This is an illustrated version of the original Smoking and Drinking by James Parton. We can all pervert and poison ourselves if we will, and yet not incur much danger of prompt extinction. Indeed, it is hard for the most careful and resolute person to avoid being a party to the universal violation of natural law. Children, of course, are quite helpless. How could I help, at eight years of age, being confined six hours a day in a school, where the word "ventilation" was only known as an object of spelling? How could I help, on Sunday, being entombed in a Sunday-school room, eight or nine feet high, crowded with children, all breathing their utmost? I hated it. I loathed it. I protested against it. I played truant from it. But I was thirteen years old before I could escape that detested basement, where I was poisoned with pernicious air, and where well-intentioned Ignorance made virtue disgusting, contemptible, and ridiculous, by turns.