—­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.

—­The Scarabee’s ear was caught by that queer word of Swift’s, and he asked very innocently what kind of bugs he was speaking of, whereupon That Boy shouted out, Straddlebugs! to his own immense amusement and the great bewilderment of the Scarabee, who only saw that there was one of those unintelligible breaks in the conversation which made other people laugh, and drew back his antennae as usual, perplexed, but not amused.

I do not believe the Master had said all he was going to say on this subject, and of course all these statements of his are more or less one-sided.  But that some invalids do much better in cities than in the country is indisputable, and that the frightful dysenteries and fevers which have raged like pestilences in many of our country towns are almost unknown in the better built sections of some of our large cities is getting to be more generally understood since our well-to-do people have annually emigrated in such numbers from the cemented surface of the city to the steaming soil of some of the dangerous rural districts.  If one should contrast the healthiest country residences with the worst city ones the result would be all the other way, of course, so that there are two sides to the question, which we must let the doctors pound in their great mortar, infuse and strain, hoping that they will present us with the clear solution when they have got through these processes.  One of our chief wants is a complete sanitary map of every State in the Union.