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These dark pockets of the swamps, these earthly Hades, are famous resting-places for those who know the untenable nature of ghosts, and who have become the possessors of healthy nerves by avoiding the poisonous influences of coal-gas in furnace-heated houses, the vitiated air of crowded rooms, and other detrimental effects of a city life.

Brewer, of the Scientific School of New-Haven, who has experimented extensively on this subject, states that, while forty per cent of moisture is needed in air to make it healthful, most stoves and furnaces do not, by any contrivances, supply one half of this, or not twenty per cent. He says most furnace-heated air is dryer than is ever breathed in the hottest deserts of Sahara.

Moreover, furnaces always leak, more or less; how much they leak depending on the care and skill with which they are managed. Carbonic oxide is much more poisonous than carbonic acid. Doubtless some carbonic oxide finds its way into all furnace-heated houses, especially where anthracite is used; the amount varying with the kind of furnace and its management.

When I get home to a furnace-heated house and have cream in my coffee, I shall feel too dissipated to be respectable! We have not been able to get a new cook since our old one died, and the fact must have gotten abroad, for all the floating brethren and sisters in Japan have been to see us!

"The only gain in the old style is that each part being handled separately, if there is ever so little difference in the metal, the bluer can give it a shorter or a longer time, whereas the machine treats all alike." "Then when the gun is assembled, all the work is done?" queried Hamilton, who was becoming a little tired from his long tramp through the works and among the furnace-heated shops.

It would be altogether out of place to think of them by our black, unsightly stoves, or in the dull and dark monotony of our furnace-heated rooms. Within the circle of the light of the open fire safely might the young conjurers question destiny; for none but kindly and gentle messengers from wonderland could venture among them.

In country houses, or in Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and other cities where the dining-rooms are ordinarily larger than those in a New York house, the danger of crowding, of heat, and want of ventilation, is more easily avoided; but in a gas-lighted, furnace-heated room in New York the sufferings of the diners-out are sometimes terrible.

Of course, less fuel is needed to warm a house when water is evaporated in stove and furnace-heated rooms. It is said by those who have experimented, that the saving in fuel is twenty per cent when the air is duly supplied with moisture. There is a very ingenious instrument, called the hygrodeik, which indicates the exact amount of moisture in the air.

The "going into camp" now adopted is even worse; for here youths taken from the sheltered counting-room and furnace-heated house are exposed to the inclemencies of the weather not long enough to harden them, but long enough to lay the foundation of disease.

All furnace-heated rooms have coldest air at the feet, and warmest around the head. It is also rarely the case that furnace-heated houses have proper arrangements for carrying off the vitiated air. There are some recent scientific discoveries that relate to impure air which may properly be introduced here.