stopped out the air only by a shutter at night, that they sought
for shelter rather than for fresh air, of which they sometimes had
too much; and, to escape the wind, built their houses in holes,
such as that in which the old city of Winchester stands. Shelter,
I believe, as much as the desire to be near fish in Lent, and to
occupy the rich alluvium of the valleys, made the monks of Old
England choose the river-banks for the sites of their abbeys.
They made a mistake therein, which, like most mistakes, did not go
unpunished. These low situations, especially while the forests
were yet thick on the hills around, were the perennial haunts of
fever and ague, produced by subtle vegetable poisons, carried in
the carbonic acid given off by rotten vegetation. So there,
again, they fell in with man's old enemy--bad air. Still, as long
as the doors and windows did not shut, some free circulation of
air remained. But now, our doors and windows shut only too tight.
We have plate-glass instead of lattices; and we have replaced the
draughty and smoky, but really wholesome open chimney, with its
wide corners and settles, by narrow registers, and even by stoves.
We have done all we can, in fact, to seal ourselves up
hermetically from the outer air, and to breath our own breaths
over and over again; and we pay the penalty of it in a thousand
ways unknown to our ancestors, through whose rooms all the winds
of heaven whistled, and who were glad enough to shelter themselves
from draughts in the sitting-room by the high screen round the
fire, and in the sleeping-room by the thick curtains of the four-
post bedstead, which is now rapidly disappearing before a higher
civilisation. We therefore absolutely require to make for
ourselves the very ventilation from which our ancestors tried to
escape.