Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/90

 found the theory false, — having been led thereto by an article written by the ablest chemist in Boston, — I decided that whoever was so unwise as to inhale their stuff was in danger of sudden death, while whoever should breathe pure oxygen would as certainly burn up inside, as if he or she drank pure alcohol and kept it up.

There is but one way in which the inhalation of oxygen can do any good whatever to a person, sick or well, and that is to breathe it just as God intended it should be, — in the sun-warmed, open air!

I have elsewhere said that no one can be good or virtuous in soiled linen. I strengthen it with — nor unless the lungs be well inflated.

Look at the operation of this principle in the case of a man who is pent up in an old dingy office three-fifths or every day. He cannot enjoy life. Why? Because his lungs are leathery and collapsed, never filled with aught save close, dusty, foul, over-breathed, stove-heated air. The man is, though ignorant of the fact, dying by inches, because his blood and other fluids are loaded down with the foul exhalations which he draws into his system, while breathing his own breath over and over again, as he does at least five thousand times a day; and at every breath he puts a nail in his own coffin, and drives it home by every half-chewed meal he eats. Now, let that man smell the heart of an oak log two feet thick every morning, — after he shall daily cut his way to it with a dull axe, — and in one month his ills will vanish under this prescription of "oxygenized air;" his weight will have increased twenty pounds; for the labor will have made him puff and blow, and his lungs, taking advantage of that puffing and blowing, will have luxuriated in their oxygenic treat. Why? Because they impart it and its contained vitality to the blood, and away that goes, health-charged, through every artery of the body, cleaning out the passages as it flies along, leaving a little health here and a little there, until, in a few months, the entire man is renewed and made over from head to heel. His color comes again; his haggardness has gone; he is full of life, vivacity, and fun; pokes your ribs as he retails, with flashing eye and extreme unction, the last new practical joke he played. He eats three times his usual quantum of roast beef and plum pudding; plays at