Sulphur Baths.--Bleaching Old Faces.--Experiments in Bathing.--Cautions.--Need of Public Baths.--Their Proper Prices.--Method of Giving Sulphur Vapor-baths.--Hot Baths for Hot Weather.--Russian Baths at Home.--Improvements Needed in Public Baths.--What they Should be.--What they Are.--The Russian Vapor-bath.---After-Sensations.--Brightness and Lightness of Health.--Reverence for the Physical.--Influence of Bathing on the Nerves and Passions.--Necessity of Public Baths. It is not a little amusing to receive requests for a way to give sulphur vapor-baths to the face alone. Somebody wants a fair complexion, and fancies it may be gained by bleaching the face like an old Leghorn bonnet in a barrel. Aside from the certainty of being choked to death by this method, there is no way of whitening and refining the face by applications to it alone, when the conditions of health are not regarded in other things. Carbolic acid may heal pimples, and glycerine masks soften the skin; but lovely red and white, with lips like currants, and skin like the flesh of young cranberries, can not be had unless the blood is pure. For this it is indispensable that food should be regulated, plenty of exercise and sunshine taken, and all the bodily functions kept in the best order. The woman who thought she could take the sulphur vapor-bath at home in her own bath-room finds that her experience reads like a chapter from the Danbury _News_ man. A bouquet of burning matches would furnish the perfume inhaled in the process, and the vapor reaching her face, left it pale and brown in spots, as if she had moth patches. That she escaped with hair only partially tinged, and any eyebrows to speak of, is due to Nature’s guardian care, which prompted the struggle for life half a minute sooner than pride was inclined to give up. The fumes lingering about the premises have induced the gravest suspicions on the part of her neighbors. She is inclined to think that, if her face would only turn brown again all over, she would forego her dreams of Parian brow and cheeks like peaches. A sulphur vapor-bath is a matter of caution, when given by the best of hands. It is not well to take it in the damp, “breaking-up” weather of March, for the bath opens the pores, and catching cold with several grains of sulphur in one’s body is the next thing to salivation by mercury. The consequence is that one feels heavy and aching, the eyes grow weak, and teeth grumble, while latent rheumatic pains wake up to sharp reminder of one’s imprudence. When the weather is warm and settled, these baths are a luxury and medicine combined. They are most effectual purifiers of the system, searching out and removing all waste particles, to leave the skin as new and fair as a baby’s. I have seen old and darkened complexions restored by them in a way that was little short of miraculous. These baths are also of benefit in neuralgia, and deal powerfully with scrofulous affections.