mon on oxygen, if one had a preacher who
understood the subject, might do more to repress sin than the most
orthodox discourse to show when and how and why sin came. A minister
gets up in a crowded lecture-room, where the mephitic air almost makes
the candles burn blue, and bewails the deadness of the church,--the
church the while, drugged by the poisoned air, growing sleepier and
sleepier, though they feel dreadfully wicked for being so.

Little Jim, who, fresh from his afternoon's ramble in the fields, last
evening said his prayers dutifully, and lay down to sleep in a most
Christian frame, this morning sits up in bed with his hair bristling
with crossness, strikes at his nurse, and declares he won't say his
prayers,--that he don't want to be good. The simple difference is,
that the child, having slept in a close box of a room, his brain all
night fed by poison, is in a mild state of moral insanity. Delicate
women remark that it takes them till eleven or twelve o'clock to get
up their strength in the morning. Query: Do they sleep with closed
windows and doors, and with heavy bed-curtains?

The houses built by our ancestors were better ventilated in certain
respects than modern ones, with all their improvements. The great
central chimney, with its open fireplaces in the different rooms,
created a constant current which carried off foul and vitiated air. In
these days, how common is it to provide rooms with only a flue for a
stove! This flue is kept shut in summer, and in winter opened only to
admit a close stove, which burns away the vital portion of the air
quite as fast as the occupants breathe it away. The sealing up of
fireplaces and introduction of air-tight stoves may, doubtless, be a
saving of fuel; it saves, too, more than that,--in thousands and
thousands of cases it has saved people from all further human wants,
and put an end forever to any needs short of the six feet of narrow
earth which are man's only inalienable property. In other words, since
the invention of air-tight stoves, thousands have died of slow poison.
It is a terrible thing to reflect upon, that our Northern winters last
from November to May, six long months, in which many families confine
themselves to one room, of which every window-crack has been carefully
calked to make it air-tight, where an air-tight stove keeps the
atmosphere at a temperature between eighty and ninety, and the inmates
sitting there, with all their winter clothes on, b