. It is the
same with man: while we obstruct the light by putting brick and board
where glass suggests itself, and mock the light by picturing impracticable
windows on our outside walls--so that our houses stare about like blind men
with glass eyes--while this is done, we sit at home and blanch, we become
in our dim apartments pale and delicate, we grow to look refined, as
gentlemen and ladies ought to look. Let the sanitary doctor, at whose head
we have thrown lettuces, go to the botanist and ask him, How, is this? Let
him come back and tell us, Oh, gentlemen, in these vegetables the natural
juices are not formed when you exclude the light. The natural juices in
the lettuce or in celery are flavored much more strongly than our tastes
would relish, and therefore we induce in these plants an imperfect
development, in order to make them eatable. Very well. The natural juices
in a man are stronger than good taste can tolerate. Man requires
horticulture to be fit to come to table. To rear the finer sorts of human
kind, one great operation necessary is to banish light as much as
possible.

Ladies know that. To keep their faces pale, they pull the blinds down in
their drawing-rooms, they put a vail between their countenances and the
sun when they go out, and carry, like good soldiers, a great shield on
high, by name a Parasol, to ward his darts off. They know better than to
let the old god kiss them into color, as he does the peaches. They choose
to remain green fruit: and we all know that to be a delicacy.

Yet there are men among us daring to propose that there shall no longer be
protection against light; men who would tax a house by its capaciousness,
and let the sun shine into it unhindered. The so-called sanitary people
really seem to look upon their fellow-creatures as so many cucumbers. But
we have not yet fallen so far back in our development. Disease is a
privilege. Those only who know the tender touch of a wife's hand, the
quiet kiss, the soothing whisper, can appreciate its worth. All who are
not dead to the tenderest emotions will lament the day when light is
turned on without limit in our houses. We have no wish to be blazed upon.
Frequently pestilence itself avoids the sunny side of any street, and
prefers walking in the shade. Nay, even in one building, as in the case of
a great barrack at St. Petersburg, there will be three calls made by
disease upon the shady side of the establishment for every one visit that