C. A. E. F.--That you have had gastric ulcer is of course unquestionable, but from what you say you have apparently been well treated. Gastric ulcer is a dangerous disease, and is very liable to recur unless stringent precautions are taken. If, however, patients with gastric ulcer are very careful, the disease gets less and less and usually ends in complete cure; but careful diet is always essential. As you know, the treatment is practically the same as that for severe dyspepsia. As regards your diet, we should not advise much alteration. You must not take oats in any form, for they are indigestible. We would suggest milk instead of cocoa, for notwithstanding all that has been said about cocoa, we have considerable reason for suspecting that it is anything but easy of digestion. When you have pain, you would do well to eat nothing but bread and milk for a day or two, and you should remain in bed during that time. As you get better you might take a little chicken or hashed mutton. It is extremely probable that you will soon get well enough to do some work. You should be careful to be near a doctor to whom you can send immediately that any untoward symptoms become manifest. "A WEST COUNTRY INQUIRER" asks us to explain the following circumstance--"I poured some permanganate of potash solution through the charcoal of my filter--as it were, washing out the filter with it--and the solution retained its bright proper colour. Must not this prove that my filter--a glass one with charcoal for the water to pass through--must be quite free from germs?" We will tell her that it by no means follows that her filter is free from germs. It is true that organisms (or rather their products) do destroy the colour of permanganate of potash, but they can only do so to a certain extent. She says that she used the solution to "wash out the filter." Probably she used some pints. It would require a vast host of microbes to destroy the colour of this quantity of solution. Her filter is, we take it, one with a carbon block, and usually in this kind of filter at least ninety per cent. of the water flows through holes in the carbon and corks, very little of it indeed going through the mass of carbon. Animal charcoal of itself will often decolourise potassium permanganate. If this correspondent wishes to test her filter more thoroughly, let her take out the carbon block and place it in a clean jug full of water, to which one or two drops of the permanganate solution has been added so as to make it a very, very pale pink. Having left it an hour or so, let her place a sheet of white paper behind the jug and see if the solution round the carbon block is paler in tint than the rest of the fluid. Even if this test is negative it will not prove that the carbon block is free from germs; nothing but a bacteriological investigation could prove the block to be sterile. GIRLS' EMPLOYMENTS.