St. Landry Democrat

There is one very good reason why people "take cold" in winter time. Most of the well-to-do spend their lives, when in-doors, in cooked air. The lower down the thermometer goes the higher the burning coal is piled; all the chinks and cracks are stopped that would let any fresh air in, and its main chance, indeed, is when the front door opens for twenty seconds, or when the beds are made in the sleeping-rooms. In the living rooms of the family there is no occasion, many people think, to raise the windows ever, except to wash them, on periodical cleaning days, or to shut in the shutters. So carpets and furniture and people, lungs and skin, are dried and baked in the hot, dry rooms, until ingenious persons can bring out electric sparks from their finger ends by skating rapidly up and down the room in their woolen slippers.

Out from this kiln-dried atmosphere into the winter streets and into the very cold or very damp air plunge the folks who live in these air-tight rooms. They put on plenty of wraps, but they wear the same foot-gear and they carry the same lungs out into the streets with them and the same sensitive skin. Then they go into friends' houses and sit in other hot rooms with all their wraps on, or they sit in church pews, the women, at least, heavily muffled in furs and woolens, for a matter of two hours. (Why a man will take off his overcoat in church and women cling to their jackets as to an article of faith, is among the puzzles for the wise to settle, or for the next hundred questions of an inquiring world.) Again, they go out in the damp streets, and it is a wonder to all doctors and thinkers that they do not all "take," and keep, too, that congested state of lungs, and membranes, and chilled blood vessels that we class under this one convenient term of "cold."

Perhaps the houses are not kept any warmer than they ought to be, when people are taking but little exercise. But they certainly are, nearly all of them, too dry and lacking in constantly renewed pure air. It has been before remarked in the Ledger that folks who are extremely particular about wearing their own clothes, and who would by no means consent to take the cast-off garments of a neighbor-one and all of them-are perfectly comfortable to breathe over and over again the cast-off and soiled air from each other's lungs, when it is cooked especially; for in summer time they do insist on a change of it, and do get their houses ventilated. Janitors of public buildings, in a short-sighted economy of fuel, will shut up all the apertures by which fresh air might get in, lest they should suffer some heat to escape thereby, and are rewarded by sleepy audiences, especially when the gas-burners are at work, also draining the cooked air of what little life it has. There are some people-many, it is hoped-who open an inch or two of their bed-room windows every night to insure a modicum of fresh air to sleep by. But these do not in the least care to have fresh air to be awake in, it seems, for they are content to have their furnace draw all its supplies from the tightly-sealed cellar, and from the stale atmosphere of the ash-boxes and vegetable bins in that subterranean apartment.

When we live in fresh air within doors as without, with its proper proportions of moisture for the skin and breathing apparatus to keep up their healthy tone, it is likely we shall have found out one way at least of how not to take cold.