Our women work hard, seemingly, and many of them against a heavy tide; nor does there ever seem to be an end to their toils. Especially do some of the laboring women of my race appear to work under heavy disadvantages; if the family is small, they are never through with their work; if it is large, there is a double excuse for having no time to rest; yet many real needful things are left undone. I have often wondered if such housekeepers, whose own affairs are neglected, and in whose homes things go to waste, while they take so much upon them of other people’s work, never thought of the story of “filling a hogshead at the spigot that had no stopper at the bung.” So with our men who labor hard; they are anxious to keep the wolf from the door, and they thoughtlessly rise in the morning, go to work, perhaps, without breakfast, working for hours in a condition for odors, contagious or otherwise, to affect the system. Thus the liabilities to colds in the vital organs, which may go on for years, gradually undermining the general health, or may, as frequently happens, develop in lung fever, and consequent shattered constitution. The laboring men of my race, generally speaking, take much better care of the horses intrusted to their care than they do of their own health. Were men just as particular about what they themselves eat and drink, and how they dress and sleep, the deaths of young men of thirty and forty years would not be so common. Those who are not careful of their health die early in this climate, and their offspring _die earlier_. It is not the blood we wish to keep hot, as some desire to do; this induces disease and premature decay. It is the body that needs to be kept warm while the blood is normal, or rather cool. This is just as easily done with man as with the horse. Frequent baths, wearing all-wool flannels next the skin in winter, changing for thinner ones in hot weather, eating coarse dry food, taking less medicine, desisting from the use of tobacco and “firewater,”—all tend to lengthen the days of mankind on this beautiful earth. It is authoritatively stated that the colored population decreases in Boston, but it is not all the fault of the climate; for there have been native Africans who lived to a great age here. It is the neglect, in a great measure, to guard against the changes of the weather.