But you woke full of life and vigor, you looked out
into the whirling snow-storms without a shiver, and thought nothing
of plunging through drifts as high as your head on your daily way to
school. You jingled in sleighs, you snow-balled, you lived in snow
like a snow-bird, and your blood coursed and tingled, in full tide of
good, merry, real life, through your veins--none of the slow-creeping,
black blood which clogs the brain and lies like a weight on the vital
wheels!"
To illustrate the effects of this poison, the horrors of "the Black
Hole of Calcutta" are often referred to, where one hundred and forty-six
men were crowded into a room only eighteen feet square with but two
small windows, and in a hot climate. After a night of such horrible
torments as chill the blood to read, the morning showed a pile of one
hundred and twenty-three dead men and twenty-three half dead that were
finally recovered only to a life of weakness and suffering.
In another case, a captain of the steamer Londonderry, in 1848, from
sheer ignorance of the consequences, in a storm, shut up his passengers
in a tight room without windows.
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