ecome enervated both
by the heat and by the poisoned air, for which there is no escape but
the occasional opening of a door.

It is no wonder that the first result of all this is such a delicacy
of skin and lungs that about half the inmates are obliged to give up
going into the open air during the six cold months, because they
invariably catch cold if they do so. It is no wonder that the cold
caught about the first of December has by the first of March become a
fixed consumption, and that the opening of the spring, which ought to
bring life and health, in so many cases brings death.

We hear of the lean condition in which the poor bears emerge from
their six months' wintering, during which they subsist on the fat
which they have acquired the previous summer. Even so, in our long
winters, multitudes of delicate people subsist on the daily waning
strength which they acquired in the season when windows and doors were
open, and fresh air was a constant luxury. No wonder we hear of spring
fever and spring biliousness, and have thousands of nostrums for
clearing the blood in the spring. All these things are the pantings
and palpitations of a system run down under slow poison, unable to get
a step farther. Better, far better, the old houses of the olden time,
with their great roaring fires, and their bedrooms where the snow came
in and the wintry winds whistled. Then, to be sure, you froze your
back while you burned your face; your water froze nightly in your
pitcher; your breath congealed in ice-wreaths on the blankets; and you
could write your name on the pretty snow-wreath that had sifted in
through the window-cracks. But you woke full of life and vigor,--you
looked out into the whirling snowstorms without a shiver, and thought
nothing of plunging through drifts as high as your head on your daily
way to school. You jingled in sleighs, you snowballed, you lived in
snow like a snowbird, and your blood coursed and tingled, in full tide
of good, merry, real life, through your veins,--none of the
slow-creeping, black blood which clogs the brain and lies like a
weight on the vital wheels!

"Mercy upon us, papa!" said Jenny, "I hope we need not go back to such
houses?"

"No, my dear," I replied. "I only said that such houses were better
than those which are all winter closed by double windows and burnt-out
air-tight stoves."

* * * * *

The perfect house is one in which there is a constant es