Can it be possible that you really hold with the once-celebrated Mr. Walker, “The Original,” as he was deservedly called, who maintained, that, by a correct diet, the system became self-purifying, through an active exhalation which repelled impurity,—­so that, while walking on dusty roads, his feet, and even his stockings, remained free from dust?  “By way of experiment, I did not wash my face for a week; nor did any one see, nor I feel, the difference.”  My deluded friend, it is a fatal error.  Mr. Walker, the Original, may have been inwardly a saint and a sage, but it is impossible that his familiar society could have been desirable, even to fools or sinners.  Rather recall, from your early explorations in Lempriere’s Dictionary, how Medea renewed the youth of Pelias by simply cutting him to pieces and boiling him; whereon my Lord Bacon justly remarks, that “there may be some boiling required in the matter, but the cutting to pieces is not needful.”  If you find that the water-cure agrees with your constitution, I rejoice in it; I should think it would; but, I implore you, do not leave it all behind you when you leave the institution.  When you return to your family, use your very first dollars for buying a sponge and a tin-hat, for each member of the household; and bring up the five children to lead decent lives.

Then, again, consider the fact that our lungs were created to consume oxygen.  I suppose that never in your life, Dolorosus, did those breathing organs of yours inhale more than one half the quantity of air that they were intended to take in,—­to say nothing of its quality.  Yet one would think, that, in the present high prices of other food, you would make the most of the only thing you can put into your mouth gratis.  Here is Nature constantly urging on us an unexceptionable atmosphere forty miles high,—­for if a pressure of fourteen pounds to the square inch is not to be called urging, what is?—­and yet we not only neglect, but resist the favor.  Our children commonly learn to spell much better than they ever learn to breathe, because much more attention is paid to the former department of culture.  Indeed, the materials are better provided; spelling-books are abundant; but we scarcely allow them time, in the intervals of school, to seek fresh air out of doors, and we sedulously exclude it from our houses and school-rooms.  Is it not possible to impress upon your mind the changes which “modern improvements” are bringing upon us?  In times past, if a gentleman finished the evening with a quiet cigar in his parlor, (a practice I deprecate, and introduce only for purposes of scientific illustration,) not a trace of it ever lingered to annoy his wife at the breakfast-table; showing that the draft up the open chimney had wholly disposed of it, the entire atmosphere of the room being changed during the night.  Now, on the other hand, every whiff lingers persistently beside the domestic altar, and betrays to the youngest child, next day, the parental