ll more the
great grandmothers, always out of doors and never with a bonnet on
except to go to church, these things entirely account for the fact so
often seen of a great grandmother, who was a tower of physical vigour
descending into a grandmother perhaps a little less vigorous but still
sound as a bell and healthy to the core, into a mother languid and
confined to her carriage and house, and lastly into a daughter sickly
and confined to her bed. For, remember, even with a general decrease of
mortality you may often find a race thus degenerating and still oftener
a family. You may see poor little feeble washed-out rags, children of a
noble stock, suffering morally and physically, throughout their useless,
degenerate lives, and yet people who are going to marry and to bring
more such into the world, will consult nothing but their own convenience
as to where they are to live, or how they are to live.

[Sidenote: Don't make your sick-room into a ventilating shaft for the
whole house.]

With regard to the health of houses where there is a sick person, it
often happens that the sick room is made a ventilating shaft for the
rest of the house. For while the house is kept as close, unaired, and
dirty as usual, the window of the sick room is kept a little open
always, and the door occasionally. Now, there are certain sacrifices
which a house with one sick person in it does make to that sick person:
it ties up its knocker; it lays straw before it in the street. Why can't
it keep itself thoroughly clean and unusually well aired, in deference
to the sick person?

[Sidenote: Infection.]

We must not forget what, in ordinary language, is called
"Infection;"[10]--a thing of which people are generally so afraid that
they frequently follow the very practice in regard to it which they
ought to avoid. Nothing used to be considered so infectious or
contagious as small pox; and people not very long ago used to cover up
patients with heavy bed clothes, while they kept up large fires and shut
the windows. Small pox, of course, under this _regime_, is very
"infectious." People are somewhat wiser now in their management of this
disease. They have ventured to cover the patients lightly and to keep
the windows open; and we hear much less of the "infection" of small pox
than we used to do. But do people in our days act with more wisdom on
the subject of "infection" in fevers--scarlet fever, measles, &c.--than
their forefathers did with small