Publisher's Synopsis
IT is only too easy to shock some people, and at the risk of shocking many of my readers at the outset, I must declare that very few bedrooms are so built and furnished as to remain thoroughly sweet, fresh, and airy all through the night. This is not going so far as others however. Emerson repeats an assertion he once heard made by Thoreau, the American so-called "Stoic,"-whose senses by the way seem to have been preternaturally acute-that "by night every dwelling-house gives out a bad air, like a slaughter-house." As this need not be a necessary consequence of sleeping in a room, it remains to be discovered why one's first impulse on entering a bedroom in the morning should either be to open the windows, or to wish the windows were open.
