e to
gratify a taste for display, or morbid fancy for exquisite work, is a
crime. Shoulders are bent, spines are curved, the blood, lacking its
supplies of oxygen, loses vitality and creeps sluggishly through the
veins, carrying no vivid color to the cheek and lips, giving no activity
to the brain, no fire to the eye. Let women throw away their fancy work,
dispense to a degree with ruffles and tucks, and, in a dress that will
admit of a long breath, walk in the clear bracing air.

"Mothers should begin early to lay the foundations of health. Children
should have plenty of vigorous, joyous exercise out of doors. They
should have romping, rollicking fun every day, at the same time giving
exercise to every part of the body, and a healthy tone to the spirits.
The body and soul are so intimately blended that exercise for the one is
of little value when the other is repressed. Thus the limbs will become
well knit and beautifully rounded, the flesh will be firm and rosy, and
the whole frame will be vigorous and elastic--vital to the finger tips.
Better that our youth should have a healthy _physique_, even if they
cannot read before they are ten years old, as in this case they would
soon overtake and outstrip the pale, narrow-chested child who is the
wonder of the nursery and the Sunday-school. Children are animals that
are to be made the most of. Give them ample pasturage, and let them be
as free as is consistent with the discipline they need; keep the girls
out of corsets and tight shoes, give them plain food, fresh air, and
plenty of sleep."

Nothing invites disease so much as the present style of living among the
well-to-do people. Nearly everything tends among this class to
deteriorate general health, and, since their numbers have within the
last decade greatly increased, the influence on the country must be
markedly detrimental, and, but for the steady flow of vitalizing blood
from the Old World, the whole Yankee race would ere long, inevitably
disappear.

We have dwelt in this chapter at considerable length on the importance
of right training and education of the young, and especially of girls,
though no more than the subject seems to demand. Boys are naturally more
out of doors, since their love of out-of-door life is greater than that
of girls, and their sports all lead them into the open air, and by this
means they more easily correct the constitutional and natural tendencies
to disease, if any there be. Then, too,