=French Polish=: For dark wood, especially old mahogany. Melt together over hot water ten parts pale resin, ten parts palm oil. Mix, take from fire, add eighty parts benzine, one part essence peppermint, and half a part essence of verbena. Keep sealed in glass, away from heat. Use away from light or fire. Apply with soft old silk, and polish by rubbing with very soft silk or flannel.
=The Glue Pot=: Melt glue only as required. Cover dry glue with cold water after breaking up well, put salt water in the bath outside, bring to a boil, then simmer until the glue ropes a little. Thin with hot vinegar. To mend things white or light-colored, melt the clearest glue in a china cup inside a saucepan, and thin after melting with gin instead of vinegar.
=To Make Glue Size=: Melt a pound of glue, thin with a quart of hot vinegar, then stir well through two to five gallons hot water, according to the strength required.
=Vegetable Size=: Tie a gallon of wheat bran or cornmeal bran loosely in net or cheesecloth; boil for five hours in five gallons of water, filling up as it boils away. Add a lump of alum after the bran bag is removed. Apply hot to walls or wood.
=Calcimine=: Stir sifted whiting into strong glue size until it is thicker than cream. Clear with a little blueing. Thin at need with boiling water. Tint with earth colors in powder. Red and yellow ocher mixed give a pinkish-cream tint; yellow alone true cream. Indian red makes pink; by adding burnt sienna the color is pinkish fawn. Yellow ocher with burnt umber gives various shades of brown. Always mix colors rather pale at first, try out on a board, then add what is lacking.
=Whitewashes=: Either glue or vegetable size may be the foundation. Add a big lump of salt to five gallons of size, stir well, and pour boiling hot upon half a peck of unslaked lime. Clear with Prussian blue and apply very hot. For sanitary carbolic whitewash use vegetable size, dissolving in five gallons, boiling hot, two ounces of carbolic crystals. Then pour upon the lime and mix well. Two ounces of copperas—green vitriol—dissolved instead of the carbolic acid gives a faint-yellow tinge and is a good prophylactic. To kill vermin, as in poultry houses, nest boxes, and so on, mix through a pail of hot wash five grains of corrosive sublimate dissolved in a pint of water; put on as a first coat, and after a while give a second coat of plain whitewash.