re element,
whistling in glee, through every crack, crevice and keyhole. Now the
house-builder and stove-maker with but few exceptions[15] seem to have
joined hands in waging a most effectual warfare against the unwelcome
intruder. By labor-saving machinery, they contrive to make the one, the
joints of his wood-work, and the other, those of his iron-work, tighter
and tighter, and if it were possible for them to accomplish fully their
manifest design, they would be able to furnish rooms almost as fatal
to life as "the black hole of Calcutta." But in spite of all that they
can do, the materials will shrink, and no fuel has yet been found, which
will burn without any air, so that sufficient ventilation is kept up, to
prevent such deadly occurrences. Still they are tolerably successful in
keeping out the unfriendly element; and by the use of huge
cooking-stoves with towering ovens, and other salamander contrivances,
the little air that can find its way in, is almost as thoroughly cooked,
as are the various delicacies destined for the table.

On reading an account of a run-away slave, who was for a considerable
time, closely boxed up, a gentleman remarked that if the poor fellow had
only known that a renewal of the air was necessary to the support of
life, he could not have lived there an hour without suffocation: I have
frequently thought that if the occupants of the rooms I have been
describing, could only know as much, they would be in almost similar
danger.

Bad air, one would think, is bad enough: but when it is heated and dried
to an excessive degree, all its original vileness is stimulated to
greater activity, and thus made doubly injurious by this new element of
evil. Not only our private houses, but our churches and school-rooms,
our railroad cars, and all our places of public assemblage, are, to a
most lamentable degree, either unprovided with any means of ventilation,
or, to a great extent, supplied with those which are so wretchedly
deficient that they

"Keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope."

That ultimate degeneracy must surely follow such entire disregard of the
laws of health, cannot be doubted; and those who imagine that the
physical stamina of a people can be undermined, and yet that their
intellectual, moral and religious health will suffer no eclipse or
decay, know very little of the intimate connection between body and
mind, which the Creator has seen fit to establis