I examined it. The ceilings were low-only nine or ten feet;--then there were two old leaky portable furnaces, which were used as occasion required for heating the large room above, or the basement room when the class-meeting was held. The only ventilation they had was to let off the surplus heat (if they had any, which was seldom) into the room above. Now for fresh air. By a very careful and minute examination, I discovered a little pipe (I think it was about six inches in diameter) to each stove (both of which would not be over half as large as what I have to supply my own bedroom), for the supply of the fresh air for that whole congregation. _Fresh air_, did I say? Well, let us see where this fresh air comes from. The janitor, after taking us down and showing where he kept the ashes, wood, old benches, and all sorts of rubbish, was about going up, but said I, "Where is the part where you get the fresh air to the furnaces?" "Oh," he said, "he could not get to that, it was such a rough place, and there was a sewer or gutter (from the adjoining graveyard I suppose) running right across it." And from that place, too rough to be got at, with an open sewer running through, and too foul to go into, was where they got the _fresh air_ (!) from for the whole of that congregation to breathe. And do you suppose this is an exception? Let me tell you. During the first year of the late war I was called upon by the Sanitary Commission to examine the hospitals in Washington City with reference to their ventilation. A large number of the churches in that city were used for hospital purposes, and many of them were heated by hot-air furnaces, and in not _one single instance_ had they fresh air boxes to them, neither had they any means for carrying off the foul air. The furnaces were generally placed in a hole excavated under the main part of the building, and all the ground around them left exposed, and the air was sucked in from the fermenting, decaying vegetable mould under the building. And this place around the furnace was the place where all the filth and old rubbish was thrown to get it _out of the way_, and it was thoroughly out of the way too, for the surgeon in charge or any inspector never got there to see it. In some cases I found this space around the furnace used as the dead house! Did I say there was no attempt in any of those buildings for systematic ventilation? I ought to have made one exception.