If all young women had committed to memory these causes of evil and
their remedies, many a badly-built chimney might have been cured, and
many smoke-drawn tears, sighs, ill-tempers, and irritating words
avoided.

But there are dangers in this direction which demand special attention.
Where one flue has two stoves or fireplaces, in rooms one above the
other, in certain states of the atmosphere, the lower room, being the
warmer, the colder air and carbonic acid in the room above will pass
down into the lower room through the opening for the stove or the
fireplace.

This occurred not long since in a boarding-school, when the gas in a
room above flowed into a lower one, and suffocated several to death.
This room had no mode of ventilation, and several persons slept in it,
and were thus stifled. Professor Brewer states a similar case in the
family of a relative. An anthracite stove was used in the upper room;
and on one still, close night, the gas from this stove descended through
the flue and the opening into a room below, and stifled two persons
to insensibility, though, by proper efforts, their lives were saved.
Many such cases have occurred where rooms have been thus filled with
poisonous gases, and servants and children destroyed, or their
constitutions injured, simply because housekeepers are not properly
instructed in this important branch of their profession.


FURNACES.

There is no improved mechanism in the economy of domestic life requiring
more intelligent management than furnaces. Let us then consider some