who looked more like ghastly spectres than men, and who could hardly be said to be alive.

A few years ago a vessel started from * Cork in Ireland to take a large number of emigrants to a ship just about to sail from Liverpool. A violent storm sprung up in the night as the vessel was crossing the Irish Channel, and the captain, fearing that the alarmed passengers would interfere with the sailors, and render it difficult to work the ship, sent them all below into the hold, and covered them closely down with the hatches. The imprisoned passengers soon found that they were suffocating, and called and knocked loudly for help; but their cries were unheard in the raging of the storm, or disregarded. In the morning the hatches were removed, and great was the horror of the captain and his crew to find the hold full of dead bodies and dying people instead of living men and women. Such are the fearful consequences which follow when human beings are forced to breathe the same air over and over again. Yet how few people think of this in their own houses, and especially in their bedrooms, which are often kept closed up, without any possibility of the bad air given out by the breathing of several persons escaping, and being replaced with fresh, wholesome, pure air. This is one reason why persons often sleep more heavily than is good for them, and cannot wake up easily at the proper time in the morning. The air they breathe during the night is like poison to them, and acts as though they had taken a narcotic;

their blood is full of it, and it does not refresh the brain through which it passes, but keeps it insensible, just as a man is when he is drowning or suffocating. The uneasy and unrefreshed condition in which such persons arise in the morning often leads them to try and stimulate their faculties to action by drinking strong, exciting beverages, which remove the feeling of fatigue for the time, but lay the foundations of disease and death. To prevent all this, to keep every room in a house fresh and sweet and provided with pure air every hour of the day and night, ought to be the first consideration of all who have homes of their own. The most simple way of airing a bedroom is by opening the window at the top; but sometimes rooms are too small to admit of this without causing a draught to come on to the sleeper, which is bad, because warmth is necessary to health as well as fresh air. In that case there are simple ways of ventilating the room which all persons who understand sanitary matters will readily explain. One is, if the window be made to divide in the middle with a sash, to open the bottom part for about two or three feet, and get a plain pięce of board made to fit into the window exactly, and to let the bottom sash rest upon it when open, the board filling up the lower part of the window. There is then a space left between the two window sashes, through which the fresh air rushes upwards into the room without causing a draught. Any one can arrange this with a very trifling expense, and it is sufficient to keep a room fresh

and aired during the night, and is safe even if the bed be near the window. Cool air will get into a warm room by some means if it be possible; if there be any cracks or holes where it can force its way into a house it is sure to come. But sometimes it can only get in through very foul entrances, and then it often arrives not as clean, fresh air, but as poisonous sewer gas, for if there be no other inlet for it, the drains which open into the house are sure to admit it. Drains, if not properly arranged, do often open into dwellinghouses, and their filthy and poisonous gases steal into our sitting-rooms and bedrooms when all seems safe, and bring ghastly fevers in their train, which carry off those most beloved in a family, and often the bread-winner of all. Every sink or gully or waste pipe of any sort that is not properly trapped and arranged is likely to admit this poisonous sewer gas into our houses, and it is chiefly at night, when the windows are shut and the house warm, that it steals in like a thief in the night, unseen and unsuspected, but with fearful consequences. Any expenditure of money that is necessary to keep out this dreadful enemy, whose attacks are worse than those of an open foe, is a wise outlay, and prevents the possibility of much greater and more unwelcome expense. Sickness caused by an unhealthy dwelling involves constant interruptions of work, and calls upon any savings in the bank or a benefit society, often ending in a rapid descent to the poor rates. Though the loss to the middle

and upper classes is great, it is not for a moment to be compared with that which falls upon the working classes themselves through their neglect in providing wholesome and comfortable dwellings for their families. It is, perhaps, not saying too much to aver that one half the money expended by benefit societies in large towns may be set down as pecuniary loss arising from bad and unhealthy homes.

But there is a worse consequence still. The low tone of health thus produced is one of the chief causes of drunkenness. A well-known sanitary reformer once remonstrated with an apparently sensible man on the folly of spending half his income on whiskey. His reply was, "Do, sir, come and live here, and you will drink whiskey too."

Dwellings in low, damp, and unhealthy situations, with bad drainage and imperfect water supply, are often to be had at low rents, and tempt those who wish to practise economy. But it is a false economy to be so tempted, and the difference in rent between a wholesome and unwholesome house of the same size is unworthy of consideration, when account is taken of the money that sickly persons have to pay for doctors' bills, physic, and loss of time, not to mention the loss of comfort and depression of spirits which are certain where foul air is breathed. A recent writer on Thrift says:-"The neglect of the conditions of daily health is a frightfully costly thing. It costs the rich a great deal in the shape of poor rates, for the support of widows made husbandless and children made fatherless by typhus. It costs

them also a great deal in disease; for the fever often spreads from the dwellings of the poor into the homes of the rich, and carries away father, mother, or children. It costs a great deal in subscriptions to maintain dispensaries, infirmaries, houses for recovery, and asylums for the destitute. It costs the poor still more; it costs them health, which is their only capital. In this is invested their all; if they lose it their docket is struck and they are bankrupt. How frightful is the neglect, whether it be on the part of society or of individuals, which robs the poor man of his health, and makes his life a daily death."

TWELVE SANITARY MAXIMS.

1. It is the duty of every householder to ascertain for himself whether his own house be free or not from well-known dangers to health.

2. As a rule the soundness of the sanitary arrangements of a house is taken for granted, and never questioned until “drain-begotten" illness has broken out. In other words, we employ illness and death as our drain detectives.

3. Whenever gas from sewers, or the emanations from a leaking drain, a cesspool, or a fouled well make their way into a house, the inmates are in imminent danger of an outbreak of typhoid fever, diphtheria, or other febrile ailments classed together under the term "zymotic," not to speak of minor illness, and depressed vitality, the connection of which with sewer gas is now fully established. Sewer gas enters a house most rapidly at night, when outer