o to pay the calls of Nature, they are often
compelled to visit her in the meanest and most offensive of abodes;
built for her by men's hands; for Nature herself makes no such mistakes
in conducting her operations. She does not always surround herself with
the pomp and pride of life, but she invariably hedges herself in with
the thousand decencies and the pomp of privacy.

But what do we often do? We build what is sometimes aptly termed "an
out-house," because it is placed so that the delicate minded among its
frequenters may be made keenly alive to the fact that they can be
plainly seen by every passer-by and by every idle neighbor on the
lookout. This tiny building is seldom weatherproof; In consequence, keen
cold winds from above, below, and all around find ready entrance, chill
the uncovered person, frequently check the motions, and make the strong
as well as the weak, the young as well as the old, very sorry indeed
that they are so often uselessly obliged to answer the calls of Nature.
It is true, the floor is sometimes carpeted with snow, but the feet feel
that to be but cold comfort, though the door may enjoy rattling its
broken hasp and creaking its loose hinges.

How often, too, are the nose and the eye offended by disregard of the
Mosaic injunction, found in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth
verses of the twenty-third chapter of Deuteronomy! Of course this
injunction was addressed to a people who had been debased by slavery,
but who were being trained to fit them for their high calling as the
chosen of God; but is not some such sanitary regulation needed in these
times, when a natural office is often made so offensive to us by its
environments that it is difficult for us to believe that "God made man a
little lower than the angels," or that the human body is the temple of
the Holy Ghost?

Dwellers in the aristocratic regions of a well drained city, whose
wealth enables them to surround themselves with all devices tending to a
refined seclusion, may doubt all this, but sanitary inspectors who have
made a round of domiciliary visits in the suburbs, or the older,
neglected parts of a large city, of to any part of a country town or
village, will readily affirm as to its general truth.

This unpardonable neglect of one of the minor decencies by the mass of
the people seems to be caused partly by a feeling of false shame, and
partly by an idea that it is expensive and troublesome to make any
change that wi