Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/37

 connect baths, wash-basins and other necessary fittings with the drains without poisoning ourselves, and the inconvenient modern "washstand" with its unreticent adjuncts will decently disappear. It cannot be very long—probably it will only be a few years—before some kind of reasonable control is exercised over the technical education of plumbers.

Thus the bedroom of the new age will be a much more convenient and satisfactory apartment than the one we slept in last night, and another irksome and unelevating part of the domestic work of our servants will be eliminated. But the sleeping-apartments, and indeed all apartments in city homes, will contain yet another very valuable and necessary article of furniture—the oxygenator. Nearly all the unhealthiness and the pinched, weary greyness of town-dwellers to-day could be cured by fresh air. Everyone is familiar with the improvement which can be effected in the health and appearance of a city family by even a short visit to the seaside or the country—an improvement which it happens to be fashionable just now to attribute, in the