FOR WIVES AND HUSBANDS.
By T. B. Terry
Not long since I was walking in the city with a celebrated physician. As we passed a house surrounded with every evidence of wealth and refinement, he spoke: “I have a patient in there, an idolized wife, who is dying, and beyond all help, and none of them know what is the matter with her, and still her husband has killed her.” “Why, doctor,” said I, “what do you mean?” “I mean just this,” he said, “her husband is just literally steeped in tobacco until the insensible perspiration from his body has become a deadly poison, and his wife has absorbed enough of this, and had before I was called in, so that she will die.” At an establishment where they treat patients for the cure of the tobacco habit, a man just brought in was washed as clean as soap and water could make him, and then some flies were allowed to alight on him. In five minutes by the watch they were dead. There was poison enough in the perspiration that came out of a man washed as clean as possible to kill them. You can imagine what it would be when he wasn’t washed, perhaps, to be continually absorbing this poison.—T. B. Terry.