your wife and your little ones and go yourself to live in a house that has been the home of that and a dozen other nasty disorders, the deadly molecules of which are lurking in every crack and crevice of paper, paint, and woodwork, and only require a little dusting and disturbance to set them at liberty to float in the air, and be taken into the lungs and poison the system.

I do not forget that there are certain sanitary laws which compel the fumigation, etc., of infected houses when patients have been removed, but can you be sure they are effectual or that they have been carried out?

And now respecting the furniture and other items necessary to make the house a home.

For general principles: Do not overcrowd; do not have large bulky things that are hard to move, that are too high to reach to the top of and dust, that take up too many cubic feet and inches of the precious air which in small rooms is a matter of great consideration.

In the bedrooms, which we will first consider, use iron bedsteads in preference to wood, and wire spring mattresses, rather than straw palliasses and feather beds. It is quite sufficient to lay over the woven wire mattress a good, well-opened flock or hair bed, the restful comfort of these is far greater than any other, while being springy and pleasant to the tired frame; they permit, and almost insist on, a straight position being maintained. They permit also of so much more valuable air space under the bed, and being one-quarter of an inch thick, as against four inches or five inches of the palliasse, they allow the careful housewife to easily remove dust from the floor without the necessity of dragging the bed about the room. Do not allow the storing of bandboxes, boots, or any other articles under the bed, but leave the space free for a good circulation of air.

It is a good plan to stain the floor, all under, stopping up all nicks and crevices, and varnishing it, and let it be done rather dark, so that you can readily detect dust and fluff.

Let your pillows, while not being stones, be firm and full, that the head does not nestle too far from the fresh air. Dr. Moffatt, the great African missionary, who lived to such a healthy old age, scorned anything softer to lie upon than a straw mattress, and preferred a log of wood even to a hard horse-hair sofa pillow for his head.

Let the bedclothes be warm but as light as you can get them.

Do not add to the day's toil a night of hard labour with a heavy cotton quilt, or one of those heavy old-fashioned bed rugs. The clothes should be just eight inches or ten inches on each side of the bed wider than it is, but not more.

For the remainder of the furniture, if you will follow the rules I have already suggested as to its size, and the wood it should be made from, I do not think there is anything further to suggest from the healthy point of view.

About the curtains and carpets there is a good deal of difference of opinion. Their presence in a room adds so infinitely to its comfort and pleasant appearance, that one would be tempted to use them on the ground that what produces pleasure is as good for the body as the mind.

Naturally, in a room that is used for a fever hospital, one would at once remove anything in the least calculated to retain infection, but there is no necessity that one should always be compelled to view one's house from this point, and with ordinary care and careful housewifeliness such luxuries can be used with impunity.

Do not, of course, admit thick. clumsy materials in heavy folds that are difficult to push away from the windows and exclude light and air, or that hang on to the floor, and allow in their folds the secretion of dust and dirt.

You know the old-fashioned manner of draping windows; it

had its uses long ago, before they knew how to hang windows, when it was necessary to provide an effectual screen from the draughts that would force their way through; they then hung over the upper part of the window from a closely fitted wooden cornice, a valance, behind which the curtain ran on a pole, but this valance was a tightly fitted kind of apron and had its purpose to serve; not so the ridiculous substitute men put up now-a-days merely to imitate what had a meaning.

In Fig. 3 I show you the original thing that our great-greatgrandfathers used, and you see plainly that it served its purpose; and in Fig. 4 I give you a notion of the modern base imitation, it has no meaning or reason for its being. If it were meant to

stop draughts it would maintain an unbroken line of defence, and not be cut and vandyked in this absurd manner.

I might talk for a week about the bad taste of such extravagances, but I wish merely to point out a much cleaner and healthier way of decorating the window.

In even many of our poorly built houses the draught that will come through badly-fitted sashes is not more than is good for the ventilation of the rooms. The large sheets of good glass we use now are capable of resisting the weather. It was not so formerly. When valances were instituted, the rough hewn frames built into the rougher stone work, frequently without plaster to stop crevices, admitted air at every point, and the casements were fitted with

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bits of horn in leaded rims, instead of sheets of glass firmly embedded in putty. So then they needed the guarding apron above and heavy folding curtains below, but it is not so with us to-day. It would be as sensible to pierce our ceilings with holes for the smoke to pass out, when already we have the chimney, because our forefathers did so in their rude huts.

Let us therefore drape our windows with only so much material as will make them pretty and give a comfortable appearance when drawn at night, and for this it is not necessary that two or three feet should drabble on the floor.

Provide a simple wooden or iron pole from one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half inches thick, and about twelve inches longer than

the full width of the window, so that the curtain can be drawn clear away and not prevent any light from the room.

And if you can boast of a window wide and low as this (Fig 5), then let your curtains-made from one of the beautiful cotton fabrics that are in the market at very low cost now-reach just an inch or so below the sill. Let them be fastened with easy fitting hooks to the rings, in order that each week, when the room receives its cleaning down, they can be readily taken off and brushed and shaken out of doors. If you have a strong predilection for curtains to your beds, you can have them with impunity, only on the same terms. I dare not advise them; I should shock

all my health-loving friends.

Many people tell us that on no account must we entirely cover floors with carpet. A margin must be stained two or three feet all round the room, and the carpet laid in a square in the centre, the margin being varnished. The idea, of course, is that the carpet not being held down by heavy pieces of furniture, usually placed against the wall, can be more easily taken up and shaken, and the smooth varnished floor all round is so much more easily dusted or wiped over with a wet cloth; and all this is indisputable.

But, if these precautions are not taken (and my experience tells me that in the majority of cases they are not), this manner of covering the floor is no whit more wholesome than the all-over carpet. The times and seasons for the taking up of carpets and the scouring of floors are indelibly fixed in the minds of mortals, and new-fangled notions, if we can call them so, cannot overcome such prejudice.

I am almost prepared to maintain that with the varnished margin there is the greater risk, unless it be cleaned oftener than the carpet. We are told that the germs of disease, flying in infinitely small particles in the dust, are taken on to the lungs, and so fulfil their mission in us. You have noticed how quickly a cloud of dust is set in motion from a smooth surface, whereas a rough porous material, as a carpet, will hold the particles. These particles of dust and germs of disease ought not to remain in the carpet, but if they must be somewhere they are better there than on your lungs. If I were taking a man smitten with smallpox into a room carpeted and curtained, my first action would be to remove both, and principally because I should know that if they remained in the room during the fever they would have to be destroyed afterwards. Removing these things would not remove the cause of dust. I should still take every precaution to prevent its accumulation. Every day, or perhaps twice a day, I should have the floor wiped over with damp cloths, using a disinfectant to destroy all germs. But I am dealing now with our ordinary daily life, and am conscious that, freed from the painful reminder of the presence of disease in our houses, men and women are liable to forget all about necessary precautions.

Rather than say to you, "Cover your floors all over with carpet," I would say, Whether you cover them all over or lay your carpets in squares in the centre of the floors, you must use the same precautions and prevent the accumulation of dust." Do not be persuaded into thinking that because you have centre squares and