cleaned, or aired;--it was that the cupboards were always reservoirs of
foul air;--it was that the windows were always tight shut up at
night;--it was that no window was ever systematically 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 pyæmia, 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.[9]

[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