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It must be confessed that Bob’s principal idea in a house had been a Gothic library, and his mind had labored more on the possibility of adapting some favorite bits from the baronial antiquities to modern needs than on anything so terrestrial as air. Therefore he awoke as from a dream, and taking two or three monstrous inhalations, he seized the plans and began looking over them with new energy. Meanwhile I went on with my prelection.

The second great vital element for which provision must be made in “our house” is FIRE. By which I do not mean merely artificial fire, but fire in all its extent and branches,–the heavenly fire which God sends us daily on the bright wings of sunbeams, as well as the mimic fires by which we warm our dwellings, cook our food, and light our nightly darkness.

To begin, then, with heavenly fire or sunshine. If God’s gift of vital air is neglected and undervalued, His gift of sunshine appears to be hated. There are many houses where not a cent has been expended on ventilation, but where hundreds of dollars have been freely lavished to keep out the sunshine. The chamber, truly, is tight as a box; it has no fireplace, not even a ventilator opening into the stove-flue; but, oh, joy and gladness! it has outside blinds and inside folding-shutters, so that in the brightest of days we may create there a darkness that may be felt. To observe the generality of New England houses, a spectator might imagine they were planned for the torrid zone, where the great object is to keep out a furnace draught of burning air.

But let us look over the months of our calendar. In which of them do we not need fires on our hearths? We will venture to say that from October to June all families, whether they actually have it or not, would be the more comfortable for a morning and evening fire. For eight months in the year the weather varies on the scale of cool, cold, colder, and freezing; and for all the four other months what is the number of days that really require the torrid-zone system of shutting up houses? We all know that extreme heat is the exception, and not the rule.

Yet let anybody travel, as I did last year, through the valley of the Connecticut, and observe the houses. All clean and white and neat and well-to-do, with their turfy yards and their breezy great elms, but all shut up from basement to attic, as if the inmates had all sold out and gone to China. Not a window-blind open above or below. Is the house inhabited? No,–yes,–there is a faint stream of blue smoke from the kitchen chimney, and half a window-blind open in some distant back part of the house. They are living there in the dim shadows, bleaching like potato-sprouts in the cellar.

* * * * *

“I can tell you why they do it, papa,” said Jenny. “It’s the flies, and flies are certainly worthy to be one of the plagues of Egypt. I can’t myself blame people that shut up their rooms and darken their houses in fly-time,–do you, mamma?”

“Not in extreme cases; though I think there is but a short season when this is necessary; yet the habit of shutting up lasts the year round, and gives to New England villages that dead, silent, cold, uninhabited look which is so peculiar.”

“The one fact that a traveler would gather in passing through our villages would be this,” said I, “that the people live in their houses and in the dark. Barely do you see doors and windows open, people sitting at them, chairs in the yard, and signs that the inhabitants are living out-of-doors.”