consumptive will surely not kill a healthy man. I am
delighted to say that it shows signs of becoming a fad now, and sleeping
porches are being put on houses all over the country. No house in
California is considered complete without them. The ideal bedroom is a
small dressing-room, opening on a wide screened porch, or balcony, with
a door wide enough to allow the bed to be rolled inside during storms or
in severest weather.

Sleep on a porch, or in a room with windows on two sides wide open, and
the average living-room or office begins to feel stuffy and "smothery"
at once. Apply the same treatment here. Learn to sit in a gentle draft,
and you'll avoid two-thirds of your colds and three-fourths of your
headaches. It may be necessary in winter to warm the draft, but don't
let any patent method of ventilation delude you into keeping your
windows shut any hour of the day or night.

On the other hand, don't fall into the widespread delusion that because
air is cold it is necessarily pure. Some of the vilest air imaginable is
that shut up in those sepulchres known as "best bedrooms," which chill
your very marrow. The rheumatism or snuffles you get from sleeping
between their icy sheets comes from the crop of bacilli which has lurked
there since they were last aired. The "no heat in a bedroom" dogma is
little better than superstition, born of those fecund parents which mate
so often, stinginess and puritanism. Practically, the room which will
_never_ have a window opened in it in winter is the one without any
heat.

Similarly, the air in an underheated church, hall, or theatre is almost
sure to be foul. The janitor will keep every opening closed in order to
get the temperature up. Some churches are never once decently ventilated
from December to May. The same old air, with an ever richer crop of
germs, is reheated and served up again every Sunday. The "odor of
sanctity" is the residue of the breaths and perspiration of successive
generations. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but it is sometimes
an astonishingly long step behind it.

The next important step is to keep clean, both externally and
internally: externally, by cold bathing, internally, by exercise. The
only reason why a draft ever hurts us is because we are full of
self-poisons, or germs. The self-poisons can be best got rid of by
abundant exercise in the open air and plenty of pure, cold H2O,
internally and externally.

Food has very little to do with