You can't catch cold by sitting in a field exposed to the draft from an open gate; though I understand that casuists of the old school of the "chill-and-damp" theory of colds are still discussing the case of the patient who "caught his death o' cold" by having his gruel served in a damp basin. The first thing to do is to get the outdoor habit. This takes time to acquire, but, once formed, you wouldn't exchange it for anything else on earth. The next thing is to learn to sit or sleep in a gentle current of air all the time you are indoors. You ought to feel uncomfortable unless you can feel air blowing across your face night and day. Then you are reasonably sure it is fresh, and it is the only way to be sure of it. But drafts are so dangerous! As the old rhyme runs, But when a draft blows through a hole, Make your will and mend your soul. Pure superstition! It just shows what's in a name. Call it a gentle breeze, or a current of fresh air, and no one is afraid of it. Call it a "draft," and up go hands and eyebrows in horror at once. One of our highest authorities on diseases of the lungs, Dr. Norman Bridge, has well dubbed it "The Draft Fetich." It is a fetich, and as murderous as Moloch. The draft is a friend instead of an enemy. What converted most of us to a belief in the beneficence of drafts was the open-air treatment of consumption! Hardly could there have been a more spectacular proof, a more dramatic defiance of the bogey. To make a poor, wasted, shivering consumptive, in a hectic one hour and a drenching sweat the next, lie out exposed to the November weather all day and sleep in a ten-knot gale at night! It looked little short of murder! So much so to some of us, that we decided to test it on ourselves before risking our patients. I can still vividly recall the astonishment with which I woke one frosty December morning, after sleeping all night in a breeze across my head that literally made Each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porcupine, not only without the sign of a sniffle, but feeling as if I'd been made new while I slept. Then we tried it in fear and trembling on our patients, and the delight of seeing the magic it worked! That is an old story now, but it has never lost its charm. To see the cough which has defied "dopes" and syrups and cough mixtures, domestic, patent, and professional, for months, subside and disappear in from three to ten days; the night sweats dry up within a week; the appetite come back; the fever fall; the strength and color return, as from the magic kiss of the free air of the woods, the prairies, the seacoast. There's nothing else quite like it on the green earth. Do you wonder that we become "fresh-air fiends"?