st
earnest advocate of sunlight and fresh air.

She says: "An extraordinary fallacy is the dread of night air. What
air can we breathe at night but night air? The choice is between pure
night air from without, and foul night air from within. Most people
prefer the latter,--an unaccountable choice. What will they say if it
be proved true that fully _one-half of all the disease we suffer from,
is occasioned by people sleeping with their windows shut?_ An open
window most nights of the year can never hurt any one. In great cities
night air is often the best and purest to be had in the twenty-four
hours.

"The five essentials, for healthy houses," she says, are "pure air,
pure water, efficient drainage, cleanliness, and light.... I have
known whole houses and hospitals smell of the sink. I have met just as
strong a stream of sewer air coming up the back staircase of a grand
London house, from the sink, as I have ever met at Scutari; and I have
seen the rooms in that house all ventilated by the open doors, and
the passages all _un_ventilated by the close windows, in order that as
much of the sewer air as possible might be conducted into and retained
in the bed-rooms. It is wonderful!"

Miss Nightingale has much humor, and she shows it in her writings. She
is opposed to dark houses; says they promote scrofula; to old papered
walls, and to carpets full of dust. An uninhabited room becomes full
of foul air soon, and needs to have the windows opened often. She
would keep sick people, or well, forever in the sunlight if possible,
for sunlight is the greatest possible purifier of the atmosphere.
"In the unsunned sides of narrow streets, there is degeneracy and
weakliness of the human race,--mind and body equally degenerating."
Of the ruin wrought by bad air, she says: "Oh, the crowded national
school, where so many children's epidemics have their origin, what
a tale its air-test would tell! We should have parents saying, and
saying rightly, 'I will not send my child to that school; the
air-test stands at "horrid."' And the dormitories of our great
boarding-schools! Scarlet fever would be no more ascribed to
contagion, but to its right cause, the air-test standing at 'Foul.' We
should hear no longer of 'Mysterious Dispensations' and of 'Plague and
Pestilence' being in 'God's hands,' when, so far as we know, He has
put them into our own." She urges much rubbing of the body, washing
with warm water and soap. "The only way I know