ave it or not,
would be the more comfortable for a morning and evening fire. For
eight months in the year the weather varies on the scale of cool,
cold, colder, and freezing; and for all the four other months what is
the number of days that really require the torrid-zone system of
shutting up houses? We all know that extreme heat is the exception,
and not the rule.

Yet let anybody travel, as I did last year, through the valley of the
Connecticut, and observe the houses. All clean and white and neat and
well-to-do, with their turfy yards and their breezy great elms, but
all shut up from basement to attic, as if the inmates had all sold out
and gone to China. Not a window-blind open above or below. Is the
house inhabited? No,--yes,--there is a faint stream of blue smoke from
the kitchen chimney, and half a window-blind open in some distant
back part of the house. They are living there in the dim shadows,
bleaching like potato-sprouts in the cellar.

* * * * *

"I can tell you why they do it, papa," said Jenny. "It's the flies,
and flies are certainly worthy to be one of the plagues of Egypt. I
can't myself blame people that shut up their rooms and darken their
houses in fly-time,--do you, mamma?"

"Not in extreme cases; though I think there is but a short season when
this is necessary; yet the habit of shutting up lasts the year round,
and gives to New England villages that dead, silent, cold, uninhabited
look which is so peculiar."

"The one fact that a traveler would gather in passing through our
villages would be this," said I, "that the people live in their houses
and in the dark. Barely do you see doors and windows open, people
sitting at them, chairs in the yard, and signs that the inhabitants
are living out-of-doors."

"Well," said Jenny, "I have told you why, for I have been at Uncle
Peter's in summer, and aunt does her spring-cleaning in May, and then
she shuts all the blinds and drops all the curtains, and the house
stays clean till October. That's the whole of it. If she had all her
windows open, there would be paint and windows to be cleaned every
week; and who is to do it? For my part, I can't much blame her."

"Well," said I, "I have my doubts about the sovereign efficacy of
living in the dark, even if the great object of existence were to be
rid of flies. I remember, during this same journey, stopping for a
day or two at a country boarding-house, which was dark as Eg