picked to pieces, or changed. It was that the carpets and curtains were
always musty;--it was that the furniture was always dusty;--it was that
the papered walls were saturated with dirt;--it was that the floors were
never cleaned;--it was that the uninhabited rooms were never sunned, or
cleaned, or aired;--it was that the cupboards were always reservoirs of
foul air;--it was that the windows were always tight shut up at night;--
it was that no window was ever systematically opened even in the day, or
that the right window was not opened. A person gasping for air might
open a window for himself. But the servants were not taught to open the
windows, to shut the doors; or they opened the windows upon a dank well
between high walls, not upon the airier court; or they opened the room
doors into the unaired halls and passages, by way of airing the rooms.
Now all this is not fancy, but fact. In that handsome house I have known
in one summer three cases of hospital pyaemia, one of phlebitis, two of
consumptive cough; all the _immediate_ products of foul air. When, in
temperate climates, a house is more unhealthy in summer than in winter,
it is a certain sign of something wrong. Yet nobody learns the lesson.
Yes, God always justifies His ways. He is teaching while you are not
learning. This poor body loses his finger, that one loses his life. And
all from the most easily preventible causes.[3]


[Sidenote: Physical degeneration in families. Its causes.]

The houses of the grandmothers and great grandmothers of this
generation, at least the country houses, with front door and back door
always standing open, winter and summer, and a thorough draught always
blowing through--with all the scrubbing, and cleaning, and polishing,
and scouring which used to go on, the grandmothers, and still more the
great grandmothers, always out of doors and never with a bonnet on