While a fact is under fifty years of age, surely it is early days to despise it, as if in its dotage, and to traduce it as a mere tradition. Yet this was already, at the time I speak of, done by the wiseacres of Maiden Lane to the great, and well-established fact, that the Cholera, when it first appeared in the year 1832, had avoided--as if it ran away from the feeding smells, and pursued the opposite--every house, where a man could say that he ever tasted our chimney-stack. On the other hand, it had followed strictly, as on any good map can be shown, the main lines of the sewage system, so far as these could yet be traced. For as yet, they were very bold in places, and then vanished, without a mouth. Now, if there had been any medical man, with power to think for himself--as certainly some do, in every century--he might have chanced to put these two facts together, and breed a conclusion. And the conclusion must have been--increase your chimneys, issuing a fine detergent smell, and abolish all drains, that bottle up and condense destructive odours, sending them out with a fizz at the traps, to rush into first-floor windows. But alas! there was no such man just then; and I fear that even now he is hard to find. Drain, drain, drain, was the cry of the period; and ventilate all your drains, that every one may smell them, and inhale a rich interest for his sewage-rate. My father had never been blessed with any scientific education. He had thriven most stoutly, as his years increased, by dwelling in a feeding atmosphere. In an unwise moment, he convinced himself, that a change of inhalation would improve his lungs; which were as sound as a bell used to be, in the days when people knew how to cast them. The only fault anywhere near them was, that from the increase of "adipose deposit," they had not the room to swing, that in thinner years they had. But he said to himself, and to my mother too--though she had the sense to say 'nonsense'--that a daily influx of entirely fresh odours would enable him to holloa, as he used to do. "Did you ever see Tommy look so well," he asked, "as when he came back from the inside of the whale? I require something of that sort; and I shall go, and smoke my pipe, every evening after tea, in the bracing air of Joe Cowl's drain." "That sounds very well," dear mother answered, "but I do think, Bubbly, that you ought to ask Dr. Flebotham first, what he thinks about it."