of greater privacy.

It is customary with many persons to sleep with bed-room windows
open,--a very imperfect, and often dangerous mode of procuring that
supply of fresh air which a sleeping-room requires. In a house
constructed in the manner indicated, windows might be freely left open
in these central halls, producing there a constant movement of air, and
the doors of the bed-rooms placed ajar, when a very slight opening in
the windows would create a free circulation through the apartments.

In the planning of a house, thought should be had as to the general
disposition of the windows, and the quarters from which favoring breezes
may be expected should be carefully considered. Windows should be so
arranged that draughts of air can be thrown quite through and across the
house. How often have we seen pale mothers and drooping babes fanning
and panting during some of our hot days on the sunny side of a house,
while the breeze that should have cooled them beat in vain against a
dead wall! One longs sometimes to knock holes through partitions and let
in the air of heaven.

No other gift of God, so precious, so inspiring, is treated with such
utter irreverence and contempt in the calculations of us mortals as this
same air of heaven. A sermon 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 rambles 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 on