to read at all, or use common-sense about any detail of life, is able to
form a judgment of what is healthful or unhealthful. If no books are at
hand, consult the best physician near, and have his verdict as to the
character of the spot in which more or less of your life in this world
will be spent, and which has the power to affect not only your mental and
bodily health, but that of your children. Because your fathers and mothers
have been neglectful of these considerations, is no reason why you should
continue in ignorance; and the first duty in making a home is to consider
earnestly and intelligently certain points.

Four essentials are to be thought of in the choice of any home; and their
neglect, and the ignorance which is the foundation of this neglect, are
the secret of not only the chronic ill-health supposed to be a necessity
of the American organization, but of many of the epidemics and mysterious
diseases classed under the head of "visitations of Providence."

These essentials are: a wholesome situation, good ventilation, good
drainage, and a dry cellar. Rich or poor, high or low, if one of these be
disregarded, the result will tell, either on your own health or on that of
your family. Whether palace or hut, brown-stone front or simple wooden
cottage, the law is the same. As a rule, the ordinary town or village is
built upon low land, because it is easier to obtain a water-supply from
wells and springs. In such a case, even where the climate itself may be
tolerably healthy, the drainage from the hills at hand, or the nearness of
swamps and marshes produced by the same cause, makes a dry cellar an
impossibility; and this shut-in and poisonous moisture makes malaria
inevitable. The dwellers on low lands are the pill and patent-medicine
takers; and no civilized country swallows the amount of tonics and bitters
consumed by our own.