Were the house properly shaped, having airy sleeping-rooms for the entire family on the second floor, the half-cellar would be sufficient, and the house itself would cost no more, while the roof, the most perishable and troublesome part, would be proportionally diminished in size.

The chimney should be carried down to the bottom of the cellar, and a register inserted, thus forming a perfect ventilating-shaft for carrying off the inevitable effluvia of the roots and vegetables stored there.

There should always be provided, either in the attic of the main house or in the space over the wood-house, a sheltered place for the drying of the weekly wash in cold weather. Many a pneumonia, or fatal lung-fever, has been contracted by going from a heated room and a steaming wash-tub into a zero atmosphere, with the feet on ice or frozen ground, to hang clothes, or, by handling them when frozen, to rescue them from some impending storm.

The neglect of this precaution, and the twin abomination of failing to make a dry and sheltered walk to the privy, which, in itself, presents the climax of cheapness and discomfort, has undoubtedly caused the sacrifice of many valuable lives.

If every farmer in the land could be made to see that the miasma which floats invisible in the upholding sunlight of noonday is precipitated by the chill of night, just as the earth in a glass of muddy water goes to the bottom, when at rest, and that he, sleeping on the ground floor, is aptly represented by a pin lying in that layer of mud, he would conquer his aversion to going up stairs; and, once having tasted the superior charms of a fresh, airy bedroom, away from the smoke and the smells of the roasting and boiling and trying and baking which must be done in every kitchen, he would never again be induced to sleep below stairs.

Too often the window of his ground-floor bedroom opens at the back of the house, in the neighborhood of the outlet to the kitchen sink, so that being opened to prevent suffocation, on a hot summer's night, it admits disease and death in another form. There are no statistics to show how many "heads of families," who have died before their time, by what has been called a "mysterious dispensation of Providence," lost their lives by inhaling the poisonous odors of surface-drains; but,

thanks to modern science, these untimely events are beginning to be justly rated as a species of unwitting suicide, and will ultimately find their true classification, as preventable untimely death.

This matter of kitchen-drains is far too little thought of. Many a tidy housekeeper, whose sink-room is a pattern of cleanliness, and whose sink is as clean as the "plates she eats from," never bestows a thought on the outlet, the care of which, being out of doors, she thinks belongs to the "men folks." Inspection, at this unvisited "back side of the house," would show layer upon layer of decaying potato-sprouts, cabbage-trimmings, onion-tops, etc., etc. They lie just down in the beginning of the slight excavation, which her husband dignifies by the name of a drain, and she thinks nothing about them till they force themselves upon her attention by sheer accumulation. Then, masculine aid is called in, and a few vigorous thrusts with a long pole push the putrescent mass along, out of immediate interfering distance, the wife merely remarking that "the drain did smell awfully when husband fixed it"; but if the poking has happened at the right season of the year, very likely more than one member of the household will have acquired the germs of typhoid, or some other miasmatic disease.

Another wide-spread source of discomfort and ill-health, though happily growing less by the force of circumstances, is the use of feather-beds. These are often precious family heir-looms, and they had an excuse for being while yet stoves and furnaces were unheard of, but are none the less injurious for all that. A coarse sacking, filled with inexpensive straw, forms the "under bed"; on this is laid a huge bag, filled with thirty or thirty-five pounds of feathers. The farmer, with his blood at almost boiling heat, after a day's haying, lies down on this cheap and unpatented vapor-bath and perspirator, and tries to sleep. Is it any wonder that he tosses and groans; that he finds his garments "wringing wet" and himself nearly deliquesced; that he rises with the "first streak of light" from pure misery? The poor wife who, very likely, in addition to all his discomforts, has suckled an infant all night, finds herself more dead than alive in the morning, and looks forward with justifiable shrinking to the tasks of the day, as she

finds the baby all broken out with prickly heat," and fretful accordingly. No wonder she calls this world "a vale of tears,” and considers life a thoroughly puzzling problem.

Had the bedroom been on the second floor, the air would have been sweet and inviting, and the bed should have been formed by placing the feather heir-loom under a mattress (a good hair one would cost $15, and last a lifetime). The baby, also, should have been provided with a well-mattressed crib. The farmer himself would have found that the air circulating about him, as it would, when raised up above, but supported by, an elastic mattress, cooled his blood, and he would have fallen into that refreshing sleep which is real rest. The baby, being cool, would have been mostly spared the eruption, and the mother, having received the full benefit of the mysterious cordial that nature pours through our veins while sleeping, would have risen a rested and renewed being. Feather-beds are answerable for much of the "debility" among farmers' wives. Not all the detrimental influences are abroad in the soft summer air; each season has its own peculiar dangers to health and life. Take a winter view, and suppose a family of

five or six children. In that case, the house will have been raised up, or built out, till some of the sleeping-rooms are remote enough from the kitchen or any other source of warmth. On winter evenings the household is generally gathered in the family "sitting"-room, and, most likely, round an airtight stove; probably the cracks around the windows are well calked with rags against any possible ingress of out-door air. A thermometer introduced here would go up to 90°. Bedtime approaches. With shrinking reluctance the youngsters look forward to going to bed in rooms where the walls glitter with frost-sparkles, and the windows are closely curtained with impenetrable sheets of frozen moisture. Anybody who has taken that awful first plunge into a bed as cold as a morgue-slab, and lain awake for an hour with his teeth chattering and every fibre quivering with cold, will realize that the warming-pans of our grandmothers had worthy uses, and will mourn with reason that they have passed out of fashion. Of course, the persons who had been sitting by the air-tight were perspiring freely when they left it, and this sudden change of temperature, with the unavoidable exposure of

undressing, would cause an instant check, in six cases out of ten, sufficient to produce a cold, while in delicate constitutions, and at critical periods, it is quite enough to lay the foundation of incurable maladies.

A properly warmed and ventilated sitting-room, and properly warmed and ventilated sleeping-rooms, would prevent many a pneumonia and consumption.

Another error of modern farm-life is, that the wife tries to do too much herself. This is one of the indirect results of labor-saving machinery. In former days, some needy girl was given a home, and "brought up," often thoroughly initiated into the arts and mysteries of the highest housekeeping, in consideration of her services. Having begun to supply hands and feet by machinery, the housewives of our day carry it too far. To be sure, the human aid is a creature of thought and feeling, of passions and impulses, while the machine causes neither anxiety nor annoyance; and so the wife overtaxes herself rather than "be bothered with a girl."

Now, read the above indictment to the farmer; tell him that each one of its various counts of "ill-built," "ill-ventilated," "ill-warmed," "ill-drained," violates an inexorable, self-executing law. His answer will probably be, "These things are well enough for those who can afford them, but they are not for such as me; it takes a more 'forehanded' man to go into draining, and all that." The proper rejoinder to this is the reply made by the experienced manufacturer to the tyro, who insisted that he could not raise his dam, "because," said he, it costs too much." "I know it," said the old head; "but it costs a deal more not to do it."

It is perfectly easy to show that, by each and all of these errors and neglects, the farmer loses in actual dollars and cents; that an intelligent, vigilant attention to all the known methods of preventing disease and premature death, in the placing and structure and care of a house would, in a series of years, find him richer in tangible material wealth. And who can reckon the bitter cost when violated law avenges itself in some sudden and fatal stroke; or who can compute the misery of seeing some loved one, whose life has been blighted into a prolonged agony, perish by inches?

If there is a wet cellar, and a state of things as hideous as

that described by Mr. French, in the report of last year, twenty-five dollars will cure the dampness, and the labor of one man for half a day will remove all the deleterious accumulations. Many a man who has plead his inability to "spare a day" in the spring, has been forced to take a day in the fall for the obsequies of some member of his household; but not till a long and wearying sickness has taxed to the utmost the energies of all who could wait or watch, and the physician has a large but well-earned bill against him, the druggist another, and the nurse, who was called in when home aid would no longer suffice, another. Had the sums which are often recklessly paid out, in frantic but vain attempts to detain some fleeting life, been invested in judicious methods of prevention, they would have been ample to underdrain the entire premises, warm every zero bedroom in the house, and pay the wages of a nimble maid all the year round!

In a home where one or more persons die of miasmatic diseases, it is fair to infer that the survivors labor under disabilities. They suffer from that nameless deficit, which makes them speak of themselves as "debilitated," "miserable," etc. The persistent use of polluted drinking-water, by producing a chronic bowel trouble, that doesn't quite kill, transforms living into a heavy burden; the victim of the air-tight stove and icy bed, coughs through the wearisome winter, to find herself "all run down," when the soft spring days arrive; while the pallid girl, who grows up shut out from the sunlight, never knows what it is to live at all.

The men have a little better chance than the women, from their out-door life, but even they do not experience the triumphant delight in living and breathing, which is the, rightful guerdon of the tillers of the soil. A man below par in health can hardly be expected to act up to the full measure of a completed manhood, so that our account will not be fully made up till we have added a dismal inventory of possibilities unfulfilled, worthy purposes unachieved and reasonable hopes forever deferred. Is it any wonder that he is easily discouraged, that he gives way to morbid repinings and ignoble discontent, that he envies the professional man, and actually imagines that the lot of the hard-worked city clerk, with all its deprivations, is better than his own?