The
doctor I was speaking of took me to see the cemetery just outside the
town, I don't know how much he had done to fill it, for he didn't tell
me, but I'll tell you what he did say.
"Look round," said the doctor. "There isn't a house in all the ten-mile
circuit of country you can see over, where there isn't one person, at
least, shaking with fever and ague. And yet you need n't be afraid of
carrying it away with you, for as long as your home is on a paved street
you are safe."
--I think it likely--the Master went on to say--that my friend the doctor
put it pretty strongly, but there is no doubt at all that while all the
country round was suffering from intermittent fever, the paved part of
the city was comparatively exempted. What do you do when you build a
house on a damp soil, and there are damp soils pretty much everywhere?
Why you floor the cellar with cement, don't you? Well, the soil of a
city is cemented all over, one may say, with certain qualifications of
course. A first-rate city house is a regular sanatorium. The only
trouble is, that the little good-for-nothings that come of utterly
used-up and worn-out stock, and ought to die, can't die, to save their
lives. So they grow up to dilute the vigor of the race with skim-milk
vitality. They would have died, like good children, in most average
country places; but eight months of shelter in a regulated temperature,
in a well-sunned house, in a duly moistened air, with good sidewalks to
go about on in all weather, and four months of the cream of summer and
the fresh milk of Jersey cows, make the little sham organizations--the
worm-eaten wind-falls, for that 's what they look like--hang on to the
boughs of life like "froze-n-thaws"; regular struldbrugs they come to be,
a good many of 'em.
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