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 mist examine ‘‘the earth, and the waters under 
