ory. I was visiting a Western city a good many years ago; it was in
the autumn, the time when all sorts of malarious diseases are about. The
doctor I was speaking of took me to see the cemetery just outside the
town, I don't know how much he had done to fill it, for he didn't tell
me, but I'll tell you what he did say.

"Look round," said the doctor. "There isn't a house in all the ten-mile
circuit of country you can see over, where there isn't one person, at
least, shaking with fever and ague. And yet you need n't be afraid of
carrying it away with you, for as long as your home is on a paved street
you are safe."

--I think it likely--the Master went on to say--that my friend the
doctor put it pretty strongly, but there is no doubt at all that while
all the country round was suffering from intermittent fever, the paved
part of the city was comparatively exempted. What do you do when you
build a house on a damp soil, and there are damp soils pretty much
everywhere? Why you floor the cellar with cement, don't you? Well,
the soil of a city is cemented all over, one may say, with certain
qualifications of course. A first-rate city house is a regular
sanatorium. The only trouble is, that the little good-for-nothings that
come of utterly used-up and worn-out stock, and ought to die, can't die,
to save their lives. So they grow up to dilute the vigor of the race
with skim-milk vitality. They would have died, like good children, in
most average country places; but eight months of shelter in a regulated
temperature, in a well-sunned house, in a duly moistened air, with good
sidewalks to go about on in all weather, and four months of the cream
of summer and the fresh milk of Jersey cows, make the little sham
organizations--the worm-eaten wind-falls, for that 's what they look
like--hang on to the boughs of life like "froze-n-thaws"; regular
struldbrugs they come to be, a good many of 'em.

--The Scarabee's ear was caught by that queer word of Swift's, and he
asked very innocently what kind of bugs he was speaking of, whereupon
That Boy shouted out, Straddlebugs! to his own immense amusement and the
great bewilderment of the Scarabee, who only saw that there was one of
those unintelligible breaks in the conversation which made other people
laugh, and drew back his antennae as usual, perplexed, but not amused.

I do not believe the Master had said all he was going to say on this
subject, and of course all these statements of hi