d have to be, as at
Nottingham, accessible in all rooms at all times. They would have water,
at high pressure, climbing about every house in every court and alley.
They would place water, so to speak, at the finger's end, limiting no
household as to quantity. They would enable every man to bathe. They would
revolutionize the sewer-system, and have the town washed daily, like a
good Mahometan, clean to the finger-nails. They hint that all this might
not even be expensive; that the cost of disease and degradation is so much
greater than the cost of health and self-respect, as to pay back,
possibly, our outlay, and then yield a profit to the nation. They say
that, even if it were a money loss, it would be moral gain; and they ask
whether we have not spent millions, ere now, upon less harmless
commodities than water?

An ingenious fellow had a fiddle--all, he said, made out of his own head;
and wood enough was left to make another. He must have been a sanitary
man; his fiddle was a crotchet. Still farther to illustrate their own
capacity of fiddle-making, these good but misguided people have been
rooting up some horrible statistics of the filth and wretchedness which
our back-windows overlook, with strange facts anent fever, pestilence, and
the communication of disease. All this I purposely suppress; it is
peculiarly disagreeable. Delicate health we like, and will learn gladly
how to obtain it; but results we are content with, and can spare the
details, when those details bring us into contact, even upon paper, with
the squalid classes.

If these outcries of the Water Party move the public to a thirst for
change, it would be prudent for us aegritudinary men not rashly to swim
against the current. Let us adopt a middle course, a patronizing tone. It
is in our favor that a large number of the facts which these our foes have
to produce, are, by a great deal too startling to get easy credit. A
single Pooh! has in it more semblance of reason than a page of facts, when
revelations of neglected hygiene are on the carpet. If the case of the
Sanitary Reformers had been only half as well made out, it would be twice
as well supported.

VIII. Filling The Grave.

M. Boutigny has published an account of some experiments which go to prove
that we may dip our fingers into liquid metal with impunity. Professor
Pluecker, of Bonn, has amply confirmed Boutigny's results, and in his
report hints a conclusion that henceforth "certain