d will be troubled by
various forms of indigestion. Now and then, too, they will have
causeless attacks of feverishness lasting for a few days, or for two or
three weeks, attended with general tenderness of the surface, and a
disposition to perspiration, which brings no relief but serves only to
weaken.

It is true that these symptoms do not often become immediately dangerous
to life, though spasmodic croup and bronchitis both have their perils;
but they interfere with health, and growth, and good looks, and
cheerfulness, and quick intelligence.

If mothers would but ask themselves the real signification of these
symptoms, and change the conditions which surround the child, and alter
their mode of feeding it, they would many and many a time be spared the
heart-ache of seeing their little ones grow up weakly, ugly,
ill-thriven.

Unfortunately, it is so much easier to give cod-liver oil and iron than
to turn the best spare room into a night nursery, and to uglify the cot
by taking away the curtains which made it so pretty, and to give up some
of the pleasures of society in order to superintend the preparation of
the baby's food; that the doctor is called in to correct by drugs the
evil which drugs cannot reach. Iron and cod-liver oil are very useful in
the second place; fresh air, good ventilation, and a wise diet must
always occupy the first.

=Acute Constitutional Diseases.=--It still remains for us to glance
rapidly at the characters of the _acute constitutional diseases_, all of
which belong, as has already been stated, to the class of fevers. Of
them all but two are contagious--that is to say, are capable of being
communicated directly from person to person. They are likewise
infectious, or, in other words, articles of bedding or clothes which
have been worn by the sick, retain a something--an exhalation from the
breath, an emanation from the skin, or a secretion from the
bowels--which may reproduce the same disease in a person previously
healthy.

To this contagious and infectious property there are two exceptions; the
one is furnished by acute rheumatism, or rheumatic fever, the other by
intermittent fever, or ague.

=Rheumatic Fever.=--The main features of _rheumatic fever_ are the same
at all ages. Fever, pain in the limbs, swelling of the joints, sweats
unattended by that relief which usually accompanies abundant action of
the skin in fevers, are its characteristics. In the child all these
symptoms are