not to be called urging, what is?--and yet we not
only neglect, but resist the favor. Our children commonly learn to spell
much better than they ever learn to breathe, because much more attention
is paid to the former department of culture. Indeed, the materials are
better provided; spelling-books are abundant; but we scarcely allow them
time, in the intervals of school, to seek fresh air out of doors, and
we sedulously exclude it from our houses and school-rooms. Is it
not possible to impress upon your mind the changes which "modern
improvements" are bringing upon us? In times past, if a gentleman
finished the evening with a quiet cigar in his parlor, (a practice I
deprecate, and introduce only for purposes of scientific illustration,)
not a trace of it ever lingered to annoy his wife at the
breakfast-table; showing that the draft up the open chimney had wholly
disposed of it, the entire atmosphere of the room being changed during
the night. Now, on the other hand, every whiff lingers persistently
beside the domestic altar, and betrays to the youngest child, next
day, the parental weakness. For the sake of family example, Dolorosus,
correct this state of things, and put in a ventilator. Our natures will
not adapt themselves to this abstinence from fresh air, until Providence
shall fit us up with new bodies, having no lungs in them. Did you ever
hear of Dr. Lyne, the eccentric Irish physician? Dr. Lyne held that no
house was wholesome, unless a dog could get in under every door and a
bird fly out at every window. He even went so far as to build his house
with the usual number of windows, and no glass in the sashes; he lived
in that house for fifty years, reared a large family there, and no death
ever occurred in it. He himself died away from home, of small-pox, at
eighty; his son immediately glazed all the windows of the house, and
several of the family died within the first year of the alteration. The
story sounds apocryphal, I own, though I did not get it from Sir Jonah
Barrington, but somewhere in the scarcely less amusing pages of Sir John
Sinclair. I will not advise you, my unfortunate sufferer, to break every
pane of glass in your domicile, though I have no doubt that Nathaniel
and his boy-companions would enter with enthusiasm into the process; I
am not fond of extremes; but you certainly might go so far as to take
the nails out of my bed-room windows, and yet keep a good deal this side
the Lyne.

I hardly dare g