The Child's Day by Woods Hutchinson

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Title: The Child's Day

Author: Woods Hutchinson

Release Date: June 11, 2006 [EBook #18559]

Language: English

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[Illustration: A GOOD SPORT FOR GIRLS AND BOYS]



THE WOODS HUTCHINSON HEALTH SERIES



THE CHILD'S DAY


BY


WOODS HUTCHINSON, A.M., M.D.


Sometime Professor of Anatomy, University of Iowa; Professor of
Comparative Pathology and Methods of Science Teaching, University of
Buffalo; Lecturer, London Medical Graduates' College and University of
London; and State Health Officer of Oregon. Author of "Preventable
Diseases," "Conquest of Consumption," "Instinct and Health," and "A
Handbook of Health."



HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO


COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY WOODS HUTCHINSON




FOREWORD


"If youth only knew, if old age only could!" lamented the philosopher.
What is the use, say some, of putting ideas about disease into
children's heads and making them fussy about their health and anxious
before their time?

Precisely because ideas about disease are far less hurtful than
disease itself, and because the period for richest returns from
sensible living is childhood--and the earlier the better.

It is abundantly worth while to teach a child how to protect his
health and build up his strength; too many of us only begin to take
thought of our health when it is too late to do us much good. Almost
everything is possible in childhood. The heaviest life handicaps can
be fed and played and trained out of existence in a child. Even the
most rudimentary knowledge, the simplest and crudest of precautions,
in childhood may make all the difference between misery and happiness,
success and failure in life.

Our greatest asset for healthful living is that most of the unspoiled
instincts, the primitive likes and dislikes, of the child point in the
right direction. There is no need to tell children to eat, to play, to
sleep, to swim; all that is needed is to point out why they like to do
these things, where to stop, what risks to avoid. The simplest and
most natural method of doing this has seemed to be that of a sketch of
the usual course and activities of a Child's Day, with a running
commentary of explanation, and such outlines of our bodily structure
and needs as are required to make clear why such and such a course is
advisable and such another inadvisable. The greatest problem has been
how to reach and hold the interest of the child; and the lion's share
of such success as may have been achieved in this regard is due to the
coöperation of my sister, Professor Mabel Hutchinson Douglas of
Whittier College, California.

THE AUTHOR.




CONTENTS


GOOD MORNING
I. Waking Up
II. A Good Start
III. Bathing and Brushing

BREAKFAST

GOING TO SCHOOL
I. Getting Ready
II. An Early Romp
III. Fresh Air--Why We Need It
IV. Fresh Air--How We Breathe It

IN SCHOOL
I. Bringing the Fresh Air In
II. Hearing and Listening
III. Seeing and Reading
IV. A Drink of Water
V. Little Cooks
VI. Tasting and Smelling
VII. Talking and Reciting
VIII. Thinking and Answering

"ABSENT TO-DAY?"
I. Keeping Well
II. Some Foes to Fight
III. Protecting Our Friends

WORK AND PLAY
I. Growing Strong
II. Accidents
III. The City Beautiful

THE EVENING MEAL

A PLEASANT EVENING

GOOD NIGHT
I. Getting Ready for Bed
II. The Land of Nod

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES




THE CHILD'S DAY




GOOD MORNING


I. WAKING UP

If there is anything that we all enjoy, it is waking up on a bright
spring morning and seeing the sunlight pouring into the room. You all
know the poem beginning,--

"I remember, I remember
The house where I was born;
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn."

You are feeling fresh and rested and happy after your good night's
sleep and you are eager to be up and out among the birds and the
flowers.

You are perfectly right in being glad to say "Good morning" to the
sun, for he is one of the best friends you have. Doesn't he make the
flowers blossom, and the trees grow? And he makes the apples redden,
too, and the wheat-ears fill out, and the potatoes grow under the
ground, and the peas and beans and melons and strawberries and
raspberries above it. All these things that feed you and keep you
healthy are grown by the heat of the sun. So if it were not for the
sunlight we should all starve to death.

While sunlight is pouring down from the sun to the earth, it is
warming and cleaning the air, burning up any poisonous gases, or
germs, that may be in it. By heating the air, it starts it to rising.
If you will watch, you can see the air shimmering and rising from an
open field on a broiling summer day, or wavering and rushing upward
from a hot stove or an open register in winter. Hold a little feather
fluff or blow a puff of flour above a hot stove, and it will go
sailing up toward the ceiling. As the heated air rises, the cooler air
around rushes in to fill the place that it has left, and the outdoor
"drafts" are made that we call _winds_.

These winds keep the air moving about in all directions constantly,
like water in a boiling pot, and in this way keep it fresh and pure
and clean. If it were not for this, the air would become foul and damp
and stagnant, like the water in a ditch or marshy pool. So the Sun
God, as our ancestors in the Far East used to call him thousands of
years ago, not only gives us our food to eat, but keeps the air fit
for us to breathe.

In still another way the sun is one of our best friends; for his rays
have the wonderful power, not only of causing plants that supply us
with food--the Green Plants, as we call them--to grow and flourish,
but at the same time of withering and killing certain plants that do
us harm. These plants--the Colorless Plants, we may call them--are the
_molds_, the _fungi_, and the _bacteria_, or _germs_. You know how a
pair of boots put away in a dark, damp closet, or left down in the
cellar, will become covered all over with a coating of gray mold. Mold
grows rapidly in the dark. Just so, these other Colorless Plants,
which include most of our disease germs, grow and flourish in the
dark, and are killed by sunlight. That is why no house, or room, is
fit to live in, into which the sunlight does not pour freely sometime
during the day. The more sunlight you can bring into your bedrooms and
your playrooms and your schoolrooms, except during the heat of the day
in the summer time, the better they will be. The Italians have a very
shrewd and true old proverb about houses and light: "Where the
sunlight never comes, the doctor often does."

So you see that Nature is guiding you in the right direction when she
makes you love and delight in the bright, warm, golden sunlight; for
it is one of the very best friends that you have--indeed, you couldn't
possibly live without it.

In one sense, in fact, though this may be a little harder for you to
understand, you are sunlight yourselves; for the power in your muscles
and nerves that makes you able to jump and dance and sing and laugh
and breathe is the sunlight which you have eaten in bread and apples
and potatoes, and which the plants had drunk in through their leaves
in the long, sunny days of spring and summer.

So throw up your blinds and open your windows wide to the sunlight
every morning; and let the sunlight pour in all day long, except only
while you are reading or studying--when the dazzling light may hurt
your eyes--and for six or seven of the hottest hours of the day in
summer time. Perhaps your mothers will object that the sunlight will
fade the carpets, or spoil the furniture; but it will put far more
color into your faces than it will take out of the carpets. If you are
given the choice of a bedroom, choose a room that faces south or
southeast or southwest, never toward the north.


II. A GOOD START

When you are really awake and have had a good look to see what kind of
morning it is, you will feel like yawning and stretching, and rubbing
your eyes four or five times, before you jump out of bed; and it is a
good plan to take plenty of time to do this, unless you are already
late for breakfast or school. It starts your heart to beating and your
lungs to breathing faster; and it limbers your muscles, so that you
are ready for the harder work they must do as soon as you jump out of
bed and begin to walk about and bathe and dress and run and play.

When you jump out of bed, throw back the covers and turn them over the
foot of the bed, so that the air and the sunlight can get at every
part of them and make them clean and fresh and sweet to cover you at
night again. Though you may not know it, all night long, while you
have been asleep, your skin has been at work cleaning and purifying
your blood, pouring out gases and a watery vapor that we call
_perspiration_, or _sweat_; and these impurities have been caught by
the sheets and blankets. So after a bed has been slept in for four or
five nights, if it has not been thrown well open in the morning, it
begins to have a stuffy, foul, sourish smell. You can see from this
why it is a bad thing to sleep with your head under the bedclothes, as
people sometimes do, or even to pull the blankets up over your head,
because you are frightened at something or are afraid that your ears
will get cold. Your breath has poisonous gases in it, as well as your
perspiration; and the two together make the air under the bedclothes
very bad.

Now you are ready to wash and dress. But before you do this, it is a
good thing to take off your nightdress, or turn it down to your waist
and tie it there with the sleeves, and go through some good swinging
and "windmill" movements with your arms and shoulders and back.

(1) Swing your arms round and round like the sails of a windmill;
first both together, then one in one direction, and the other in the
other.

(2) Hold your arms straight out in front of you, and swing them
backward until the backs of your hands strike behind your back.

(3) Hold your arms straight out on each side, clench your fists, and
then smartly bend your elbows so that you almost strike yourself on
both shoulders, and repeat quickly twenty or thirty times.

(4) Swing your arms, out full length, across your chest five or ten
times.

(5) Swing forward and down with your arms stretched out, until the
tips of your fingers touch the floor.

(6) Set your feet a little apart, swing forward and downward again,
until your hands swing back between your ankles.

[Illustration: STARTING THE DAY]

When you come back from these down-swings, bend just as far back as
you can without losing your balance, so that you put all the muscles
along the front of your body on the stretch; and then swing down again
between your ankles. This will help to tone up all your muscles, and
limber all your joints, and set your blood to circulating well, and
give you a good start for the day.


III. BATHING AND BRUSHING

Now you are ready to wash and dress. You can easily take off the gown,
or garments, that you have worn during the night; but there is one
coat that you cannot take off--one that is more important and useful
and beautiful than all the rest of your clothes put together, no
matter of how fine material they may be made, or what they have cost.

Do you remember the old Bible story about Joseph and his "coat of many
colors"? Perhaps you've wished you had one just as nice. Now, the fact
is, your coat is more beautiful even than Joseph's; and, as for its
uses, it is the most wonderful coat ever made!

This coat of yours changes its color from time to time; sometimes it
is pink, sometimes red, sometimes a soft milky white, and sometimes a
dull dark blue, or purple. I wonder if you guess what it is. Sometimes
it is dry and sometimes wet, sometimes it is hot and sometimes cold,
sometimes rough and sometimes smoother than the softest silk--just run
your hand gently over your cheek!

Now you have guessed my riddle. This "wonderful coat" is your skin,
which covers you from top to toe. It fits more closely than any glove,
and yet is so easy and comfortable that it never rubs or binds or
hurts you in any way.

[Illustration: THE SKIN-STRAINER

The little pores open in furrows of the skin. This drawing is
many hundred times as large as the piece of skin itself.]

Will the wonderful coat wash? Yes, indeed, and look all the prettier.
In fact, to keep it white and clear you must bathe often, not only
your hands and face, but your whole body. Your skin is a strainer, you
know. It is a "way out" for some of the gases and waste water from the
blood. What will happen, then, if you don't wash your skin? The little
holes, or _pores_, that the sweat comes through may become clogged.
The strainer won't let the poison out, and so it will stay inside your
body. Then, too, if you do not wash the skin, the little scales that
are peeling off the outside coat will not be cleared away. You have
noticed them, haven't you, sometime when you were pulling off black
stockings? You found little white pieces, almost as fine as powder,
clinging to the inside of the stockings. These little scales are
always rubbing off from your skin.

So every morning it is good to splash the cool water all over
yourself, if you can, as the birds do in the puddles. You don't need a
bathtub for this, though of course it is much pleasanter and more
convenient if you have one. Pour the water into a basin and splash it
with your hands all over your face, neck, chest, and arms. Then rub
your skin well with a rough towel. Next, place the basin on the floor;
put your feet into it and dash the water as quickly as you can over
your legs. Then take another good rub. But you must not do this unless
you keep warm while you are doing it, and your skin must be pink when
you have finished. If you are chilly after rubbing, you should use
tepid, even very hot, water for your morning bath. In summer you can
bathe all over easily; but in winter, unless your room is warm, it is
enough to splash the upper half of your body. Once or twice a week you
should take a good hot bath with soap and then sponge down in cool
water. See how the birds enjoy their bath; and you will, too, if you
once get into the habit of bathing regularly.

Now let us take a good look at this coat and see if we can find out
what it is like.

The other day I saw some boys playing basketball. They wore short
sleeves and short trousers. Four were Indians, and five were white
boys, and one was a negro. The skin of the white boys seemed to shine,
it looked so white; and the negro's shone in its blackness; but the
Indian's looked a dull rich dusky brown.

Yes, you say, they belong to different races.

But what causes the difference in their color?

Little specks of coloring matter, or _pigment_, which lie in the outer
layer of the skin. Even white skins contain a little pigment, they are
not a pure white. A Chinaman's skin has a little more of this pigment,
so that it looks yellow; an Indian's has still more; and a negro's has
most of all, making him black.

Sunlight can increase the amount of pigment in the skin. The people
who live in the torrid zone have much darker skins than those who live
where the days are short and cold. You have noticed, yourself, that
when you expose the skin of your face or arms to the hot sun, you
become freckled, or tanned. This tanning, or browning, of the outer
layer of the skin protects the more delicate coats of skin below from
being scorched or injured by the strong light.

When you are playing and running with your schoolmates, you see that
their faces grow very red, and even their hands. Why is this? Because
the heart has been pumping hard and has sent the red blood out toward
the skin. The red color shines through the outer part of the skin. The
pigment in the Indian's skin, or the negro's, prevents the red blood
underneath from shining through, as it does through yours.

[Illustration: THE PARTS OF THE SKIN

The pore P on the surface of the skin is the end of a tube
through which sweat flows out. At O are the oil sacs that feed
the hair H. At B are the little blood vessels that make the skin
look pink.]

The skin, you see, is made up of different layers. When you burn
yourself, you can see a layer of skin stand out like a blister. It is
white; but if the blister is broken, underneath you see the coat that
is full of tiny blood vessels, so tiny and so close together that this
whole coat looks red. The skin, like every other part of the body, is
made up of tiny animal cells. In the outer coat they become quite flat
like little scales and then wear off; and their places are taken by
the newer cells that are growing from beneath. The skin grows from
beneath, and bit by bit it sheds its old outer coat. This is how it
keeps itself nice and new on the outside and "grows away" the marks of
cuts and burns.

Now hold up your hand and look across it toward the light. What do you
see? It looks fuzzy, doesn't it? Ever and ever so many tiny little
hairs are on it. The other day a little boy asked me what made his
skin look so rough? I looked, and saw that all the little hairs were
standing on end, so that his skin looked like "goose-flesh." It was
because he was cold. The muscles at the roots of the hairs had
shortened, so that they pulled the hairs straight up and made the skin
look rough.

What part of the body has a great deal of hair on it? The head, of
course. Isn't it strange that you have such long hair on the top of
your head and none at all on the soles of your feet or the palms of
your hands? The hair on your head protects you from cold and rain and
the hot sun; but hair on your palms, would only be in the way.

Now look at the ends of your fingers. There the skin has grown so hard
that it forms _nails_. If you look at your toes, you will see that the
same thing has happened there. These nails are little pink shells to
protect the ends of your fingers and toes. You see what a wonderful
coat it is that you are wearing.

Does the skin coat keep you warm? Yes, and not only that, but it keeps
you cool, too. You have often seen little drops of water on your skin,
when you were very hot. This sweat, or perspiration, as we call it,
cools the body by making the skin moist. You know how cold it makes
you to be wrapped in a wet sheet. Well, the skin cools you in just the
same way, when it becomes wet with sweat. The sweat comes from the
blood under the skin; so that, as we saw before, by letting this
moisture pass through, the skin acts as a sieve to let out the waste
from the blood.

Then, too, the skin covers and protects all the other parts. It is
thin where it needs to be thin, so as not to interfere with quick
movements, as on the eyelids and the lips; and thick where it needs to
be thick, to stand wear and tear, as on the soles of the feet and the
palms of the hands. I remember once taking a sliver of shingle out of
the back of a little boy who had been sliding down a roof. I had to
sharpen my knife and press and push and at last get a pair of scissors
to cut out the sliver. It was just like cutting tough leather. But
even if we do sometimes get cuts and burns and bruises, yet our skin
coat protects us far more than we really think. It keeps out all sorts
of poisons and the germs of blood-poisoning and such diseases. These
enemies can attack us only through a scratch or cut in the skin, for
that is the only way they can get into the blood. The skin is better
than any manufactured coat, too, because, if it is torn or scratched,
it can mend itself.

[Illustration: READING BY TOUCH INSTEAD OF SIGHT

These boys are blind; their books are printed with raised
letters, which they read by feeling of them.]

Does your skin ever talk to you? No, of course not; yet it tells you
ever so many things. Shut your eyes and pick up a pencil. As you touch
it, your skin tells you that it is round and smooth, and pointed at
one end. You can feel the soft rubber on the other end, too. Is it
wet? No. Is it hot? Of course not. Now place a book in the palm of
your hand. Is it flat or round, light or heavy, rough or smooth? All
these things your skin tells you through little nerve tips, which are
scattered thickly all over it. Still another thing the skin does; if
you touch anything sharp or hot, it says at once that it hurts. If
your clothes are tight or uncomfortable, the skin soon lets you know.
You see it is always on the lookout, always ready to tell you about
the things around you and to warn you against the things that might
hurt you. The fifth of your "Five Senses," the sense of _touch_, is in
your skin.

There are some parts of your skin-coat that should have special care.

I hardly need tell you about washing your face carefully around your
nose and in front of your ears. Sometimes I have seen a "high-water
mark" right down the middle of the cheek or just under the jaws or
chin.

Of course your mother has told you about washing your hands! You see,
our hands touch so many dirty things, and handle so many things that
other people's hands have touched, that we ought always to wash them
before a meal for fear some of the dirt or germs on them may get into
our mouths and cause disease.

And we really need to clean our nails as often as we wash our hands,
for that little black rim under the nail is very dangerous. Dust and
disease germs and dirt of all kinds find it a good place in which to
hide. Trim your nails with a file, not a knife; and clean them with a
dull cleaner, for a sharp-pointed one will scrape the nail and roughen
it, or push the nail away from the skin of the finger underneath.

[Illustration: USEFUL TOOLS]

Trim and clean the edges of your nails carefully and thoroughly, but
don't fuss much with the roots of them. That little fold of skin there
may strike you as untidy, but it covers the soft growing part of the
nail; and if you push it back with a nail-cleaner, it may cause the
nail to crack and roughen or become inflamed and start a "hang nail"
or "run around." If you push it back at all, do so only with the ball
of your thumb or finger.

The edges of the nails should be trimmed in a curve to match the curve
of the end of the finger. Of course you know that you should never
bite your nails, not only because it is a bad habit and will bring a
good deal of dirt into your mouth, but because you may bite, or tear
down into, the tender growing part of the nail, sometimes called the
_quick_; and then this part may become inflamed, and you will have a
troublesome sore on the end of your finger.

[Illustration: DO YOUR NAILS LOOK LIKE THESE?]

Just as your nails are a part of your skin,--hardened from it and
rooted in it,--so, too, are your teeth; and, like the rest of the
skin, they should be kept thoroughly clean. Every morning and evening
at least they should be carefully brushed. If you take good care of
your first teeth and have them filled when they need it, you will
probably have good permanent teeth, and you won't have to suffer with
toothache.

The skin of your head, which grows such beautiful hair, and the hair
itself, should be kept clean. There are two things needed for this.

First, the hair should be brushed and combed night and morning. The
skin of your scalp is shedding tiny thin scales all day and all night,
just as the rest of your skin is doing. Fortunately, your hair is
growing from roots under the skin much in the same way as blades of
grass grow from their roots; and, as it grows, it pushes up these
scales from the surface of the scalp to where you can readily reach
them with a good bristle brush. If they are not well brushed out, the
dust and smoke from the air will mix with them, and the germs in the
dust and smoke will breed in the mixture, and you will soon have
"scurf" or _dandruff_ on your head. So give at least fifteen or twenty
strokes with the brush before you use the comb. It isn't necessary to
brush or scrape the scalp, and a comb should be used only to part the
hair or take out the tangles.

The second thing is to wash the hair and the scalp. Boys ought to wash
their hair every week; and girls, every two weeks; and girls,
especially, should be careful to dry their hair very thoroughly
afterwards. You will notice after washing your hair that it feels dry
and fluffy, and sometimes rather harsh. This is because the soap and
hot water together have washed out of the hair its natural oil, or
grease, which kept it bright and soft; and this is why it is better
not to wash the hair with soap and hot water oftener than once a week
or so. But it shouldn't be shirked when the time does come. Watch how
hard your kitten works to keep her fur coat glossy, though it must be
tiresome enough to lick, lick, lick.

Sometimes in cold weather your lips and knuckles crack and bleed. That
is because the skin on those parts is so thin and so often stretched
and bruised. If you will take a little pure olive oil or cold cream
and rub it on your lips and hands, it will make the skin softer and
not so likely to break.

[Illustration: SHOES THAT SHOW SENSE

Low heels and plenty of room for the toes.]

Sometimes your feet tell you that they need better care. Perhaps your
shoes are too tight, or too loose and rub your toes. Soon the skin
becomes very hard in one spot, and you have a "corn" on your toe. You
must be very, very careful how your shoes and stockings fit. If you
should find a corn, or the beginning of one, you had better tell your
mother about it, and let her see that your stockings are not too big,
so that they wrinkle into folds and chafe, or that your shoes are
mended, or that you have a larger pair. And then, if you wash your
feet in cold water every day, and put some vaseline or sweet oil on
the hard spot night or morning, the corn will probably go away.

Not only your shoes, but all of your clothing must be comfortable if
your skin and the parts under it are to do their work well. Your
clothes as well as your skin must be washed often, because the sweat,
which is oily and greasy as well as watery, soaks into them, and the
little white scales cling to them, and often dust and disease germs,
too.

One winter a little boy came to my school. The other children told me
they did not like to sit by him, his clothes had such an unpleasant
smell. I talked to him about it, and what do you suppose he said!
"Why, I can't bathe; the creek's too cold in winter." He was waiting
till summer time to take a bath! No wonder the other children did not
like to sit near him.

Yet, with all the bathing and rubbing and brushing, your skin won't be
clean and beautiful and able to do all that it has to do, unless your
stomach and heart and lungs are in good working order. So you must eat
good food, sleep ten or twelve hours a day, and play out of doors a
great deal, if you expect your skin to be healthy.




BREAKFAST


When you are washed, it doesn't take you long to dress; and before you
have finished brushing your hair, you begin to feel as if you were
ready for breakfast. You know just where the feeling is--an empty
sensation near the pit of your stomach, and you don't have to look at
the clock to know that it is breakfast time.

About this time something begins to smell very good downstairs; and
down you go, two steps at a time, and out into the dining-room, or
kitchen. You could do it with your eyes shut, just following your
nose; and it is a pretty good guide to follow, too. If you will just
go toward the things that smell good, and keep away from, or refuse to
eat, those that smell bad, you will avoid a great many dangers, not
only to your stomach, but to your general health; for a bad smell is
one of Nature's "black marks," and you know what they are.

How nice and fresh and appetizing everything looks--the white cloth,
the clean cups and saucers, and the shining spoons and forks. You are
sure that a good breakfast is one of the best things in the world. You
sit down and begin to eat, and everything tastes as good as it looks.

[Illustration: MILK AND SUNLIGHT DON'T AGREE

The early riser can help a great deal by taking the milk bottles
in out of the sun. Milk spoils quickly if it is not kept cool.]

A good breakfast would be an egg, or a slice of bacon or ham, with a
glass of milk,--or two, if you can drink another,--and two or three
slices of bread, or toast, with plenty of butter; and then some cereal
with plenty of cream and sugar, or some fruit, to finish with. A
breakfast like this will give you just about the right amount of
strength for the morning's work. Don't begin with a cereal or
breakfast food; for this will spoil your appetite for your real
breakfast. Cereal has very little nourishment in proportion to its
bulk and the way it "fills you up." Bread or mush or potato alone is
not enough. Any one of these gives you fuel, to be sure; but it gives
you very little with which to build up your body. For that you must
have milk or meat or eggs or fish.

It is most important that children should eat a good big breakfast.
All the hundred-and-one things that you are going to do during the
day--racing, jumping, shouting, studying--require strength to do; and
that strength can be got only out of the power in your food, which is
really, you remember, the sunlight stored up in it.

Sometimes, when you come down in the morning, especially if you
haven't had the windows of your bedroom well open so as to get plenty
of air during the night, you may feel that you are not very hungry for
breakfast. Or perhaps, if you have risen late, or are in a great hurry
to get to school in time, you just swallow a cup of coffee or tea, and
a cracker or a little piece of bread, or a small saucer of cereal.
This is a very bad thing to do, because coffee and tea, while they
make you feel warm and comfortable inside, have very little
"strength," or food value, in them, and simply warm you up and stir up
your nerves without doing you any real good at all. A cracker or a
single piece of bread or one large saucer of cereal has only about one
fourth of the strength in it that you will need for playing or
studying until noontime. So after you have started to school with a
breakfast like this, about the middle of the morning you begin to feel
tired and empty and cross, and wonder what is the matter with
yourself.

Children of your age are growing so fast that they need plenty of
good, wholesome food. They get so hungry that they want to be eating
all the time. For "grown-ups" three times a day is enough; but for you
children, whose bodies use up the food so fast, it is well to take
also a piece of bread and butter, or two or three cookies, or a glass
of milk with some crackers, in the middle of the morning and again
about the middle of the afternoon. It will not hurt your appetite for
dinner or supper, and you won't be wanting to "pick" at cake and candy
and pickles all day long.

How does eating keep you alive and make you grow? Eating is somewhat
like mending a fire. You put wood or coal on the fire, and it keeps
burning and giving out heat; but if you do not put fresh fuel on, the
fire soon goes out. Just so, putting food into your body feeds the
"body fires" and keeps you warm, and at the same time makes you grow.
Of course the "body fires" are not just like those you see burning in
the stove: there are no flames. But there is burning going on, just
the same.

The food you put into your body must be made soft and pulpy before it
can burn in your muscles. Now you can guess what your teeth are for.
They chop, crush, and grind the food; and the tongue rolls it over and
over and mixes it with the moisture in your mouth, until it is almost
like very thick soup. Then you make a little motion with your tongue
and throat, and down it goes.

[Illustration: THE FOOD TUBE

Note the arrows. This is the trip made by every mouthful of
food.]

Where does it go? It is passed down a tube that we call the _food
tube_. While I tell you about it, you can look at the picture and then
try to draw it yourself.

The food goes quickly down the first part of the tube until it comes
to a part much larger than the rest, which we call the _stomach_. Here
it is churned about for a long time, and the meat you have eaten is
melted, or dissolved. Then the food goes on into the next part of the
tube, which has become narrow again. This lower part, which is about
twenty-five feet long, is coiled up just below the waist, between the
large bones that you can feel on each side of your body. These coils
of the food tube, we call the _bowels_.

Winding all around the stomach and bowels are tiny branching pipes
full of blood. They look somewhat like the creepers on ivy, or the
tendrils on grapevines. These suck out the melted food from the
bowels. They take what the body can use, and carry it away in the
blood to all parts of the body. This is the fuel that keeps the "body
fires" going. The tougher parts of the food, which the body cannot
use, are carried down to the lower end of the bowels and pushed out by
strong muscles.

This waste should be passed out from the body once every day and at
the same time each day. In the morning after breakfast is perhaps the
best time. If you do not get rid of it every day, it makes poisons,
which go into your blood and soon make you very sick indeed. You must
keep clean inside as well as outside.




GOING TO SCHOOL


I. GETTING READY

As soon as you have finished breakfast, and brushed your teeth and
gone to the toilet, you are ready to run out of doors to play, if you
have plenty of time, or, if not, to start for school.

Doesn't it seem a nuisance, in winter time, to have to put on a coat
and overshoes and a cap or a hood, and sometimes leggings and mittens,
too? But your mothers know what is best for you; and when you are
young and growing fast, you have so much more surface in proportion to
your weight than when you are grown up, that you lose heat from the
blood in your skin very fast; and unless you are warmly dressed, you
become chilled.

When you are chilled, you are using up, in merely trying to keep
yourself warm, some of the energy that ought to be used for growing
and for working. It has been found out by careful tests that children
who are not warmly dressed, and particularly whose arms and legs are
not warmly covered, do not grow so fast as they ought to, and more
easily catch colds and other infections. So take time to put on your
cap and your coat, if the weather is cold; and, if it is snowy, to
button on leggings over your stockings; and then you can play as hard
as you like, and run through the snow, and keep warm and rosy and
comfortable.

Wool is one of the best stuffs for coats and dresses and stockings and
gloves and caps, not only because it is warm, but also because it is
lighter in weight than anything else you could wear that would be
equally warm, and because it is _porous_; that is, it will let the air
pass through it, and the perspiration from the body escape through it.

Don't wear any clothes so tight that you cannot run and jump and play
and fling your arms and legs about freely, or so fine and stylish that
you are afraid of getting them soiled by romping and tumbling.

It is best to wear fairly heavy, comfortable shoes with good thick
soles; then you will not have to wear rubbers, except when it is
actually pouring rain, or when there is melting snow or slush upon the
ground. Felt, or buckskin, or heavy cloth makes very good "uppers" for
children's shoes; but only leather makes good soles.

It is best not to wear rubbers too much, because the same
waterproofness, which keeps the rain and the snow out, keeps the
perspiration of your feet in, and is likely to make them damp. When
they are damp, they are as easily chilled as if they had been wet
through with rain or puddle water. Always take off your rubbers in the
house or in school, because they are holding in not only the water of
perspiration, but the poisons as well; and these will poison your
entire blood, so that you soon have a headache and feel generally
uncomfortable.


II. AN EARLY ROMP

The minute you are outside the door, the fresh morning air strikes
your face, and you draw four or five big breaths, as if you would like
to fill yourself as full as you could hold. If you have had a good
night's sleep and a good breakfast, the very feel of the outdoor air
will make you want to run and jump and shout and throw your arms
about. This warms you up finely and gives you a good color; but if you
keep it up long, you will notice that two things are happening: one,
that you are breathing faster than you were before; the other, that
your heart is beating harder and faster, so that you can almost feel
it throbbing without putting your hand on your chest.

If you run too hard, or too far, you begin to be out of breath, and
your heart thumps so hard that it almost hurts. What is your heart
doing? It is pumping; it is trying to pump the blood fast out to your
muscles to give them the strength to run with.

[Illustration: AN EARLY RUN IS A GOOD PREPARATION FOR THE DAY'S
WORK]

Of course you have seen a pump? Perhaps some of you have to pump water
every day at home. You take the handle in your hands, lift it up, then
press it down, and out pours the water through the spout; and, as you
keep pumping, the water spurts out every time you press the handle
down. It is hard work, and your arms are soon tired; but, as you
cannot drink the water while it is down in the well, you must pump to
bring it up where you can reach it.

[Illustration: THE HEART-PUMP

The big tubes are the arteries and veins.]

Just so the heart pumps to keep the blood flowing round and round,
through the muscles and all over the body. If you put your finger on
your wrist, or on the side of your neck, you can feel a little throb,
or _pulse_, for every spurt from your heart-pump; and that means for
every heart-beat.

This heart-pump is made of muscle, and is about the size of your
clenched fist. And just as you can squeeze water from a sponge or out
of a bulb-syringe, by opening and shutting your hand around it, so the
big heart muscle squeezes the blood out of the heart. It squeezes it
out from one side of the heart; and then, when it lets go, the blood
comes rushing in from the other side to fill the heart again. So the
heart goes on squeezing out and sucking in the blood, all day and all
night as long as we live.

When the blood comes to the muscles, it is a beautiful bright red; but
after the muscles have taken what they want of it for food to burn,
and warm you up, the "ashes" and the "smoke" go back into the blood
and dirty its color from red to purple. Then the blood is carried to
the lungs, where the fresh air you breathe in blows away the "smoke"
and makes the blood red again.

The blood is pumped all over the body through tubes or pipes, called
_blood vessels_. Those that carry the red blood out from the heart, we
call _arteries_. They are deep down under the skin, and we cannot see
them. The pipes that carry the purple blood from the muscles and other
parts back to the heart again, we call _veins_; and some of these are
so close to the surface that we can easily see them through the skin.
Let your hand hang down a minute or two, then you can see the veins on
the inside of your wrist, or on the back of your hand, if it is not
too fat.

[Illustration: IT IS GOOD TO PLAY OUT OF DOORS TILL THE BELL
RINGS--EVEN IN WINTER]

The muscles, the brain, the skin, and other parts of the body get
liquid food from the blood by "sucking" it through the walls of the
smallest of the blood vessels, for these walls are very thin. In the
same way, when waste passes from the muscles or the skin into the
blood, it, too, soaks through the thin walls of the tiniest blood
tubes, called _capillaries_.

Your heart beats or throbs about seventy-five times in a minute when
you are well. Look at the second hand of a watch, while you count the
beats in your wrist or in your neck.

Does your heart ever become tired? Not while you keep well, unless you
over-drive it by running or wrestling too hard. It can rest between
the beats. But the heart muscle, like any other muscle, must have
plenty of good red blood to feed on. You put food into the blood by
eating good breakfasts and dinners. The more you run and jump and
play, the more work the heart has to do and the stronger it grows; and
a good morning romp before school will send the blood flowing so
merrily round from top to toe that you will feel fresher and brighter
all the day.


III. FRESH AIR--WHY WE NEED IT

The heart is not the only thing that goes faster and harder when you
run about in the morning and play hard. You are breathing faster and
deeper as well, as if there were something in the air outside that you
needed in your body as much as food.

But, of course, you know that air is not good to eat. It has no
strength in it, as food has; it isn't even a liquid like milk or
coffee or tea. It is so thin and light that we call it a _gas_.
Indeed, I suppose it is pretty hard for you to believe that air is a
real thing at all. But all outdoors is full of the gas called air, and
everything that seems to be empty, like a room or an empty box, is
full of it.

You cannot even smell it, as you can that other gas which comes
through pipes into our houses and burns at the gas jets; nor can you
see it like the gas that comes out of a boiling kettle or from the
whistle of a locomotive, and which we call _steam_. This is simply
because air is so pure that it has no smell, and is so perfectly clear
that we can see right through it. Almost the only way that we can
recognize it is by feeling it when it is moving. But it is a very real
thing for all that; and, like sunshine and food, is one of the most
important things in the world for us.

What is it that air does in the body? We must need it very much, for
we die quickly when we cannot get it: it takes us only about three
minutes to suffocate, or choke to death, if we can't get it.

You remember that the blood is pumped out from the heart, all through
the body. Everywhere it goes,--to the feet and the hands and the
head,--it is carrying two things: food that it has sucked up from the
food tube, and hundreds and hundreds of tiny red sponges called red
_corpuscles_. These little sponges are full of air which they sucked up
as the blood passed through the lungs. When we stop breathing,--that
is, taking in air,--the little red sponges of course can't get any air
to carry to the different parts of the body.

The body is made up of millions of tiny, tiny animals, called
_cells_,--so tiny that they can be seen only under a microscope. Each
of these cells must have food and air, just like any other animal.
They eat the food the blood brings to them, and they take the air from
the red corpuscles in the blood. With the air as a "draft," they burn
up the waste scraps, as we burn scraps from the kitchen, in the back
of the stove.

Suppose you light a candle and place it under a glass jar and watch
what will happen. The flame will become weaker and weaker, and at last
it will quite go out. You might think at first that the wind blew it
out; but how could the wind get through or under the jar? No, the
glass keeps all the outside air away from the flame; and that is just
the reason why it does go out. Unless it has fresh air, it cannot
burn. There is something--a gas--in the air that makes the flame burn,
and when it has used up all this gas inside the glass, and can't get
any more, it stops burning.

Now you will want to know what this gas in the air is. When we write
about it, we use its nickname, the large capital letter _O_; but its
whole name is _Oxygen_.

Just as the candle flame must have oxygen to keep it burning, so our
cells must have oxygen to burn their impurities, or waste; and if they
don't get the oxygen, and can't burn their impurities, they are
poisoned by them and "go out," or die.

You can see the flame when the candle is burning, but you can't see
the fires that burn in our bodies; there are no real flames at all. I
know it is hard for you to believe that there can be any burning when
our bodies are so wet and damp. But if you can't see it, you can
easily feel it. Blow on your hand. How warm your breath is! Touch your
hand to your cheek. It is quite warm, too. If you run or play hard,
you sometimes become so hot that you want to take off your coat. That
is because your fires are burning faster. The muscles are using more
food and making more scraps to be burned. You breathe faster and
faster till at last you are "out of breath" and feel as if you would
smother or choke. The blood has hard work to bring oxygen enough to
keep the fires going.

After the cells have burned the food scraps, they turn the "ashes" and
"smoke" back into the blood-stream that is always flowing past them.
If the cells did not do this, they would soon smother to death, just
as you could not possibly live in a house without chimneys to carry
off the smoke. And, of course, the blood wants to get rid of this
waste just as quickly as possible.

Part of the waste in the body is liquid, like water, and can flow away
through the blood pipes without needing to be burned. Some of this
watery waste comes out through the skin and stands in beads or drops
upon it. That is the part we call perspiration, or sweat. The rest of
it goes in the blood to another strainer called the _kidneys_, passes
through this as _urine_, and is carried away from the body as the
waste water from the bathtub and the sink is carried away from a
house.

For the "smoke" Mother Nature has still another beautiful plan. She
sends the blood-stream flowing through the _lungs_, where it can send
off its "smoke" and then get fresh air to carry to the cells in the
muscles. When you breathe out, you are sending out the "smoke"; and
when you breathe in, you are taking in fresh air.

Our body "smoke" is not brown or blue, like the smoke from a fire; it
is a clear, odorless gas, called _carbon dioxid_. This is the same gas
that makes the choke-damp of coal mines, which suffocates the miners
if the mine is not well ventilated; and the same gas that sometimes
gathers at the bottom of a well, making it dangerous for anyone to go
down into the well to clean it. And this gas is poisonous in our
bodies just as it is in the mine or the well.

You see, then, how important it is that we should live much of our
lives in the clear pure air out of doors, and should bring the fresh
air into our houses and schools and shops. "Fill up" with it all you
can on your way to school, for the best of air indoors is never half
so good as the free-blowing breezes outside.


IV. FRESH AIR--HOW WE BREATHE IT

When you are running and breathing hard, and even when you are sitting
still and breathing quietly, air is going into your lungs and then
coming out, going in and coming out, many times every minute. How does
the air get in and out of the lungs? It will not run in of itself; for
it is light and floats about, you know. Here, again, Mother Nature has
planned it all out. She has made us an air bellows, or air pump, to
suck it into the lungs. First we'll see what shape this pump is, and
then how it works.

[Illustration: THE CHEST THAT HOLDS THE LUNGS

Back of the lungs is the heart; its position is shown by the
broken line. The black line across the chest shows how high the
diaphragm rises when we breathe out quietly.]

Stiff rings of bone called _ribs_ run round your body, just like the
hoops in an old hoop skirt, or like the metal rings round a barrel.
Here is a picture of the bones of the chest. Perhaps your teacher can
show you the skeleton of some animal. You will notice how the rings,
or ribs, slant and are joined by hinges behind to the backbone and in
front to the breastbone. It looks somewhat like a cage, doesn't it?
Put your hands on the sides of your chest and you can feel your own
ribs. Do they slant upward or downward?

This chest-cage is our breathing-machine. Before I tell you how it
pumps, I want you to get a pair of bellows and see how they work. When
you lift up the handle of the bellows, you make the bag of the bellows
larger so that it sucks in air; and when you press the handle down
again, the air puffs out through the nozzle.

Our air machine, though it is somewhat different from the bellows in
shape, works in exactly the same way. You remember that you found that
the ribs slant down and can be moved on hinges. Suppose, now, you
place your hands against your ribs and feel the ribs lift as you draw
in a long breath. The air will be sucked into your nose just as it was
into the bellows when you raised the handle. By lifting your ribs, you
have made the chest-cage larger; and the air has rushed into your
nose, down your windpipe, and filled your lungs. If you breathe very
deeply, you will find that your stomach, too, swells out. This shows
that the muscular bottom of the cage, called the _diaphragm_, has been
pulled down, making the cage larger still.

In this chest-cage are millions of tiny air bags that make up the
lungs; and every time you take a breath, the air bags are puffed out
with the fresh air that comes rushing in. By the time you let your
ribs sink again, the air has given its oxygen to the blood, and the
blood has poured its carbon-dioxid smoke into the air bags for you to
breathe out. Nature, with the same bellows, pumps in the oxygen and
pumps out the "smoke."

Now, we breathe into our lung-bellows whatever air happens to be
around us. So we should take care that the air around us is fresh air.

Unless the air were kept in motion by the heat of the sun, causing
breezes and winds, it would become stale and wouldn't do at all for
our lung-bellows to use. The air we breathe must be kept moving and
fresh if it is to make us feel bright and strong and happy. Mother
Nature has given us miles upon miles and oceans upon oceans of this
clear, fresh air to breathe--"all outdoors," in fact, as far as we can
see around us and for miles above our heads. She sends the winds to
move the air about and blow away the dust and dirt; and the sunshine,
you remember, not only to warm the air and keep it moving, but to burn
right through it and kill the poisons. But this brings us to something
else.

You have learned that the air we breathe out would soon smother us,
just as smoke would; and now we will see why. If you blow against the
window pane on a cold day, the glass is no longer clear; and when you
look at it closely, you see that it is covered with tiny drops of
water. This is part of the breath you have just blown out. If the room
is cold enough, you can see your breath in the air; that is, the steam
in your breath becomes cold and appears as tiny water-drops. You have
seen how in the same way, the steam, an inch or so from the spout of
the teakettle, cools, making little water-drops that float in the air
like clouds. Part of the breath, then, is water; but most of it is a
gas, and you can't see it at all as it floats away into the air about
you.

If your teacher has a glass of limewater, and will let you breathe
into it through a tube, you will see that your breath soon makes the
water look milky. This shows that the gas in your breath is not like
the air about you; because air was all over the top of the limewater,
yet did not change it at all. The milky look is caused by carbon
dioxid, one of the poisons in your breath.

When some people come close to you, you want to turn away your head,
because you do not like the smell of their breath. Even when one is
quite well, the breath has a queer "mousey" odor, so that we never
like to breathe the breath of another person. This disagreeable odor
comes not only from the lungs but from the teeth.

We are always breathing out poisons into the air. One of these you can
see in the milky limewater, and others you can smell when you happen
to come close to anyone else.

[Illustration: PROVING THAT THE BREATH IS NOT LIKE THE AIR]

If you blow on your fingers, you feel that your breath is much warmer
than the air. If people are crowded together in rooms with doors and
windows shut, their breath soon heats and poisons the air, until they
begin to have headache, and to feel dull and drowsy and uncomfortable.
If they should be shut in too long, without any opening to let in the
fresh air, as in a prison cell, or in the hold of a ship during a
storm, the air would become so poisonous as to make them ill, and
would even suffocate them and kill them outright. Even the bees found
this out thousands of years ago; and in their hives in hot weather
they station lines of worker-bees, one just behind another from the
door right down each of the main passages, whose business it is to do
nothing but keep their wings whirring rapidly, so that they fan a
steady current of fresh air into every part of the hive.

[Illustration: DUSTING--HOW SHALL WE DO IT?]

How does Mother Nature get rid of these poisons from our breath? Of
course, you say, "She uses the wind and the sunshine." Yes, the winds
can whisk up the poison and blow it away so fast, and the sunshine can
burn up the horrid smell so quickly, that even the air above big
cities, and in their streets, is quite clean enough for us to breathe,
except where the people are very closely crowded together and very
dirty. Mother Nature wants all of us to help in keeping the air clean.
This we can do by keeping ourselves and our houses clean, and by being
careful not to leave scraps of waste, or dirty things, in the streets
and cars and parks and other public places. And you children ought to
be very careful about your school yard and the halls and the
classrooms, where you spend so much of your time.




IN SCHOOL


I. BRINGING THE FRESH AIR IN

The only place where air is absolutely sure to be fresh is out of
doors. There, as we have seen, the sun and the winds keep it so all
the time. But, unluckily, we cannot spend all our time outdoors,
either when we are little or after we have grown up. So we must try in
every way that we can to bring the outdoors indoors--to get plenty of
fresh air and light into the houses that we live in, especially the
bedrooms we sleep in and the schoolrooms we study in when we are
children, and the offices or shops we work in when we are grown up.

After you have your lungs and your blood well filled with air, either
by walking briskly to school or by chasing one another about the
school playground, you will suddenly hear the bell ring, and you march
indoors and sit down at your desks. Here, of course, the air cannot
blow about freely from every direction, because the walls and doors
and windows are shutting you in on every side. The room, to be sure,
is full of air; but if the doors and windows are shut, this air has no
way of getting outside, nor can the fresh, pure air out of doors--even
though it be moving quite fast, as a wind or a breeze--get inside.

[Illustration: A CLASSROOM ALMOST AS GOOD AS THE OUT-OF-DOORS

Notice the windows open top and bottom, and the high windows
under the roof. Why are these good?]

We must let the fresh air come in and the stale air go out. This is
one of the things that windows are for; and this is why they are hung
upon pulleys and made to slide up and down easily. Of course, even
when the windows are not open, they are letting in light, which, you
remember, is a deadly enemy to germs and poisons.

Bright sunlight is best for purifying the air of a room, but even
ordinary daylight has a good deal of germ-killing power. Therefore, a
room that is well lighted is not only much pleasanter to live in, but
much healthier, than one that is dull and gloomy. You see why we need
plenty of windows and doors: we must let in the breezes and the
sunshine, and let out the poisons and the dirt. Then, too, we must
make the air in the building move about in order to keep it fresh; for
if the air is not fresh, we soon grow tired and sleepy and have
headaches. That is why your teacher keeps the windows open at the top
a foot or so. You can easily see that when there are twenty or thirty
of you breathing out poisons, and each one of you needing about four
bushels of fresh air every minute, the old air ought to be going out
and the fresh air coming in all the time.

[Illustration: VENTILATION

Watch the candle flames. Which way is the air moving, and why?]

That is also why your teacher gives you a recess, so that you can run
out of doors and get some fresh air. Then she can throw open all the
windows and doors and have the air in the room clean and fresh when
you come back again. So when recess comes, don't hang about in the
hallways or on the stairs or in the basement, but run right out of
doors into the playground and shout and throw your arms about and run
races to fill your lungs full of fresh, sweet air and stretch all your
muscles, after the confinement and sitting still. Don't saunter about
and whisper secrets or tell stories, but get up some lively game that
doesn't take long to play, such as tag or steal-sticks or soak-ball,
or duck-on-a-rock or skipping or hopscotch. These will blow all the
"smoke" out of your lungs and send the hot blood flying all over your
body and make you as "fresh as a daisy" for your next lesson.

When you come back into the schoolroom after recess, the air will seem
quite fresh and pure; but unless you keep the windows open, it will
not be long before your head begins to be hot, and your eyes heavy,
and you feel like yawning and stretching, and begin to wonder why the
lessons are so long and tiresome. Then, if your teacher will throw
open all the windows and have you stand up, or, better still, march
around the room singing or go through some drill or calisthenic
exercises, you will soon feel quite fresh and rested again.

In the mild weather of the spring or early fall, all you need to do to
keep the air fresh in the schoolroom is to keep the windows well open
at the top. But in the winter, the air outdoors is so cold that it has
to be heated before it is brought in; and this, in any modern and
properly built schoolhouse, is usually arranged for. The fresh air is
drawn in through an opening in the basement and is either heated, so
that it rises, or is blown by fans all over the building. This sort of
fresh air, however, is never quite so good as that which comes
directly from outdoors; so it is generally best to keep at least two
or three windows in each room opened at the top as well, and never to
depend entirely upon the air that comes through the heating system.

Sometimes this may mean a little draft, or current of uncomfortably
cool air, for one or two of you who sit nearest the windows; but your
teacher will always allow you to change your seat if this proves very
unpleasant. If you have plenty of warmth in the room you sit in,
unless the air outside is very cold, this "breeze" won't do you any
harm at all; on the contrary, it will be good for you. Instead of
catching cold from a draft like this, it is from foul, stuffy,
poisonous air, loaded with other people's breaths and the germs
contained in them, that you catch cold.

[Illustration: GARDENS TAKE US OUT OF DOORS]

In fact, staying indoors is usually the reason why people are sick.
They don't go out into the clean fresh air for fear they'll be too
cold! It seems a pity we can't just live out of doors all the time.
Perhaps we shall some day; for doctors are finding out that fresh
outdoor air and good food are the very best medicines known, and the
only "Sure Cures." They are pleasant to take, too. Many cities are
providing outdoor schools for children who have weak lungs or are not
strong in other ways. Perhaps some day all school children will be
allowed to study in the open air at least part of every school day.


II. HEARING AND LISTENING

Now you are all ready to go to work. What are you going to work with?
Books? pencils? paper? Yes, but you have something better than those
and all ready for use. It is that little kit of tools that are
sometimes called our "Five Senses." You remember that we have already
talked about one of them, the sense of touch in the skin. Now which
one are you going to use first this morning? If your teacher talks to
you, I hope it will be the one we call the sense of hearing. Suppose
we try to find out something about this sense of hearing, and begin
with a little experiment.

Take a piece of cork in your hand and lift it up high and then let it
drop into a large basin or tub of water. What happens? The cork
strikes and then goes bob-bob-bobbing up and down on its own waves.
Now watch the little waves all around the cork. Where do they stop?
They don't stop until they touch the edge of the pan; and no matter
how big the pan is, the waves go on and on until they reach the edge.

We can see these waves of water, and so we easily believe that they
are there. Now there are, just as truly, waves of air all around us.
We cannot see the waves, because they are too small and roll too
quickly. But some of these, when they roll against our ears, make us
hear. They make what we call _sound_. You have heard about sending
messages through the air, without telegraph wires. Wireless messages
are often sent to ships out in the middle of the ocean. This is done
by starting tiny electric waves, which travel through the air much as
the waves of water are traveling across the ocean beneath. Of course
there must be a machine, called a _receiver_, to catch the waves and
"hear" the message.

Mother Nature has given each of you two very delicate little receivers
to catch the sound waves and carry them to your brain. You know what
they are--you can name them. But how are these wonderful little
machines made?

You have never seen the whole of your ear. The part on the outside of
the head, of course, you can easily see and feel. Sometimes you notice
a deaf person put his hand behind his ear and press it forward so as
to catch the sound waves better. These waves roll in at the little
hole you can see, and travel along a short passage till they come to a
round _drum_, a piece of very thin skin stretched tight like a
drumhead.

Have you ever beaten a drum with a stick? You felt the drumhead quiver
under the blow, did you not? Well, when the sound waves beat against
the drum in the ear, it quivers and starts little waves inside the
ear. Each little wave in turn beats against a little bone called the
_hammer_; the hammer beats against another called the _anvil_, and
this against a third called the _stirrup_; and the quiver of the
stirrup is passed on to a little window, opening into a little room
with a spiral key-board; and from this, the wave travels along a nerve
to the brain. As the waves reach the brain, the brain hears. In this
way we hear all sorts of sounds, from the tick of a watch to the
whistle of a train.

[Illustration: THE WAY BY WHICH SOUND WAVES REACH THE BRAIN

A section through the right ear.]

There is a sensible old saying, "Never put anything smaller than your
elbow into the inner part of your ear." Now, of course, you can't put
your elbow into such a tiny hole! So the old saying means, never put
anything in. The eardrum is very thin and can easily be broken. Even a
slap on the ear, or a loud sound too close to it, might crack and
spoil the drum and make one deaf.

The outside ear needs careful washing; there are so many little
creases that gather dirt and dust. The deep crease behind the ear,
too, will become sore if it is not kept clean.

Besides cleaning your ears, you must train them to listen. Some boys
and girls hear just a word or two of what is said, and then guess at
the rest and think they are listening, or else ask to have it
repeated. We should try to hear exactly what is said; and if we listen
carefully, it will soon be much easier to understand at once.

Of course, if you really cannot hear, the doctor can tell you what is
the matter, and usually can help you very much. Sometimes people
become deaf simply because the throat is swollen. Indeed, most
deafness comes from colds and catarrhs and other inflammations of the
nose and throat. These spread to the ear through a little tube that
runs up to the drum cavity from the back of the throat. Sometimes,
when you are blowing your nose, you may feel your ear go "pop"; and
that means that you have blown air up into the ear through this little
tube. Be sure to see a doctor if you don't hear well; and be sure,
too, to tell your teacher, so that she may know why it is you do not
hear what she says, and ask her to give you a seat near her, so that
you can hear.

Then, too, you should learn to notice outdoor sounds--the songs of the
birds, the noises that the animals make, the wind in the trees, and
the patter of the rain. The old Norsemen have a story that their god
Heimdall had such keen ears that he could hear the grass growing in
the meadow and the wool growing on the backs of the sheep! Your ears
can never be so keen as that; but there are many, many happy outdoor
sounds that you should listen for. They will help to make you happy,
too.

Careful listening may sometime save your life. You can hear the car or
the train coming, and you can learn to tell from which direction a
sound comes. You can learn to tell one sound from another in the midst
of many sounds. In more ways than you can think of now, this habit of
listening will protect you from danger.

The Germans have a proverb, "Hear much and say little." What does it
mean?

[Illustration: "DO YOU HEAR IT? CAN YOU SEE IT?"]


III. SEEING AND READING

You can learn a great deal through your ears, but think how much more
you can learn through your eyes. Just count over all the things that
you have had to get your eyes to tell you to-day, and then shut your
eyes for a minute and think what it would mean never to be able to
see. Don't you think you ought to take very good care of your eyes?
You are going to keep them very busy all your life, and they deserve
the very best care you can give them.

[Illustration: THE LIGHT ON THE PAGE, NOT IN THE EYES]

Just as soon as lessons begin, you get out your books; and a good
share of the day in school you have a book before you, reading it or
studying it or copying from it. It makes a great difference to your
eyes how you hold the book and how the light falls. In reading, you
should always hold your book so that the light falls upon the page
from behind you, or from over one of your shoulders. In this way, the
brightest light that comes into your eyes is not from the window, but
from the page of your book.

If the light comes from a window in front of you, or if you sit in the
evening with your face toward the lamp when you read, the light coming
straight from the lamp or the window, as well as the light coming up
from the pages of the book, pours into your eyes; and this dazzles and
confuses your eyes, so that you can't see plainly and comfortably and
are very likely after a while to find that your head aches. At home,
of course, you can seat yourself with your back to the light when you
read; and usually at school your seats are so arranged that the light
falls from behind you or from one side. If not, by turning a little in
your seat, you can get the light from over your shoulder.

Notice how the light falls upon the blackboard. When the light comes
from the windows behind you, or from one side, you can see what is
written there quite plainly. But if the blackboard happens to be
between two windows, and especially if this is the lightest side of
the room, you will find that the light dazzles you so that you cannot
see the writing clearly.

You must have noticed, too, that if, after you have been reading from
the blackboard you look down again suddenly to the page of your book,
for an instant you will not see the letters plainly. Then, almost
before you have time to notice it, you feel a little change take place
inside your eyes, and the print upon the page of your book becomes
quite plain. This is because your eye has to change the shape of one
of the parts inside it, called the _lens_, before you can see clearly
the things that are near you. This change, which is called
_accommodation_, is made by a little muscle of the eye; and if you
keep your eyes working at close work, like reading or writing or
fancy-work, too long at a time, or if your eyes need glasses to make
them see clearly, and you haven't them on, this little muscle becomes
tired. Then the print of your book, or your writing, or the stitches
you have taken begin to blur before your eyes. Your eyes begin to feel
tired, and your head begins to ache. This is what we call _eye
strain_.

Sometimes this eye strain upsets your appetite or your digestion and
makes you sleepless and worried. The trouble may be caused by your own
carelessness: you may have been reading too long, or in a poor light,
or with the light shining right in your face instead of coming over
your shoulder. But sometimes it is caused by the fact that your eyes
are not just the right shape; and then the only way to relieve it is
to have proper glasses, or spectacles, fitted, which will make up for
this too flat or too round shape, or too large or too small size, of
your eyes.

If you cannot see clearly what is written on the blackboard when the
light falls upon it from behind you, or above; or if, in a good light,
you cannot read the words in your book quite easily, without straining
at all, when you hold the book either at arm's length or a foot from
your face; or if your head aches or your eyes begin to feel tired or
uncomfortable, or the letters begin to blur, after you have read
steadily--say, for half an hour,--it is a pretty sure sign that there
is some trouble with your eyes. Then you had better have them examined
at once by your family doctor or by the school doctor. In many schools
now there are doctors to test the children's eyes, and ears, too, so
that each child may have a chance to see and hear everything that the
other children can see and hear.

Not very many years ago people thought that glasses were only for old
people, but now we know that many children's eyes need glasses, too. I
knew a little girl whose sight was so poor that when she was standing
and looked down at the grass, she couldn't see the green blades. She
thought that the grass looked like a green blur to everyone, just as
it did to her; and so she never said anything about it. She was twelve
or thirteen years old before she found out that she couldn't see
clearly. Of course, trying hard to see things gave her a headache and
made her tired and cross. So some one took her to a doctor, and he saw
at once what was the matter and fitted her with glasses. Soon she was
quite well and strong; and how glad she was to see the leaves and a
hundred other things she had not seen before!

[Illustration: THE EYEBALL IN ITS SOCKET

The muscle from M to M, which helps to turn the eyeball, has
been cut away to show the optic nerve.]

Here we have a picture of the _eyeball_, as we call it. The little
bands fastened to it are the bands of muscle; and as soon as I say
_muscle_ you know what they are for--to move the eyeball about, up and
down and from side to side. There are muscles outside the eye as well
as inside. Coming out from the back of the eyeball is a pearly white
cord quite different from the muscle bands. This is what we call a
_nerve_. This nerve in your eye carries to your _brain_, or thinking
machine, picture-messages of whatever you look at.

The nerve in your eye gets messages of light much as the nerve deep in
your ear gets its messages of sound--from tiny waves in the air. The
light waves are smaller and faster even than the sound waves, and the
eye nerve is the only nerve that can get pictures of them. You know
that, for wireless messages, the receiving machines are not all alike
and cannot all take the same messages, if the messages are sent with
different sorts of electric waves; and neither can our receiving
machines. Some get messages of sight, and some of sound, and some of
touch, or taste, or smell.

Now shut your eyes as quickly as you can. How long did it take you? A
minute? No, not a quarter of a second. It is about the quickest thing
you can think of--"the twinkling of an eye." You shut your eyes "quick
as a wink" whenever anything seems likely to fly or splash into them,
and this is what the eyelids are for. If anything gets into the eye
before the lids can shut, the eye "waters," and _tears_ pour out of
it. These are made by a gland-sponge up under the upper lid, so as to
wash any dust or sand or other harmful speck out of the eye before it
can hurt the sensitive eyeball.

Now look at some one's eyeball. It is like the picture, isn't
it?--bright white around the edge and then a ring of color, brown or
blue or gray; and inside the color-ring, or _iris_, a little round
black hole that we call the _pupil_. Watch the little hole change as
you turn the face toward the window. It becomes ever so much smaller.
Now turn the face away from the window, back again into the shadow.
How did the pupil change this time?

[Illustration: EYES PROTECT THEMSELVES AGAINST THE LIGHT]

The iris, or color-ring, acts like a curtain, like the ring-shutter of
a camera, and closes up the hole, or pupil, when the light is too
bright and would dazzle or burn the inside of the eye; but when the
light is dim, the iris opens again, so as to let in light enough with
which to see. Look at the little window in your kitten's eyes. It is
not the same shape as yours; but when you carry her to the light, you
see how the iris closes in and leaves just a little black slit or
line.

You remember the blind children? Isn't it wonderful how they can play
games and study, too, even though they are blind! They have to make
their senses of touch and hearing tell them many things that you learn
through your sense of sight. Many of these children _need not have
been blind_, if the nurse who first took care of them when they were
born had known enough to wash their eyes properly, not with soap and
water, of course, but with just one or two drops of a kind of
medicine--an _antiseptic_, as we call it--that makes the eye perfectly
clean.

But you children who have good eyes that can see, do you really see
things when you look at them? You can train your eyes just as you can
train your ears. You can teach them to read quickly down a page, and
to find things in pictures, and, better still, to see things out of
doors, in the garden and the woods and on the seashore. We hear a
great deal about "sharp eyes," but most of us see very little of all
we might see. Our eyes are on the lookout, too, to protect us from
dangers that may come; with our skin and nose and ears, they are
constantly on the watch; so the better we see the safer we are.

Even if your eyes are perfect now, you will need to take good care of
them to keep them strong. Don't let any story, no matter how
interesting it is, tempt you to read in a dim light or a light that is
too strong. And if you can't see the blackboard easily, or can't read
big print, like the school calendar, across the room, tell your mother
or your teacher, so that she can ask the doctor to find out what the
matter is.


IV. A DRINK OF WATER

It is astonishing what thirsty work studying is! Scarcely is the
second recitation over before your throat begins to feel dry, and up
goes your hand--"May I get a drink?"

If anyone even says the word "water," it makes you thirsty. It is so
good that just the thought of it makes you want some. I should like
you to notice how much water you drink every day. Perhaps a glass in
the morning when you get up, and one at night before you go to bed,
and three or four in between.

Why do we need so much water? Well, how much do you weigh? Perhaps you
will find it hard to believe, but more than half of that weight is
water; and because we are always giving off water from the skin and
from the body, we need plenty more to take its place.

No living thing can grow without water. Take a bean, for instance, and
put it in an empty glass on the window sill; and even if the sun
shines full upon it, nothing will happen, except that after a few days
it will shrivel and dry up. But fill the glass with water, and in a
few hours the bean will begin to swell; and in a few days it will
burst, and a little shoot will grow out of one end of it and a tiny
root at the other. The water and the warmth together have made it
sprout and grow.

[Illustration: A DRINKING-CUP EASILY MADE]

Children at school and people on trains should have their own private
cups, for serious diseases may be caught from the mouths of other
people. You can get a metal pocket folding cup for ten or fifteen
cents, or paper ones for a few cents a dozen. If you don't have your
own cup, I hope you will get one and carry it. Here is a pattern for a
paper cup that you can easily make for yourselves. Try it and see.
When you have once learned how, you can make it very quickly and have
a fresh cup every time you want one; but of course you should be sure
first that the paper itself is clean.

If you drink milk, this takes the place of some of the water and gives
you food as well. It is both drink and food; and a very good food for
children it is, too. You know, babies can live on it because it has
everything in it to make them grow.

Do you know why it is that people are so careful nowadays about having
milk and drinking-water very clean? It is because they have found that
the tiny plants, called germs, that make people sick are often carried
about in these drinks. A disease called _typhoid fever_ is carried in
this way.

Fifty years ago, cities and towns used to be very careless about where
they got their water supply, and would often take it out of streams
into which other cities emptied their sewage. Now, however, they are
much more particular; and the health officers, or Boards of Health,
are insisting that public water supply, such as is brought into our
houses in pipes, shall be taken either from some spring or
deep-flowing well, or from a stream or lake up in the hills, into
which no drainage from houses or farmyards, and no dirty water from
factories, empties.

[Illustration: A PIPE FOR THE CITY WATER SUPPLY

This pipe is laid for many miles to bring water from the distant
hills.]

We are still, however, far from being as careful as we should be about
this; and I am sorry to say that America has had more deaths from
typhoid fever than any other civilized country. Germany, which, of all
countries in the world, is the most particular about keeping its water
supply pure, has the fewest deaths from this cause, in proportion to
its population--scarcely one fifth as many as we have.

Therefore, by taking proper care, it would be quite possible to
prevent at least two thirds of our nearly 400,000 cases of typhoid
fever and 35,000 deaths from typhoid, every year.

It is not only cities and towns that ought to be careful of their
water supply. In fact, now, out on the farms and in the healthy
country districts, the death rate from typhoid fever has actually
become higher than it is in our large cities. The main cause of this
is the custom of digging the well in such a place that the waste water
thrown out from the house, or the drainage from the barnyard or the
pigpen or the chicken-house may wash into it, soaking down through the
porous soil. Far more typhoid fever now is spread by means of infected
well water than by any other means.

Most dangerous of all is the leakage from the privy vault; as, by this
means, the germs of typhoid fever and other diseases that affect the
food tube and digestion may drain through the soil till they reach the
drinking water in the well. These dangers can be avoided either by
having the well dug at some distance from the house and in higher
ground, or by having the drainage from the house, barns, and
out-buildings piped and carried to a safe distance from the well.

Fortunately, there are only a few kinds of germs that make us sick.
Most germs are helping us all the time; we could not live without
them. Some of them make our butter taste good, and others make our
crops grow, and others eat up the dirt that would make us sick. But
since disease germs are so tiny that we cannot possibly see them with
the naked eye, we must know where the water and milk that we use come
from, and whether or not they are perfectly clean. Boiling the water
will kill these germs and make the water pure. It is better not to
boil milk if it can be had from a dairy where the stable and the cows
and the milkmen and the pails and bottles are quite clean.

The fruits and fruit juices--lemon and orange and raspberry and lime
and grape--give nice wholesome drinks. Home-made juices are much
better than those you buy; you can be sure that they are pure and
really made from fruit. And just here I want to caution you against
buying "pink lemonade" or soda water or any other drink of that sort
from the penny venders and open stalls on the street. The drinks they
sell are not made from pure fruit juices, but from different flavoring
extracts that are made to taste like the fruit and are colored with
cheap dyes. Even the sweetening in them is not pure sugar, and they
are often made or handled in a careless, dirty manner, or exposed to
the dust of the street, and to flies.

Not long ago I was at the home of a friend where for supper we had the
nicest grape juice I ever tasted. When I said, "How good it is!" one
of the little girls piped up, "Billy and I picked the grapes, and
sister made it all by herself. She learned how at cooking school."

When I was packing my suitcase to leave, this little girl brought out
a big bottle of grape juice and wanted me to take it with me to
remember her by. It was all beautifully sealed with wax, and even this
she had done by herself! Do you think I could have kept it that way
very long? Perhaps not, it was so good; but if I had wanted it for a
keepsake, I could have kept it, sealed as it was, for years and years,
and it would have been just as sweet and fresh as when it was given to
me.

Suppose, instead of keeping it in its bottle, I had poured it out into
a glass. Can you tell me what would have happened to it then?

In a few days little bubbles would have come, one after another, up to
the top of the juice; and soon it would have been all full of bubbles.
What causes the bubbles? Floating all about in the air and sunshine
are tiny specks called _spores_. These are to the tiny _yeast_ plants
what seeds are to other plants. Seeds fall into the ground and grow,
but these yeast spores fall into the grape juice and grow. While they
are growing in the grape juice, they eat what they want from the
juice; and, as they eat, they make bubbles of carbon dioxid,--which,
you remember, forms in our lungs and looks like air,--and of another
substance called _alcohol_. Of course, when they have changed the
juice in this way, it tastes very different. It is then what we call
_fermented_.

_Fermented drinks are harmful_; but some people like bubbling drinks
so much that they leave good fresh grape juice open on purpose to let
the little yeast plants get into it and make it into what we call
_wine_. They treat apple juice in just the same way to make _cider_;
and they even take fresh rye and barley and corn, and mash them up,
and put yeast plants into the mash to ferment them and make them into
_whiskey_ and _beer_. It does seem a pity, doesn't it, to take good
foods like wheat and apples and grapes and make them into these things
that really do us harm if we drink them.

A very wise man named Solomon, who lived thousands of years ago,
warned people not to drink wine, not even to look at it when it
sparkled in the cup. He said no really wise man would drink it. Of
course not; the wise man uses the food and drink that make his body
grow strong and his brain work true, and no fermented drink can do
that.

There is no better drink for anyone than clear pure water, and no
better food and drink in one than pure fresh milk.

[Illustration: A SCHOOL KITCHEN WHERE BOTH BOYS AND GIRLS LEARN
TO COOK]


V. LITTLE COOKS

If you have to come so far to school that you cannot go back to dinner
and so must bring a luncheon with you, be sure to take plenty of time
to sit down and eat it slowly and chew every piece of food thoroughly.
Many children who bring luncheons to school just grab a piece of food
in each hand and "bolt" it down as fast as they can possibly bite it
off and swallow it, and then rush out to play.

Play is good and very important, but you had better spare ten or
fifteen minutes of it in order to chew your lunch thoroughly and
swallow it slowly, and then to sit or move about quietly for a few
minutes before starting to play hard. This will give your stomach a
chance to get all the blood it wants to use in digesting the food;
for, you remember, when you romp and play, your blood moves outward
toward your skin and away from your stomach. Don't think that, just
because you "picnic" at lunch, it is not as important as any other
meal.

I hope, however, that it will not be long before almost every school
will have a school kitchen and a lunch room; first, so that every girl
at least can learn to cook. It is well worth while being able to do;
indeed, no girl ought to be considered properly educated until she has
learned to cook, and no boy either, for that matter. Then, if the
school has this kitchen, it can be used to furnish hot luncheons, or
dinners, for those children who cannot conveniently go home in the
noon recess. Hot lunches are much more digestible than cold ones, and
they taste much better, and are much less likely to be eaten in a
hurry.

But why should we learn to cook? Why shouldn't we eat our food raw
instead of taking all this trouble and pains to cook it?

I know of a boy--a big lazy fellow--who is always forgetting to do
things. He used to go away in the morning without leaving wood enough
for the kitchen fire. So his mother said to herself one day, "I'll
teach him to remember." The next morning he went off again and left no
wood. At noon he came back "hungry as a hunter." She called him in to
dinner; and in he came, sat down, picked up the carving knife--then he
stopped! What do you suppose was the matter? The beef was raw! Then he
lifted the cover of the potato dish, and there lay the potatoes raw!
Then he tried another dish and found nice green peas, but hard as
little bullets. They were raw, too! Not even the bread had been
cooked; it was a soft, sticky mass of dough. His mother, who is a
jolly old lady, fairly shook with laughter when she told me about it.
She said she never again had to tell him to split wood.

Now that boy didn't need to be told one reason for cooking. We don't
like our food raw; it doesn't taste so good. At first, perhaps, that
doesn't sound like a very good reason; but it is more important than
you think. For it is a fact that, just as soon as you smell food, your
stomach begins to get ready the juice that is to digest it. If this
very first juice, which is called the _appetite juice_, is not poured
out, then the food may lie in the stomach some little time before it
begins to be digested at all. So it is quite important that our food
should smell and taste and look good, as well as have plenty of
strength and nourishment in it.

Another reason for cooking is that it either softens or crisps our
food so that we can chew it better and digest it more readily. You
know what a difference there is between trying to eat a raw potato and
a nice, mealy, well-baked one, or trying to eat popcorn before it is
popped and after.

Another good thing, too, cooking does, which is very important. It
kills any disease germs, or germs of decay, that may happen to have
got upon the food from dust or flies, or from careless, dirty
handling.

Of course, some of our food, such as apples and other ripe fruits, and
celery and lettuce and other green vegetables, we can eat raw and
digest quite well; but we should be careful to see that they have been
thoroughly washed with water that we know to be pure. Grocers often
have a careless way of putting fruit and vegetables out upon open
stands in front of the shop, or in open boxes or baskets inside the
store, and leaving them there all day. This is very dangerous, because
dust from the street, which contains horse manure and all sorts of
germs, may blow in upon them; flies, which have been eating garbage or
feeding at the mouths of sewers, may come in and crawl over them. You
ought to be very sure that anything that you are going to eat raw, or
without thorough cooking, has been well washed. And you ought to ask
your mother to speak to your grocer, if he is careless in this way,
and have him keep his fruit and vegetables, as well as sugar and
crackers and beans and dried fruit, either under glass or well
screened from flies and dust.

More important than almost anything else in good cookery is to keep
the food and the kitchen and the dishes and your hands perfectly clean
all the way through, so that nothing that will upset your digestion
can get into the food. After things are well cooked, it is very
important that they should be nicely served on clean dishes, on a
clean table cloth, with polished knives and shining spoons and forks.
This means not only that everything about the table and the food will
be perfectly clean and wholesome, but that you will enjoy eating it a
great deal more. And when you enjoy your food, you remember, your
stomach can _secrete_ the juice that is needed to digest it, very much
faster and better than when, as you say, you are just "poking it
down."

If you have a school kitchen and a lunch room, you can learn the best
way of cooking and serving things; and then, perhaps, you can do these
same things at home and be a real help. Most children are fond of
trying to cook, and I am glad that they are. Everyone, boys and girls
both, should know how to cook simple things. Perhaps some day you will
be stranded, like Robinson Crusoe, on a desert island! Perhaps the
rest of the family may be sick. How nice it would be for you to be
able to prepare breakfast for them. I know a family where the youngest
boy often rises early and gets breakfast for five. He can fry the
bacon and boil the eggs and make the coffee and mush and biscuit just
as nicely as his mother can; and he takes pride in it and enjoys it.

Cooking is what we call an art. Everyone, of course, can learn to do
it; but some people can do it much better than others, just as some
boys and girls can draw better than others. I hope some of you will be
what we might call "artist cooks." Take pride in the art and learn all
that you can about it. There are so many things a cook should know.

A great deal of good food is spoiled by bad cookery, particularly by
frying slowly in tepid grease, or fat, so that it becomes soaked with
grease. You should have the frying pan just as hot as possible before
you begin to fry; and then the meat or potatoes or cakes will be
seared, or coated over, on the outside, so that the fat cannot soak
into them, and they will not only taste better, but will be much more
digestible.

In baking you will have to be careful not to let the oven become too
hot, or else the meat or bread will be burned or scorched. Even if the
heat does not do this, it may harden and toughen the outside of the
meat so that it is almost impossible either to chew or digest.

Sugar is really a very good food if you do not eat too much at once,
and so pure candy is good for you if you do not eat too much. The very
best time to eat it is at the end of a meal. If you learn to make it
at school or at home, you can always have some to eat after your
luncheon without having to buy it. If you do buy candy, don't get the
bright colored kind; it looks pretty, but it may hurt you. And be sure
to see that it has been kept under a cover, where the dust and flies
could not get at it. Dust is dirty, and flies don't wipe their feet.
You want clean, pure candy.

Of course, after cooking, you will always be very careful to wash up
all the pots and pans and dishes that you have used. Food and scraps
that are left sticking to dishes and cooking utensils very quickly
turn sour and decay; and then the next time the dishes are used, you
will perhaps have an attack of indigestion, and wonder why.

There are two things you should always notice: Whether the bread you
eat is sweet and thoroughly baked; if it is soggy and sour, it will
make trouble in your stomach. Whether all your food is clean and fresh
before it is cooked; this you can tell by your eyes and nose.


VI. TASTING AND SMELLING

When, at home, you give the baby a ball or a key or a watch to play
with, what does he do with it the very first thing? He is never quite
happy, is he, until he has put it into his mouth? Does he want to eat
it? No, he wants to feel it; and he has not yet learned to feel very
carefully with his hands, as you do.

Can you feel with your mouth? If you have the least little hole in one
of your teeth, you know it as soon as you rub your tongue against it.
How big it feels and how rough the edges seem! If you take a
looking-glass, you find, if you can see the hole at all, that it is
just a tiny, tiny hole.

Your tongue and lips, like the rest of your skin, are always touching
and feeling things for you and sending messages to the brain. They say
whether your milk is hot or cold, and whether the food you eat is soft
enough and quite right in other ways. Your tongue is a very busy
little "waiter": he passes the food about in your mouth for the teeth
to chew, and he rolls it about at a great rate. But he does more than
this; he tells you something about how it tastes--not everything, as
you may think, but only whether it is _bitter_, _sweet_, _sour_, or
_salty_. Queer as it may seem, your nose tells you the other "tastes,"
which are really smells. It is your nose that says whether you have a
strawberry or a piece of onion in your mouth, whether it is coffee or
cocoa that you are drinking.

Of what other use is your nose?--for only a little patch in the upper
part is for smelling and tasting. The greater part of the nose is to
breathe through. You see, your nose warms and moistens the outside air
that you take in, so that, by the time it reaches your throat, it is
as warm as your body and does not hurt your throat. Your nose also
strains, or filters, out of the air the dust, lint, and germs that may
be floating in it.

You should always keep your lips closed and breathe through your nose.
Whenever you cannot breathe through your nose, there is something the
matter. It may be that your nose is swollen shut with a "cold"; but
that will last only a few days. If, however, your nose often feels
"stuffed up," there is probably something in it or behind it, that
ought to be taken away. A throat doctor can easily cure you; and, when
he has, you'll be surprised how much better you feel and how much
faster you grow.

[Illustration: A CLEAR PASSAGE TO THE LUNGS

(Follow the arrows.)]

I once knew a little girl whose nose was always blocked up. She had
headache and felt tired most of the time and was behind in her
classes. The doctor told her what was the matter, but her father and
mother were afraid that it might hurt her to have the doctor take out
what was clogging her nose. Well, what did she do? Instead of crying
and being afraid, one day she walked right into the doctor's office
and asked him to take out the _adenoids_, as we call these growths
that block up the nose. And after the doctor had taken them out, she
began to grow well and fat and strong so fast that she soon "caught
up" in her classes.

[Illustration: A PASSAGE BLOCKED BY ADENOIDS]

When you breathe well through your nose, you can smell and taste
better, too. In fact, when your nose is clogged, you cannot smell at
all.

How does this sense of smell help us? You say we can smell the flowers
and the fresh air after the rain, and cookies baking, and all the
things that we like so well. Yes, and these give us pleasure; but how
about the bad smells? The bad smells are warnings. If there is a dead
mouse or rat about, we smell it; and that leads us to look for it and
take it away. We smell the dirt and get rid of it, and thus keep away
sickness. When we walk into a room, if the air is bad we smell it at
once and open a window or a door, and so save ourselves from being
poisoned.

Some people hurt their noses by smoking tobacco. The inside skin of
the nose is very delicate, and the smoke going back and forth through
the nose and the throat keeps them from doing their work properly. It
is very bad for little children even to smell tobacco smoke. It seems
in some way to keep them from growing as they would in clear fresh
air. What a silly habit smoking is! It does no one any good. It hurts
not only the people who make the smoke, but the people who have to
smell it. Most of the people who smoke tobacco have to learn to like
it. It almost always makes them very sick when they first begin.

Sir Walter Raleigh, or the men he sent to America, first taught our
great-great-great-grandfathers to smoke. His men bought tobacco of the
Indians here and took it back to England; and Sir Walter himself
learned to smoke and made smoking fashionable. The first time that Sir
Walter's servant saw him smoking, he thought his master was on fire;
so what did he do but bring a big bucket of water and throw it all
over him! I wish that that bucket of water had settled the matter, so
that Sir Walter had stopped smoking and had never taught anyone else
to smoke. If it had, think how much money might have been put to
better use, for smoking is a very costly habit. And it is not only
wasteful of money, but, worse still, of health; for it is the cause of
a great deal of poor health and disease.

Remember that you want the air you breathe perfectly fresh and clean
and not spoiled and poisoned by tobacco smoke.


VII. TALKING AND RECITING

When I was little and playing with my brothers, I did not always do
what they wanted. So they'd sometimes say, "We'll put him in Coventry,
then he'll do it." They did not really _put_ me anywhere. They simply
would not speak to me or answer anything I said. It was just as if I
were entirely alone. Of course it was a quick way to make me ready to
take my part in the game again.

How do you think you would feel if you never, never could speak to
anyone, and no one could speak to you? What a quiet world we'd have!
Almost every day I meet a boy who can't hear and can't speak. How does
he ask for things? He makes letters and spells words with his fingers,
and his friends watch his fingers and read what he says. Is that the
way you do? "No, indeed," you say, "I talk." "What do you talk with?"
"I talk with my mouth." Yes, that's true enough; but if you did not
use something besides your mouth, you'd never make a sound.

Where does the sound come from? Feel gently with your finger and thumb
along the front of your neck. Do you find something harder than the
rest of your throat? That is the large tube called your _windpipe_. Do
you feel a ridge sticking out from this? Now sing or talk a little.
You can feel the ridge move up and down, and the sound thrill in it.
That is where the sound comes from. That is your voice-and-music box,
or _larynx_.

You have seen the little red rubber balloons, haven't you? You blow
into them until they are big and round; and then, when you take your
mouth away, out comes the air, making a squawking or whistling sound.
Now, if you look closely at the mouthpiece, you see a tiny piece of
rubber tied across it. The air rushing past this rubber is what makes
your balloon sing.

Your own music box is made on the same plan. When you breathe out, the
air is pushed from your lungs up the pipe that we call the windpipe.
In the upper part of this is the little box, a corner of which you can
feel with your thumb and finger. Across the box, inside, are stretched
two folds of skin and muscle, just as the rubber is stretched across
the opening of the balloon. Whenever you like, you can blow out your
breath between these folds of skin in your voice box. Blow it out in
one way, and what happens? You are singing. Blow it out in another
way, and you are talking; in still another way, and you are just
making a noise--perhaps mewing like a kitten, or neighing like a
horse. If you pull these folds of skin close together, you can close
your windpipe and "hold your breath." A cough is made by filling your
chest with air, holding the folds close shut, and then suddenly
"letting go." How many sounds you can make from one tiny music box! Of
course the muscles of the mouth and throat, and the teeth and the
tongue all help the voice box as much as they can.

One of the best ways to keep your voice clear and strong is to dash
cold water every morning on your throat and chest, then to rub with a
coarse towel till your skin is pink and warm. Gargle your throat with
cold water if your voice is husky. Singing is very good for you, too;
but don't try to sing too hard. Sing easily and gently, and see how
many words you can sing without taking a breath. That is good for the
lung-bellows as well as the voice box. Always sing in fresh air, but
not in cold air.

When you talk, try to make all the words clear and distinct; open your
mouth and let the sound out. Once I had a big grown boy in one of my
classes who did not open his lips properly when he spoke. So I asked
him to prop his mouth open with a piece of stick and then talk. I made
him do it until he learned to speak much more clearly. A famous Greek
orator, named Demosthenes, who had a habit of mumbling his words,
trained himself to speak clearly by putting pebbles in his mouth and
then reciting in a loud voice.

When you want your voices to sound pleasant,--and that is always, of
course,--you must call on your brain to help. That is your thinking
machine. Always think twice before you let anything unpleasant or
unkind come out of your voice box. How happy we could make everyone
about us if we followed this rule!


VIII. THINKING AND ANSWERING

Suppose, as you are walking home from school to-day, you are about to
cross the street when you see an automobile coming very fast. What do
you do? You stop, of course; wait for it to go by, and then start on
again. Why do you stop? "Why," you say, "if I didn't, the automobile
might run over me." Something of that sort would just flash through
your mind, wouldn't it, in the very same second that you first saw the
automobile coming. Now, as you know, you think with your brain. But
what was it this time that set your brain to thinking? "Nothing," you
say, "I just saw the automobile coming." And that is true in a way:
you didn't need anything more than your eyes to tell you.

But how did your eyes get the message to your brain, and how did your
brain tell your legs to stop walking? We must have in our bodies a
kind of telephone system. And that is, in fact, just what we have. Our
_brain_ is our "central office"; and our _nerves_ are the wires,
running from all parts of our body to the brain, carrying messages
back and forth.

An old man and an old woman lived out on the very edge of a little
town. One day their house caught fire and was blazing away before they
noticed it. They rushed to their neighbor's telephone and rang up
"Central" to tell her to "phone" for the firemen and hose cart. _Kling
a-ling-a-ling!_ went their bell, but no "Central" answered; and while
a man was running to town to get the firemen, the fire got such a good
start that the house burned down.

You can see from this why we need a central office in good working
order, when we use the "phone." All the wires run into the one
building, and there must be some one there to receive calls and see
that they are sent out to their proper places. In this case, you see,
"Central" should have been at her post to see that the message went on
to the engine house, and then the fire would have been put out
"double-quick."

The "central office" of our Body Telephone System is just as important
and just as necessary to keep in good working order. It would be very
little use to have even the keenest of eyes and the sharpest of ears,
with the readiest of nerve wires to carry their messages into the
center of the body, unless we had some _organ_, or headquarters, there
for switching the messages over to the nerves running to the right
muscles to tell them what to do. If the brain-"Central" should fail in
its duty, or get out of order, then the body would be in serious
trouble at once.

Every day we read in the papers of accidents because somebody didn't
think, as well as see or hear. People see cars and automobiles coming,
but don't give them a thought and so are run down and hurt. They hear
the whistle of the engine at the crossing, but drive on just the same,
without seeming to have heard it at all. They are absent-minded; the
operator in the "central office" seems to be off duty, or busy about
something else. But if we are going to get on in this world of cars
and automobiles and all sorts of unexpected things, we must always
"have our wits about us," as the saying goes, ready to send the
messages out to the muscles in our legs and arms and fingers just as
soon as any one of our "Five Senses" "rings up" the "Central" in our
brain.

Our body wires do not look at all like telephone wires; and the brain,
if you could see it, would never suggest to you a central office.

The nerves are fine white cords, the smallest ones finer than a hair,
and the largest so big and strong that you could lift the body by it;
and their branches run all over the body, to the muscles and the blood
tubes and the skin and all the other parts, as the picture shows. You
have already read how the skin can tell you when you feel warm and
when you feel cold and when something hurts you.

The brain is a soft wrinkled mass, partly gray and partly white. It is
in the head; and because it is very soft and easily hurt, Mother
Nature has put around it a strong wall, or shell, of bone--the
_skull_, or brain box. Feel your head and see how very hard this bone
is. Solomon, the Hebrew poet-king, called it the "golden bowl." I
suppose he called it a "bowl" because it is round like one, and
"golden" because it is so precious. People do not often grow well
again if the "golden bowl" is broken or even cracked.

[Illustration: THE NERVOUS SYSTEM--OUR BODY TELEPHONE

The picture shows the brain, or "Central," and the thick nerve
cord that runs down through the backbone, and the principal
nerves of the back and the arms.]

The big _nerve cable_, called the _spinal cord_, that connects the
brain with the rest of the body, and carries all the messages backward
and forward, runs down the back and is protected by the backbone, or
_spine_, which is hollow, so that the cord can run down through it.
This backbone is jointed together so beautifully, too, that you can
bend your back about and stoop over, and carry heavy weights on your
back, and yet the bony tube still protects the cord inside. Solomon
calls this the "silver cord," because it is so white and shiny that it
looks like silver. You see, our bodies are full of beautiful as well
as wonderful things.

Probably sometime when your teacher has asked you to recite a poem you
have all learned, someone in the class has answered, "I don't remember
it," or has stood up and recited the first few lines and then stopped,
and thought, and finally had to say, "I can't go on."

Now what is the matter with this boy, or girl? He looks bright enough,
and you will probably remember that he was in the class when you
learned the poem. "Oh," you say, "the poem didn't stay in his head."
No, it didn't "stick" in his memory; but why didn't it?

Some of the messages that the Five Senses carry to the brain are
answered at once, as when we move away from danger, or reach out our
hands and help ourselves to butter, or take off a shoe to shake out a
pebble. But there are other messages that do not call for an immediate
reply, and are just stored away for future use in the big "central
office" of our Body Telephone, in what we call our _memory_. And
later, when the proper message is sent in by our eyes or ears, or
other sense organs, which reminds us of this message which they sent
before, perhaps several weeks, months, or even years ago, it wakes up
the old message stored away in the memory, and we say we "remember"
what happened to us, or what we learned at that time.

So, when your teacher asks you to recite a certain poem, and your ears
hear the title or the first line, you recall the rest of the verses
and the lesson about it. How many things does the word "Christmas"
wake up out of your memory? or the sight of soldiers marching? or the
first taste of strawberries in May?

You think about a great many things that you never _do_. Really you
are thinking almost all the time you are awake. And besides the
messages that "Central" just stores away for future use, there are a
great many messages being carried back and forth along the "telephone
system" all the time, that you don't keep track of at all--the
messages that keep the stomach and the heart and the lungs and
everything in your body working together properly.

How are we to take care of the telephone lines and "Central" of our
_nervous system_? Whatever you do to build up and help the other parts
of the body will help your brain to _feel_ and _think_ and _remember_;
and will help your muscles and nerves to answer promptly and truly
whatever the message may be. Plenty of good food, plenty of sleep and
fresh air, plenty of play, will keep your nerves and brain healthy and
growing.




"ABSENT TO-DAY?"


I. KEEPING WELL

How many times have you been absent this term? No oftener than you
were obliged to be, I am sure; for it's almost as bad as being "put in
Coventry" to come back and hear about the good time the rest of the
class have been having, and feel that you "weren't in it." Of course,
sometimes, when you are not well, you have to be absent; it is best
that you should be. But it is better still to know how to keep well,
so you won't have to be absent, and won't have to miss any good times
in work or play all your life.

You remember that all the parts of your body are fed and ventilated by
the blood, which is pumped to them from the heart. So long as this
blood is pure and has plenty of oxygen in it, it does good to every
part of the body to which it comes. But the moment that poisons and
dirt and waste begin to pile up in the blood, then the blood that
comes to the different parts of the body may be poisonous to them,
instead of helpful.

Such poisons in the blood are particularly harmful to the nerves and
the brain, because these are among the most delicate and sensitive of
all the structures in the body.

Often we think of the body as a beautiful house. Now a house does not
look very beautiful when it has dust and crumbs on the floor, buckets
of greasy dishwater in the kitchen, and smoke from the furnace in the
air! You could not live in such a place. No, the smoke must go out up
the chimney, the dust and crumbs must be swept away, the dirty water
must be drained off in pipes; the house must be not only cleaned, but
kept clean all the time. This is true of your body, too.

Now Mother Nature sends the smoke from the body out through the lungs,
and the crumbs and solid dirt down and out by means of the food tube.
But the waste water--how does she get rid of that? The waste water,
you remember, is in the blood vessels, mixed with the blood. How does
she get it out of the blood? She sends it through three magic
cleaners, or strainers,--the _skin_, the _liver_, the _kidneys_.

That the skin is a strainer, you already know; for you know how the
skin lets out the waste water in perspiration, or sweat, and how
important it is that we keep the little holes of the strainer open and
clean. And you know, too, that most of the water that passes out of
the body goes first to the kidneys.

The liver, however, is the largest cleaning machine of all and has to
work very hard. The blood comes to it full of foods and poisons. This
wonderful cleaner picks out the food it needs and takes up many of the
poisons, too. "What does it do with the poisons?" you ask. Some of
them it changes into good food, and others it makes harmless and sends
away down the food tube in a fluid called _bile_. If we are strong and
healthy, the liver has the power to kill many of the disease germs
that get into the body. That is why sometimes, when you have had a
chance to take mumps or grippe or some other "catching" disease, you
don't take it. Your liver kills the germs, or seeds. See how carefully
Mother Nature has planned that we may be clean inside as well as
outside.

[Illustration: THE POSITION OF THE LIVER

Compare this with the diagram on page 26, and see how the liver
partly overlaps the stomach.]

But you must not over-work your liver. If you do, it may become too
tired to do anything at all. Then all these poisons will spread
through the body; the skin and the whites of the eyes will grow
yellow, and you will be what is called "bilious." When this happens,
the poisons go to your brain, too, and make you feel sad; your tongue
looks white instead of pink, and you have a disagreeable taste in your
mouth. Your happiness depends very much on your liver.

"How shall I keep my liver rested and in good working order?" By
eating only sound, wholesome, pure food, and avoiding dirty milk; by
going to the toilet regularly every morning after breakfast; by
keeping your windows open and avoiding the poisons and disease germs
in foul air. Then, if you run and play and work out of doors, so that
the muscles move a great deal and you breathe in plenty of oxygen to
keep the body fires burning briskly, that will help a great deal.

Last summer up in the mountains I saw a big log close by the path. It
had been sawed across so that the end was smooth. It was brown and
weather-stained, so of course I knew that it had lain there a long
time. How surprised I was to see a pile of fine fresh sawdust on the
ground beside it. As I came nearer, I saw piece after piece of sawdust
dropping, dropping, dropping, one after the other, from a hole in the
log. I looked into the hole, and what do you think I saw? Hundreds of
little brown ants, busy as could be carrying the sawdust, throwing it
out, and then scurrying back to get some more. Several feet inside the
log, other ants were cutting the sawdust, hollowing out the rooms of
their house; and in another part others were getting food for the
workers, and still others taking care of the baby ants. They were all
helping one another, and whatever one ant did helped all the rest.
That is the way with the parts, or organs, of the body. When one part
works well, it helps all the rest; when one squad of tiny cells in the
muscles or liver or heart is doing its duty, like the little ants, it
helps all the other cell-workers in the body to keep healthy.

If you eat proper food, you help not only your stomach but your liver,
too; for it has not so many poisons to get rid of. While you are
helping your stomach and your liver, you are helping your heart and
your brain, and so on. So what you do to help one helps all.

There are, however, some poisons that the liver cannot get rid of; but
these the skin or the kidneys carry away. Have you ever seen kidney
beans? The bean is the shape of a kidney. The kidneys are in the
middle of your back, packed close to your backbone, on a line with
your waist. This is a picture of them. Do you see the little tubes
leading down from the kidneys, carrying the waste water and poison
down into a kind of bag? The walls of this bag, called the _bladder_,
will stretch, and it will hold about a pint of waste water. From the
bladder a tube carries the water down out of the body.

[Illustration: THE KIDNEYS AND THE BLADDER

The large tubes are the artery and the vein that carry blood to
and from this part of the body.]

You can help your kidney-strainers by emptying your bladder at certain
times each day. Some children have to empty the bladder much oftener
than others, but most children can form what we call _regular habits_
about it, by trying to do it at the same times each day. If you are
quite strong, five times a day is often enough: when you first get up,
at recess, at noon, at four o'clock, and at bedtime. Many children do
it much oftener than this; but as they grow older and the muscles grow
stronger, they slowly outgrow this trouble, if they try to form the
right habits.

There are many diseases of the kidneys; for, like the liver, they are
sometimes over-worked and do not carry the poisons from the body. You
are helping your kidneys when you drink plenty of fresh clean water
every day, and also when you play or work hard enough to get into a
good perspiration; for, as perspiring carries out some of the poisons,
it leaves less for the kidneys to pour out. You ought to get into a
good perspiration at least once every day, or better, three or four
times, if you wish to keep healthy. The Bible says, "In the sweat of
thy brow shalt thou eat bread"; and you must earn health and happiness
at the same price.


II. SOME FOES TO FIGHT

You have seen that sitting or sleeping in rooms where the air is bad,
or eating the wrong kind of food, or working after you are badly
tired, will poison your blood and hinder the proper working of that
beautiful machine, your body. These poisons are made inside your body,
and you can prevent them by living healthfully and wholesomely. But
there are other poisons, which may get into the blood from outside the
body; and while it is best for you not to think too much about these,
or to worry over dangers that may never come, yet it is well to know
just enough about some of them to be able to keep out of their way, as
far as possible.

The most dangerous form of poisons from outside the body are those
made by the germs of some rather common diseases, which, because you
can "catch" them from some one else who has them, are called
"catching," or _infectious_, or _contagious_.

Some of the germs of these "catching" diseases, like the germs of
typhoid fever, of which we have spoken in connection with our drinking
water, are carried in the water or milk that we drink, or upon the
food that we eat; and one of the worst carriers of germs is the
ordinary household fly.

Not so very many years ago, people did not know that _dirt makes
people sick_. You see, they did not know anything about the disease
seeds (germs) that grow so fast in dirt. They did not like to have
flies about, because flies look so dirty and bite people and crawl
over things and spot them. But nowadays, we will not have flies about
because we know that they have been in dirty places where disease
germs live, and that one little fly can carry thousands and thousands
of these germs on his feet.

Have you ever looked at a fly through a magnifying glass or under a
microscope? If you haven't, try it sometime. You will see that his
legs are covered with little hairs; and it is on these little hairs
that the germs lodge. They are too small for you to see except with a
very powerful glass; but scientists have proved that they are there,
and they have found that there are always typhoid germs among them.

[Illustration: THE COMMON HOUSE FLY

As he appears through a magnifying glass.]

Did you ever see a fly wipe his feet before he came into the house?
No, indeed; and he goes anywhere he pleases, over the bread and into
the cream. Yet he was born in dirt and bred in dirt, and he lives in
dirty places all the time he is not crawling over your clean things
and spoiling them.

Flies are hatched from eggs; and these eggs can hatch only in piles of
dirt, such as heaps of manure, or places where garbage and scraps from
the house are dumped or thrown. We call the common fly the "domestic"
or "house" fly, because he lives only in the neighborhood of houses
and barnyards where heaps of manure and piles of dirt are allowed to
gather.

When the fly first hatches from the egg, it is a little white,
wriggling worm called a _maggot_, like those that some of you may have
seen in decaying meat or fish or cheese. The maggots must have
decaying substances to eat and live upon while they are growing, and
this is why the eggs are laid in manure heaps and garbage piles.

[Illustration: A MAGGOT HATCHING FROM THE EGG

(Greatly magnified.)]

It takes the maggot about five days to grow to its full size, and then
it turns into a _chrysalis_. That is, it is shut up in a kind of case
that it has spun for itself, like the cocoon of the silkworm or the
caterpillar. In about five days more it breaks out of this cocoon and
appears as a fly with wings.

So, you see, the eggs must stay in that manure heap about two weeks if
they are to hatch. If, within that time, the manure is carted away and
thrown out somewhere where it will dry, the little unhatched flies
will be killed, or prevented from hatching. All we have to do, then,
to be entirely rid of flies about our houses is to see that the heaps
of manure and all piles of cans and garbage are taken away at least
once a week.

[Illustration: FLY MAGGOTS ON OLD NEWSPAPER

Note the size of the maggot compared with the newspaper type.]

If manure heaps or piles of dirt cannot, for any reason, be carried
away as often as this, then they can be sprinkled with something that
is poisonous to flies, such as arsenic or kerosene. This will kill the
maggots. If we keep every kind of waste and scraps from the house, and
all the manure from the barn and the pig-pen and the hen-house
carefully cleaned up, or sprinkled with some poison, we shall get rid
of flies entirely and never need to use screens at the doors and
windows. Until we do this, it is best to put screens at the doors and
windows in the summer time, and particularly to screen carefully any
place where food is kept or cooked; for we know that a great many
cases of typhoid and of other diseases of the stomach and bowels, such
as _summer sickness_, or summer _diarrhea_, and _cholera morbus_, are
carried to our food by the dirty feet of flies.

Many of the germs of "catching" diseases--most of them, in fact--are
carried in the air, in scales that have rubbed off the skin of the
persons sick with them, or in spray that they have coughed into the
air, or in saliva that they have spit upon the floor.

There is one sickness of this kind that I ought to tell you about,
because it kills so many thousand people here in our own country every
year. We sometimes call it the "Great White Plague." Its common name
is _consumption_, and the doctors call it _tuberculosis_. I dare say
you have heard of it and wondered what it meant.

A few years ago people thought it could not be cured. They thought
that children had it because their parents had had it before them. But
now, the cheering thing about it is that we have found that Mother
Nature herself can cure it with fresh air and sunshine and wholesome
food. We have found, too, that people catch it from others who are
sick with it, and need not have it just because their parents did.

[Illustration: FRESH AIR AND SUNLIGHT ARE GOOD DOCTORS]

This means, then, that thousands of people who have it need not die,
but can be cured simply by living and sleeping out of doors and eating
plenty of milk, eggs, and meat, nuts and fruit. There are camps for
them in almost every state in the Union now. The fresh air gives them
such a big appetite that they can eat more than most healthy people,
and they soon get strong and well.

If all the people who now have consumption were taken out into the
country and cured, there would be no one left for the rest of us to
catch it from, and the disease would soon die. Some day our Boards of
Health will decide to do this, and then consumption will become as
rare as smallpox is now, and will kill only a few hundred people a
year in the United States instead of 150,000 every year, as it does
now.

People and governments are giving great sums of money, not only to
cure the people who now have consumption, but to do something towards
stopping the disease by keeping things so clean and people so strong
that no one will ever have it. Even little children can help to fight
and kill this "Great White Plague," and I'll tell you how.

We know that, when people have consumption in their lungs, what they
cough and spit out of their mouths and blow out of their noses (we
call it _sputum_) has the germs, or seeds, of the disease in it. So,
to keep other people from catching the disease, they must hold
something before the face when they cough, and they must catch the
sputum in paper (newspapers or paper napkins are very good for this)
and burn it, for burning kills the germs. Then, too, they must not
kiss other people on the mouth, and others must not kiss them. They
must use their own drinking-cups, and never lend or borrow a cup. You
see, you can look out for these things, yourselves. When grown people
kiss you, just turn your cheek to them, instead of your mouth. Your
cheek will not carry anything to your windpipe and lungs. And be sure
to carry your own drinking-cup, or, better still, make the one for
which you already have the pattern, every time you need one.

[Illustration: HIS OWN CUP AND TOWEL]

This sounds easy enough; and it is, too. But sometimes people don't
know when they have this "plague," and of course they do not feel that
they must be careful. What is to be done, then?

If people won't take care of themselves, then the government has to
make health laws to protect them, and the health officers have to see
that the laws are obeyed. In many of the states and cities, laws have
been made so that nobody is allowed to spit on the sidewalk or in the
cars or in any other public place; and common drinking-cups are
forbidden at all park fountains and at the water-coolers in schools
and trains and stations and other public places.

You ought to know about these things, because, as I have just said,
other sicknesses, too, are carried about in the nose and mouth.
_Grippe_, _pneumonia_ or lung fever, and what we call _colds_ are
caught in exactly the same way. We used to think we caught them by
being chilled; but we are much more likely to take them by being shut
up in a hot, stuffy room with other people who already have them.
Mother Nature never gave us such things in her beautiful, clean
outdoors. We must wear clothes enough to keep us warm when we go out,
and have bedclothes enough to keep us warm while we sleep; but we need
not be afraid of catching any sickness from the clean outside air,
either by day or by night. Drafts are not dangerous, except when our
blood is already full of poisons and germs from foul air.

Of course it is foolish even for strong, healthy people to run any
risks that can be avoided, and there is one other thing that you
should keep on the watch against doing; and that is, touching or
kissing or playing with other children who may be sick. It is better
not even to sit in the same room with them if you can avoid it.

Many of the infectious diseases--and nearly three fourths of all the
diseases that children have are infectious--are caught, as we have
seen, from germs that are carried in the air. That is one reason why
so many infectious diseases are likely to begin with running at the
nose, or sneezing, or cold in the head, or sore throat. The germs,
having been breathed in with the air, catch on the sides of the
nostrils or at the back of the throat, and start inflammation and
soreness wherever they land. This is just the way that _measles_,
_scarlet fever_, _chicken pox_, _whooping cough_, and _diphtheria_
begin. Nearly all colds in the head, and sore throats with coughing,
are infectious; so the best thing to do whenever you have a bad cold
in the head, or a sore throat, is to keep out in the open air as much
as you can, until it is better. Of course, a cold is not such a
serious thing in itself; but, if it is neglected, it may lead to some
very dangerous troubles, particularly to inflammation of the lungs,
and sometimes even of the kidneys or the liver or the heart. Several
of these infectious diseases--measles, chicken pox, and scarlet fever,
for instance--have a rash, or breaking-out, called an _eruption_, upon
the skin. This is another thing easy to look out for; and if you see
anyone with a rash upon his face and hands, it is a good thing to keep
away from him and not let him touch you. Even if he should not have
measles or scarlet fever or chicken pox, but only a disease of the
skin itself, he still might spread the infection of that; for most
diseases that cause a breaking-out upon the surface of the skin are
infectious.

Some of these infectious diseases are so common among children that
they are called _Children's Diseases_, or the _Diseases of Infancy_,
just as if it were natural for you to have them while you are
children, and as if they were something that you have to have as a
matter of course, before you grow up.

But it isn't necessary at all to have them, if you will take care of
yourselves and help your doctors and the Board of Health of your
county or town or city to prevent their spreading. These diseases,
although usually very mild, never do anyone any good whatever, and may
do serious harm; for their poisons may stay in the blood and injure
the heart or the kidneys or the nerves.

One thing I should like to urge you to do if you happen to get one of
these "children's diseases"; and that is, to stay in bed or out of
school or away from work just as long as your doctor tells you to.
This is important, because it is very dangerous indeed to become
over-tired or overheated or chilled, or to get your feet wet or romp
too hard or sit up too late, before you have fully recovered; and you
will not have fully recovered until at least three or four weeks after
you are able to be out of bed. But if you take good care of yourselves
for three or four weeks after measles or chicken pox or whooping cough
or a very bad cold, you will avoid almost all danger of their poisons
injuring your heart or kidneys or nerves, and causing chronic
diseases, like Bright's disease or heart disease, later in life.

Perhaps now I have told you enough about poisons and sickness. You
must not be frightened about them. I have told you these things so
that you may understand why you must bathe, and brush your teeth, and
wash your face and hands, and wear clean clothes, and breathe fresh
air, and keep your windows open, and play out of doors--in fact, keep
your bodies clean inside and out. I know you will be glad enough to do
these things, troublesome though some of them may be, if you know the
reason why. The best of it is that when you keep perfectly clean and
healthy, not even the "Great White Plague" and cold seeds, or germs,
can hurt