers of one who now rests in the graveyard at Augusta. This cap was the very thing. I placed it reverently upon my head, with an act of faith, and lay down. The result was magical. Never since I was a boy can I remember to have experienced so perfect and delicious a repose. Not a dream rippled the surface of my calm brain, and I awakened hours afterward with a sense of satisfaction that must be a foretaste of heaven itself.