696 PLAIN FACTS FOR OLD AND YOUNG 



every other device for the purpose of keeping out the 

 cold air of winter. Apartments are made as nearly 

 air-tight as possible; and in these close, unventilated 

 rooms, hermetically sealed up, thousands of persons 

 annually spend several months of the year, regardless 

 of the fact that with the air which they respire day 

 and night, they are inhaling debility, disease, and 

 death. The life-giving oxygen, which a beneficent 

 Creator has supplied in lavish abundance '' without 

 money and without price," moans anxiously around 

 these sealed-up houses, seeking in vain for even one 

 small crevice through which to find entrance, to carry 

 life, energy, and purification to the suffocating inmates. 

 Let a person from the pure, crisp, outer air, enter 

 one of these magnificent dens of disease. Beautiful 

 carpets cover the floors, fine works of art adorn the 

 walls, luxurious furniture abounds in every room, and 

 no luxury that wealth can buy is wanting ; but oh ! what 

 a smell! One is tempted to protect his olfactories 

 with a handkerchief, and beat a hasty retreat; but 

 courtesy demands that he should suffer martyrdom, 

 and so he sits down with as much complacency as pos- 

 sible, but involuntarily turns wistfully toward the win- 

 dow now and then, hoping to discover some little crack 

 or crevice through which one breath of pure, unpoi- 

 soned air may enter. But in vain. In each breath his 

 keen sense of smell discovers ancient smells from the 

 kitchen, odors of decomposition from the cellar, moldy 

 dust from the carpet, and worst of all, the foul exhala- 

 tions from half a dozen human bodies,— lungs, skins, 

 stomachs, decajang teeth, etc. On the window-panes 

 little streams of organic filth are seen running down 

 to form pools upon the window-sills. On all the outer 

 walls the same sort of condensation of fetid matter is 



