is true, but making you ready for diphtheria and typhoid-fever, and
consumption, and other nameless ills. It is so easy to doubt or set aside
all this, that I give one case as illustration and warning of all the
evils enumerated above.

The State Board of Health for Massachusetts has long busied itself with
researches on all these points, and the case mentioned is in one of their
reports. The house described is one in Hadley, built by a clergyman. "It
was provided with an open well and sink-drain, with its deposit-box in
close proximity thereto, affording facility to discharge its gases in the
well as the most convenient place. The cellar was used, as country cellars
commonly are, for the storage of provisions of every kind, and the
windows were never opened. The only escape for the soil-moisture and
ground-air, except that which was absorbed by the drinking-water, was
through the crevices of the floors into the rooms above. After a few
months' residence in the house, the clergyman's wife died of fever. He
soon married again; and the second wife also died of fever, within a year
from the time of marriage. His children were sick. He occupied the house
about two years. The wife of his successor was soon taken ill, and barely
escaped with her life. A physician then took the house. He married, and
his wife soon after died of fever. Another physician took the house, and
within a few months came near dying of erysipelas. He deserved it. The
house, meanwhile, received no treatment; the doctors, according to their
usual wont, even in their own families, were satisfied to deal with the
consequences, and leave the causes to do their worst.

"Next after the doctors, a school-teacher took the house, and made a few
changes, for convenience apparently, for substantially it remained the
same; for he, too, escaped as by the skin of his teeth. Finally, after the
foreclosure of many lives, the sickness and fatality of the property