opened even in the day, or
that the right window was not opened. A person gasping for air might
open a window for himself. But the servants were not taught to open the
windows, to shut the doors; or they opened the windows upon a dank well
between high walls, not upon the airier court; or they opened the room
doors into the unaired halls and passages, by way of airing the rooms.
Now all this is not fancy, but fact. In that handsome house I have known
in one summer three cases of hospital pyaemia, one of phlebitis, two of
consumptive cough; all the _immediate_ products of foul air. When, in
temperate climates, a house is more unhealthy in summer than in winter,
it is a certain sign of something wrong. Yet nobody learns the lesson.
Yes, God always justifies His ways. He is teaching while you are not
learning. This poor body loses his finger, that one loses his life. And
all from the most easily preventible causes.[3]

[Sidenote: Physical degeneration in families. Its causes.]

The houses of the grandmothers and great grandmothers of this
generation, at least the country houses, with front door and back door
always standing open, winter and summer, and a thorough draught always
blowing through--with all the scrubbing, and cleaning, and polishing,
and scouring which used to go on, the grandmothers, and still 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 sickroom 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