es, with all their improvements. The great
central chimney, with its open fireplaces in the different rooms,
created a constant current which carried off foul and vitiated air. In
these days, how common is it to provide rooms with only a flue for a
stove! This flue is kept shut in summer, and in winter opened only to
admit a close stove, which burns away the vital portion of the air quite
as fast as the occupants breathe it away. The sealing-up of fireplaces
and introduction of air-tight stoves may, doubtless, be a saving of
fuel: it saves, too, more than that; in thousands and thousands of cases
it has saved people from all further human wants, and put an end forever
to any needs short of the six feet of narrow earth which are man's only
inalienable property. In other words, since the invention of air-tight
stoves, thousands have died of slow poison. It is a terrible thing to
reflect upon, that our Northern winters last from November to May, six
long months, in which many families confine themselves to one room, of
which every window-crack has been carefully calked to make it air-tight,
where an air-tight stove keeps the atmosphere at a temperature between
eighty and ninety, and the inmates sitting there with all their winter
clothes on become enervated both by the heat and by the poisoned air,
for which there is no escape but the occasional opening of a door.

It is no wonder that the first result of all this is such a delicacy of
skin and lungs that about half the inmates are obliged to give up going
into the open air during the six cold months, because they invariably
catch cold, if they do so. It is no wonder that the cold caught about
the first of December has by the first of March become a fixed
consumption, and that the opening of the spring, which ought to bring
life and health, in so many cases brings death.

We hear of the lean condition in which the poor bears emerge from their
six-months' wintering, during which they subsist on the fat which they
have acquired the previous summer. Even so in our long winters,
multitudes of delicate people subsist on the daily waning strength which
they acquired in the season when windows and doors were open, and fresh
air was a constant luxury. No wonder we hear of spring fever and spring
biliousness, and have thousands of nostrums for clearing the blood in
the spring. All these things are the pantings and palpitations of a
system run down under slow poison, unable to get a