172 ISLES OF SUMMER. 



our limited opportunities, and we have endeavored to collect and 

 decide upon the facts with judicial fairness. "We do not ask the 

 reader to adopt our views, but only to take our testimony for 

 what it may seem to be worth, and to consider it in connection 

 with that of others whose opinions may be entitled to more 

 weight. 



The climate of the Bahamas, in its normal condition, seemed 

 to us fairly described in the lines we have quoted at the com- 

 mencement of this chapter, although they were written of the 

 mountain air of Western Massachusetts. But when the poet 

 declares — (we substitute the word ''ocean" for ''mountain") — 

 that 



"Suns cannot make 

 In this pure air the plague that walks unseen ; 

 The ocean wind, that faints not in thy ray, 

 Sweeps the blue stream of pestilence away," 



he states what cannot be truthfully said of Nassau or its suburbs, 

 and what is not probably true of any of the thickly inhabited 

 portions of the globe. 



Nothing is easier than to poison the purest air. Without con- 

 stant care and vigilance, the waste matter — the sewage incident 

 to permanent abodes — will become any and everywhere, (the re- 

 gions of unending frost alone excepted,) the prolific source of 

 disease and death. Through window and door, through crack 

 and crevice the pestilence will enter. Nature affixes penalties 

 to her sanitary laws which execute themselves. The code of 

 health which she has established is learned at a fearful cost in 

 sick rooms, in cemeteries, and in mortuary records. In pushing 

 our inquiries into the sanitary conditions of Nassau, it will not 

 do to look only at her ocean winds, "the breath of a celestial 

 clime." We must examine "the earth, and the waters under 



