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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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 you, even though they get into your mouth or nose; for Mother Nature gives healthy bodies the power to kill germs, and quite without our knowing it.



III. PROTECTING OUR FRIENDS

If you knew that some of your little friends were sick with an infectious disease like measles or scarlet fever, of course you would keep away from them, so as to avoid catching the disease. And if they knew that they had a disease that was infectious, of course they would want to let all their friends know of it, so as to prevent them from coming and catching it. But how can they let all their friends know? Sick people don't feel like writing letters; and, even if they did, some diseases can be carried in letters. So that might not be at all a friendly thing to do.

This has always been the greatest difficulty in preventing the spread of infectious diseases—how to let other people know. So about fifty or sixty years ago, people got together and decided that the best thing to do was to appoint an officer known as a Health Officer, or a committee known as a Board of Health, in each town and in each county, whose business it should be to find out cases of infectious disease, and to warn other people against them.

These officers first ask all the doctors in the town to report to this Central Health Office, or Board of Health, every case of a patient with an infectious disease. Then, when the case has been reported, that office sends some one with a card on which the name of the disease is printed in large letters, and he tacks the card upon the front of the house or upon the fence around the lot, so that everyone who goes near the house may know that there is danger, and keep away from it. Then, sometimes, a messenger from the Board of Health goes into the house and talks to the family, and tells them how they can keep the patient in a room by himself, so as to prevent the rest of the family from catching the disease; and how they can best take care of the patient, and keep from carrying the infection through clothing or food or anything else.



Then, because anyone who has been sick with an infectious disease will still be shedding the germs of the disease and spitting or coughing, not only as long as he is sick, but for two or three weeks after he is beginning to feel better, the messenger will tell the family that the patient must stay either in his own room or within his own house or yard, for so many days or weeks. This is called keeping quarantine. The word comes from the Italian word quaranta, "forty"; because in the early days when the practice was first begun, the patients used to be kept by themselves in this way for forty days. While sometimes this is very inconvenient and hard and troublesome, it is really the only safe way of stopping the spread of these diseases; and I am sure anyone of you would be willing to take this extra trouble sooner than let any of your friends catch a disease from you, and perhaps die of it. Quarantine is also the best and safest thing for the patient, because it keeps him quiet and at rest until he has completely recovered, and until all danger that the poison of the disease will attack his lungs or heart or kidneys is over.

In some of the best schools now there is an examination of all the children every morning, by a visiting doctor sent by the Board of Health. If the doctor finds any child that has red and watery eyes, or is running at the nose, or sneezing, or coughing, or has a sore throat, he usually sends him home at once, so that the other children will not catch the infection. The school doctor is not thinking only about what seems to be a cold, although, as you know, it is very important that anyone with a cold should take good care of himself and should not let others catch it from him. The doctor sends the child home because this is just the way in which several other infectious diseases may begin—measles, scarlet fever, chicken pox, whooping cough, and diphtheria. For most infectious diseases, as you will remember, are caught from germs floating in the air and breathed into the nose and throat.

The Board of Health takes care of the public in many ways besides these. It keeps a very careful watch upon the water supply of the town, or city, so as to keep the houses and factories from running their drainage, or sewage, into it; for this, as you already know, might cause the spread of typhoid fever and of other diseases of the bowels and stomach.

The Board of Health sends men to examine, or inspect, the milk the dairymen bring, to see that it is sweet and pure, and that there are no infectious germs in it. And it sends men out into the country to examine the dairy farms and see that the cows are properly fed, and that the barns in which they are milked are kept clean; and that the water in which the milk pans and bottles are washed comes from clean, pure wells or springs.



Another thing that the Board of Health does is to send an inspector round to look very carefully at all the meat that is sold in the butcher shops, and at all the fruits and vegetables at the grocers'. If he finds any meat that is diseased or tainted or bad, or any fruit or vegetables that are beginning to spoil, or any flour, sugar, or canned goods that have been mixed with cheaper stuffs that are not good to eat,—in fact, are what the law calls adulterated,—he may seize the bad and dangerous foods and destroy them, and summon to court the dealers who are trying to sell them. Then the dealers are fined or perhaps sent to prison.

So, you see, the Board of Health is one of the very best friends that you have, trying to keep your food pure and good, the water that you drink clean and wholesome, and the milk sweet and free from dirt or disease germs. You ought to help these officers and their inspectors in every way that you can. I know that it is sometimes troublesome to obey all their rules; and perhaps when you don't know what the dangers are which they are trying to guard you against, it seems to you that they are too particular about a great many things. But just see what they have done already to make our cities and houses healthier and pleasanter places to live in.

Only one hundred and fifty years ago, for instance, that terrible disease called smallpox killed hundreds of thousands of people every year in Europe; and it attacked the eyes and blinded so many of those who recovered from it, that nearly half the poor blind people in the blind asylums had had their sight destroyed by it. In smallpox there is a terrible eruption, or breaking out, upon the skin, which is likely to leave it pitted and scarred; and even fifty years ago it was exceedingly common to see people who had been pitted by smallpox, or, as the expression was, "pock-marked."

Cows have a disease somewhat like this, but much less dangerous, called cow-pox. Years ago, before dairies were inspected as they are now, dairy maids often caught this disease from the cows they milked, so that their hands would break out with pock-marks.

About a hundred years ago, a Dr. Richard Jenner discovered that the dairy maids in the country district in which he lived, who had caught this mild infection from the cows they milked, never caught smallpox even when they were exposed to it. So after studying over the subject for some years, he took a little of the matter, or pus, from the eruption on the udder of a cow that had cow-pox, scratched the arm of a little patient of his, and rubbed some of the pus into it. Only a short time after, the family of this little boy was exposed to smallpox, and all the other children took it badly, but he escaped.

This was the beginning of what we call vaccination; and as soon as it was found that this scratching of the arm and putting a little of this vaccine matter into it would cause only a few days of feverishness, and then after that give complete protection against smallpox, the Boards of Health all over the civilized world took it up and insisted upon everybody's being vaccinated when a baby.

As a result, smallpox has become one of the rarest, instead of the commonest, of our infectious diseases. Only a few dozen people die of it each year in Europe, instead of several hundred thousands; scarcely one one-hundredth of the people now in our blind asylums have been sent there by smallpox, and I dare say that many of you have never even seen a pock-marked person.

Another disease that used to be very dangerous to little children is diphtheria. It was not only very infectious, but very deadly; and nearly half of the children who took it died of it, and the doctors didn't know anything that would cure it. About twenty years ago, two great scientists, one a Frenchman named Roux—a student of the great Professor Louis Pasteur, of whom I am sure you have heard—and the other, a German, named Behring, discovered an antitoxin for diphtheria; that is, something to defeat the poison of the diphtheria germ. When this antitoxin is injected into the blood, it will cure diphtheria.

The doctors and the Boards of Health took this up too, and insisted upon its being used in all cases; with the result that where the antitoxin is used early, scarcely one in twenty of the patients dies, instead of eight or ten out of twenty, as before.

You know how careful we are all trying to be not to let consumption spread. By insisting that all houses shall be built so as to give plenty of light and fresh air to everyone; and by forbidding spitting upon the streets; and by insisting that food to be sold, especially milk, shall be clean,—by preventing the spread of the disease in every way, our Boards of Health have cut down the number of deaths from this disease nearly one half; and people in the United States, for instance, or in England, where these health laws are enforced, live now almost exactly twice as long on the average as they did one hundred years ago, or as they do now in India and in Turkey, for instance, where the people are ignorant and dirty and careless.

So you see that even if some of the health regulations do seem rather troublesome and fussy, it is well worth while to try to follow them and help the health inspectors in every way. Even little children can help very much in keeping the houses and the cities in which they live clean and healthful and beautiful.



WORK AND PLAY

I. GROWING STRONG

When school is over, out you go with a rush, into the open air. You have worked hard all day, and now you have two hours before supper to do just as you like.

Perhaps you will play tag, or prisoner's base, or stealing sticks, or town ball. They are all fine fun, and they exercise every muscle in your body and make your lungs breathe deeper and your heart beat faster, and make every part of you grow stronger.



Perhaps you have a few chores to do or errands to run; but even these are almost as much fun as play and give you good exercise in the open air and, what is better still, a feeling that you are being of some use in the world, which is one of the happiest and most satisfactory feelings that you will ever have, if you live to be a hundred years old.



But when you have finished your work, you must not forget to play real, lively, jolly games out of doors—ball and tag and hide-and-seek, and all those games that children love.

Hide-and-seek is a good game, because, when you are caught, you can stand still a few minutes and rest. When you are hiding, you can take a good breath for the home-run you have to make. Most games, in fact, are planned like this—a run and a rest, and then another run. While you rest, some one else is taking his turn at the bat, or at being "It," or whatever is the hardest part of the work. This is one reason why games are so good for you to play.

You see, when you run, you are working your muscles and heart-pump very hard; and if you kept running all the time, you would burn up so much food in the muscles that the heart couldn't pump blood fast enough to wash away all the waste, and would just chug-chug-chug till it tired itself out. When you are tired, it is time to stop and rest; for being tired means that the poisons are not being carried away from the muscles fast enough, and that your heart is working too hard.

What is it in your body that gives it stiffening to stand upright, and makes levers in your legs and arms to move it about? When you feel your body and arms and head with your fingers, what are they like? Isn't there something hard and then a soft kind of pad over it? We call the hard things bones. Your teacher will show you some. These are white and chalky looking; but when they were alive, they were a beautiful pinkish white color.



So you have a pretty pearl-colored framework, the shape of your body. This, which is called your skeleton, makes you stiff enough to stand up and walk about. Now bend your arm and turn your wrist and open and close your hand. You find that your frame-work is jointed. When you are tired standing, you can bend your joints and sit down. If you want an apple, you can close your fingers and pick it up.





What are the soft pads that you felt over the bones of your arms and legs? Stretch your right arm straight out in front of you and take hold of the upper part of it with your left hand. Now clench your right fist and bring it toward your shoulder. Can you feel the elastic pads, or bands, moving? What are they doing? They are pulling your hand up to your shoulder. When you walk, you can feel the elastic bands moving your legs along. So every move we make, these elastic ropes are at work pulling us about and letting us sit down and making us run and jump. We call them muscles.

You have perhaps seen jointed dolls. The strings and rubber bands on their joints help to make them move; but the dolls don't act as if they were alive. They have no telephone system to tell their bodies how to move.

If you will stop and think how many "moves" you make in a day, you'll know how hard your muscles have to work. They'd be quite tired out if they did not have plenty to feed on all the time and did not rest at least nine hours a day. I told you how the food is melted and carried about in the blood. It is the blood that brings the muscles their food and keeps them alive and makes them strong enough to move the joints and the bones.

What does all this playing do for you? It makes you grow not only big, but strong, too. What puny little things you'd be if you couldn't get out and run and play and make your muscles strong and your nerves do just what you tell them to do.

I know of ten or twelve little chickens that hatched a few weeks ago. There are so many cats about, that the poor little chicks have to be shut up in the barn all day. At first they ran and played and jumped on their mother's back, but now they hump their shoulders and hang their heads and don't seem hungry and look sad and sick. They are not so big as some that hatched later. Can you tell me why? Of course you can. You know that it is outdoor exercise and play that chickens need, and that you need to make you grow big and strong, too. Of course, you will have to keep your backbone straight and your chest out and your head up; but all these things will be easy for you if you are perfectly well and strong.

The school tries to take just as good care of your health and growth as it can. Your lessons are short, and you change from one to another frequently, with perhaps drills or calisthenic exercises between, so that you need not sit still too long at a time; and the seats and desks are of different sizes so that you need not sit at a desk that does not fit you. When your teacher urges you to go out of doors and play at recess time, even if you do not want to, you must think to yourself, "It will rest me and make me grow big and straight and strong."

When you come home from school, go out of doors and stay out just as long as you can. Don't let dolls or toys or picture books tempt you to stay in the house. The pictures out of doors are ever so much prettier, as soon as you learn to see them. But some of you live in crowded cities. I hope you are near a park or a playground, where you can have a good romp with other children, and use the swings and see-saws and bars, and the skating pond in winter, and the swimming pool in summer.



What fun swimming is! You can learn easily if you have a safe place and an older person to teach you the stroke. You can roll over on your back in the water, and float, and dive; but you must not stay in longer than twenty minutes, and not so long as that sometimes. As soon as you begin to feel chilly, come out. Swimming not only cleans your skin, but is splendid exercise for your lungs and muscles.

All this play out of doors will help your appetite, and that will make you ready to eat the right kind of food, and this food will get into your blood and keep your muscles firm and strong.



II. ACCIDENTS

I am going to tell you what to do in the case of some of the little accidents that may happen to anyone, and especially of the kind that children meet with in playing; but I don't want you to stop playing for fear you'll be hurt. Mother Nature can usually heal all the bumps and cuts and scratches that come from wholesome play.

You can, however, help her very much by keeping the scratch or cut perfectly clean. This is the chief thing to remember. Wash it thoroughly in clean water. Hold it under the pump, or faucet, and let the water pour down on it.

If you can, pour some antiseptic, or germ killer, over the cut, and wrap it up in a clean cloth. There is a medicine called peroxid of hydrogen, which is good for cuts and wounds, but an older person will have to put it on for you.

If the scratch is from a finger nail or the claw of a cat, or if the wound is the bite of some animal, you must be sure to have your mother or a doctor clean the wound with strong medicine. You see, nails and claws and teeth are, as a rule, dirty, and have on them germs that will get into the cut and make it swell and be very sore indeed.



Sometime you may have a cut that is deep. You will see the bright red blood spurt from it. This means that you have cut one of the blood pipes called arteries. If the cut is on the arm or the leg, you should take a cloth or bandage and tie it tightly around the arm or leg above the cut; and if that does not check the blood, put a piece of stick under the cloth and twist the stick, as in the picture. For a cut like this you must get help as soon as possible, and keep quiet, or else you will increase the flow of blood.

If you get anything in your eye, be sure not to rub the eye; don't even wink hard if you can help it. You will only make the pain worse, because you will scratch the eyeball. Let some one take out the bit of dust or the cinder or the fly, or whatever it is, as quickly as possible. Often, if you close the lids gently and hold them so, the tears will wash the speck down for you.

If you should bruise yourself, the best way to treat the bruise is to pour either quite cold or quite warm water over it, and keep this up for several minutes; or to put it into a bowl of hot water. Then tie it up in a bandage of soft cotton cloth or gauze and pour over it a lotion containing a little alcohol—about one sixth or one fourth. This, by evaporating, cools off the bruise and relieves the pain.

If your ear, or nose, or a finger should happen to be frozen or frost bitten, the best thing to do is to rub it hard with snow until it thaws out and becomes pink again. Above all, don't go too near the fire, and don't go into a very warm room too soon.

If you get one of those uncomfortable itchy swellings on your feet called chilblains, which come from cold floors in your houses, or from wet feet, or from wearing too thin shoes and stockings, don't put your feet too near the fire, but rub them well with turpentine just before going to bed at night. This will often take all the pain and itching out of them.

Sometimes people make the mistake of drinking something that is poisonous. Of course, one good way to prevent this is to have every bottle in the house carefully marked and never to take anything from a bottle without reading the mark, or label. Another good way is not to have poisons about any more than we actually need to.

Still, even so, sometimes a mistake is made. If you ever make such a mistake, the best thing to do is to drink as much warm water as you can, and into the second cupful to put a tablespoonful of dry mustard or two heaping tablespoonfuls of salt. This will make you vomit, and up will come the poison. The water makes the poison weaker. If this doesn't make you throw up the poison, have some one tickle the back of your throat with a feather. There are a great many kinds of poison and as many things to take to cure them; but this is the only remedy I shall tell you about, because, by the time you have tried this, some older person will probably have come to help you.

All the medicines that you see advertised as "Headache Cures" are dangerous poisons if taken in too large doses; and most of them in small doses weaken the heart. They are what we call narcotics; they just deaden the nerves to pain without doing anything whatever to relieve or remove the cause.

If you have a headache, the best thing to do is to go and lie down quietly and rest or sleep, until it goes away. A headache always means that something is wrong; it is one of Nature's most valuable danger signals. When your head aches, Nature is telling you that you have been over-straining your eyes, or breathing foul air, or eating some food that does not agree with you, or forgetting to go to the toilet regularly, or not getting sleep enough. The sensible thing to do is not to swallow some medicine to deaden your nerves to the pain, but to find out what you have been doing that is unhealthful for you, and then stop it.

Most of the medicines called "patent medicines," which are advertised to "cure" all sorts of pains and troubles, contain poisons, and are particularly dangerous because they easily lead one to form the habit of taking them. Nine tenths of them are either absolute frauds,—of no strength or use whatever,—or else they contain alcohol, or opium, or some of the dangerous drugs made out of coal tar.

Now about burns. You need not wash them, because the heat has killed the troublesome germs. They need to be covered from the air, if the blister is broken. Cover them thickly with olive oil or vaseline, or common baking soda mixed with a few drops of water. This makes a good paste to put over them, and it will ease the pain. (This is the way to treat a wasp or bee sting, too, after you have pulled out the "stinger.") If the blister of the burn is not broken, just keep putting vaseline or sweet oil on it every half hour or so, and the blister won't break; for the oil will make it limber and prevent it from bursting.

If ever your clothes should catch fire, do not run; the wind you make will only fan the flames, so that they burn faster. Lie down and roll over and over, as fast as you can. If there is a rug or a quilt handy, wrap yourself up tight in it. My youngest brother once saved a little child's life this way. He was not very old, but he remembered to put the child on the floor and roll him up in a rug.

However, the best way to prevent accidents with fire is to let fire and lamps and matches and kerosene and sparklers and firecrackers alone.

I am so glad that people are becoming sensible about keeping our nation's birthday, the Fourth of July, and are doing away with the firecrackers that have killed so many thousands of children. The burns you get from firecrackers are much more dangerous than other burns. A dirt-germ often gets into them that may cause lockjaw. The name tells what it is: it locks the jaws together so that its victim cannot eat; and, of course, if he cannot eat, he cannot live very long. Next Fourth of July try getting flags and bunting and drums and horns, if you like, instead of these dangerous fireworks.

In keeping the Fourth one year not long ago, one hundred and seventy-one children lost one or more fingers; forty-one lost a leg, an arm, or a hand; thirty-six lost one eye, and sixteen lost both eyes; and two hundred and fifteen children were killed! This accounts for only the children; counting everybody, five thousand three hundred and seven people were killed or hurt. No wonder we begin to think that we ought to keep the Fourth in some other way.

In the City of Washington, on one Fourth of July, one hundred and four people were taken to the hospital; but the following year when no fireworks were allowed to be sold, the hospitals did not have a single patient from the accidents of the day.



Water, as well as fire, has its dangers. If you ever fall into the water, be sure to keep your mouth shut and your hands below your chin. Then paddle with your hands gently, and you'll swim, just as any other young animal does when first thrown into the water. Even your cat, who hates water, can swim easily when she falls in. If you keep your wits as she does, you will get along as well. Some people learn to swim just by trying by themselves.



If anyone in your party, when you are out boating or swimming, should be nearly drowned, the best way to revive him is to lay him, as quickly as possible, flat on his face on level ground, just turning his head a little to one side so that his nose and mouth will not be blocked. Then, kneeling astride of his legs, put both your hands on the small of his back and press downward with all your weight while you count three. This squeezes the abdomen and the lower part of the chest so as to drive the air out of the lungs. Then swing backward so as to take the weight off your hands, while you count three again; and then swing forward again and press down, again forcing the air out of the lungs. Keep up this swing-pumping about ten or fifteen times a minute for at least ten or fifteen minutes, unless the person begins to breathe of himself before this. Don't waste any time trying to hold him up by the feet, or roll him over a barrel so as to get the water out of his lungs. Just turn him over on his face as quickly as possible and get to work making a weight-pump of yourself on his back.

If there is any life left in the body at all when it is taken out of the water, you will succeed in saving it. It is very seldom, however, that anyone who has been under water more than five minutes can be revived.

And now the thing that I want you to be sure to remember, I have saved for the last. No matter what kind of accident happens, keep your wits about you and keep cool. Be calm and think what it is best to do, instead of letting yourself be frightened. Of course, get some one to help you as soon as you can and, if need be, call for help as loud as your lungs will let you. But use that wonderful "phone" system to send in and out the messages that will help you to help yourself by telling your muscles what to do.

III. THE CITY BEAUTIFUL

One morning I stopped a moment on the street to speak to a friend. Her little nephew had just finished eating some candy, and down went his candy-bag on the pavement. His aunt happened to see it. "Oh, no, Claude," she said, "don't you see the big green can there? Better put it into that." But Claude was only three years old; and the can was so tall that he could not tell what it was, till we led him up to it.

Do you have cans like these in your town, too? It is good to think that every one of us, even such little fellows as Claude, can help to keep the city beautiful. But it is not simply to make things look nice that we have so many cans—cans for ashes, cans for papers, cans for food scraps. No indeed, it is to keep the city clean and make it fit for people to live in; for if dirty papers and scraps were left to blow about the streets, they would fill the air with germs and filth.

Any dust that blows about the streets is likely to be carrying disease germs with it. That is why we have sprinklers driven through the streets to wet them and to keep down the dust; and why, in large cities, the streets are thoroughly flooded at night. If the streets are kept damp and clean, then the air above them is cool and fresh and pure.

How does the city get rid of all the dirt and waste? From every house there are two kinds of waste. Some is taken away in pipes from the sink and bathroom out into pipes that run under the street, and these carry it away from the city to some stream or deep water that takes it entirely away from the town.

The waste stuffs that are not watery, but solid—cabbage leaves, apple cores, potato parings, and other scraps from the kitchen are carted away and burned or fed to pigs. The ashes and tin cans are carted away, also, and used in making new land or filling up hollow places.

Besides taking away the dirt, cities are careful to get clear, pure drinking water. They are very, very careful about this; and they usually have the water tested often, because, as you have learned, even water that looks perfectly pure may give people typhoid fever. That is why, when you are out in the country, on a picnic perhaps, you must not drink from the streams. They may receive the drainage from a farmer's barnyard, or the sewage from some house.

The more we all learn about these things, the more careful will the city be to protect her people. To be sure, most cities now have Boards of Health who employ men and women to go about and see that the food in the stores is clean—no flies, no dust, and no tobacco smoke on it. They have laws, too, about keeping milk clean; and in New York alone these laws have saved the lives of thousands of babies. And they have laws about the care of streets and buildings and cars and parks and a great many other things.

In all these things we have been talking about, I want you to be thinking how you can help. For a city is made up of people—boys and girls and men and women. The city is what its people make it; and everyone must help, even the smallest children, no older than little Claude.

The first and most important thing for you to do is to keep yourself clean and tidy. And the next thing is for you to keep your back yard as well as your front yard and the school yard and the street free from papers and sticks and cans and old playthings. You can put away your things when you are through playing; or, if you are making a railroad or a town or a playhouse, you can leave it looking nice and tidy. You can help chiefly by putting away your own things. You know the old saying, "A workman is known by his chips"; and a good workman always works in an orderly way.

When you eat apples or bananas or oranges, don't throw the skins or peelings about, but put them in a garbage can or swill bucket or cover them with soft dirt in the garden or stable yard; and don't throw peanut shells, or scraps of paper and the like, about the streets or parks. You should begin to notice all these things and talk about them, and that will make other people begin to think about them, too.

Then you can make gardens instead of leaving bare, untidy back yards. I think that nicely kept vegetable gardens are almost as pretty as flower gardens. If you cannot mow the lawn, you can at least cut the long grass on the edges; and that makes such a difference! It is wonderful how much boys and girls can do in making and keeping a city really beautiful.

I hope that you have plenty of room to play in now. Of course, when you grow up, you will see that there are plenty of playgrounds and parks for the children. We are beginning to find out that the richest and the most beautiful city is the one whose streets are lined with families of happy, rosy-cheeked children. So, you see, the "City Beautiful" is the one that takes best care of her children, and she can do this only by keeping her streets and houses perfectly clean and seeing that the food her people get is fresh and good, and their drinking water pure. If the city or town you live in is not like this, be sure you do your very best to make it better.





There is one great evil that for hundreds and hundreds of years has been known wherever people are crowded together, and even in the open country, too; and which has been the cause of more untidiness and uncleanliness and unhappiness and disease than any other evil ever known. And that is the drinking of alcohol. People don't drink clear alcohol, but they can get a great deal of it—enough to poison them badly—in the fermented drinks you learned about some time ago.

In the days when your grandfather was a little boy, every man thought that ale and wine and whiskey were good foods for him when he was well; and good medicine when he was sick. He believed that they gave him an appetite, and increased his strength. But now we have found, by carefully studying the effects of alcohol, in laboratories and in hospitals, that these beliefs were almost entirely mistaken. We know that all that wine, beer, and whiskey do is to make people feel better for a little while, without making them actually stronger or better in any way. In fact, in most respects these drinks make them weaker and worse instead.

Perhaps you will ask, "How do whiskey and wine and beer do us harm?" And here is only part of the answer: (1) They tire the heart and, by enlarging the blood pipes in the skin, make the heart pump too much of the blood out to the skin. In this way they make a person feel warmer when he really is not any warmer. (2) They make the liver work too hard. (3) They dull the brain, so that it cannot think so clearly or so well. (4) If one drinks them frequently, it is harder for him to get well when he is sick; more people die out of those who drink alcohol than out of those who do not.

Alcohol is a narcotic; that is, it deadens our nerves, for the time being, to any sensations of pain or discomfort, much in the same way that a very small dose of morphine or opium would. We may imagine it does us good because, for a little while after drinking it, we may cease to feel pain or fatigue or cold; but, instead of making us really better and able to do more work, it is dulling our nerves so that we work more slowly and more clumsily. Men who have carefully measured the amount of work that they do have found that they do less work on days when they take one or two glasses of beer or wine than they do on days when they drink only water.

The great insurance companies have found that those of their policy holders who drink no alcohol at all live nearly one fourth longer and have nearly one third fewer sicknesses than those who drink alcohol even in moderate amounts.

Indeed, so strong is the evidence as to the bad effects of alcohol, and so steadily is it increasing, that it will probably not be very many years more before the drinking of wine or beer by intelligent, thoughtful people will have become less than half as common as it is now.

Strong, healthy men may be able for a long time to drink small amounts of liquor without noticing any harmful effects; but all the time the alcohol may be doing serious harm to their nerves and brain and kidneys and liver and blood vessels, which they will not find out until it is too late to stop the trouble.

Useless and bad as alcohol is for full-grown men and women, it is even worse for young and growing children; and no child, and no boy or girl under the age of twenty-one, should ever touch a drop of it, except in those rare instances where it may be prescribed as a medicine by a doctor, just as many other drugs are, which in larger doses would be poisons.

Fortunately, it will be no trouble for you children to let it alone entirely; for not one of you would like the taste of it the first time—or, indeed, for the matter of that, for the first ten or twelve times—that you tried to drink it, if you should be so foolish. This is one striking difference between alcohol and all other foods and drinks. Children have absolutely no natural liking, or taste, for the drinks that contain it, as they have for meat, milk, sugar, apples, and the other real foods. This is Nature's way of telling them that it is not a real food, and not needed in any way for their growth and health. Let it alone absolutely, until you are at least twenty-one years old; and by that time you will probably have become so convinced of the harm that it is doing that you will never begin using it at all.

What we have been saying so far applies, of course, only to the moderate use of alcohol. How terrible the effects of the long or excessive use of alcohol are, you don't need to learn from a book. All you have to do is to keep your eyes open on the streets, and see the drunken men reeling along the sidewalk, and the wrecks of men that hang around the saloons. The poorhouses and the jails and the insane asylums are filled with them. The most terrible thing that can happen to anyone is to become a drunkard. The best and safest and only sensible thing to do is to keep away from the only stuff that makes drunkards. It may do you the most terrible harm, and it cannot do you the slightest good.

Your city can never become the "City Beautiful" so long as this evil mars it; and, as you grow up, I hope you will do all you can toward making the right kind of city and home.



THE EVENING MEAL

When you have had some good games of play after school, and have finished whatever errands you may have to run, or have done the chores about the barn or the garden or the house, you will begin to feel as if there were something missing somewhere. It won't take you very long to discover where that missing feeling is; and when you hear a call from the house, or a ring of the bell in the hall, you come running in for supper. If you have worked well in school and played hard and done your chores well, you will have a splendid appetite. In fact, you will think there is no other meal in the day that tastes quite so good.

Is your evening meal supper or dinner? If you have had a hot dinner at noon, you probably do not want anything more than a good supper. But if you had only luncheon, then you are ready to eat something hot and hearty about six o'clock.

What are some of the things that you like for dinner? Meat and eggs and bread and butter and jam and rice and potatoes and onions and celery and cookies and apples and oranges and oh, so many, many other things! Mother Nature has given us all these good things, that we may have not only enough to eat but plenty of different kinds. We soon grow tired of one kind, and that is how she tells us that we need many kinds.

When I was little, oranges were not so common as they are now; and I never but once had as many as I wanted. That once, my father told me to eat all I liked, and I did; but for weeks afterwards I didn't want even to see an orange! Did you ever feel that way too, though perhaps not about oranges? Nature sometimes has to teach us not to eat too much of one kind at a time.

Some people like one thing, and some another. Do all of you like onions? I think not; but those who do, like them very much. The same thing is true of tomatoes and sweet potatoes and red raspberries and oysters and many other things. But there are some things that almost everybody likes; and our grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers ate them. One of them is called the "staff of life" because we lean, or depend, on it so much; we have it for breakfast, dinner, and supper. That is bread, of course. Meat and eggs and milk and butter, too, are among the foods that we all like.

These might be called our "main foods," and we should eat one or two or even three of them at each meal. Meat and milk and eggs and butter, animals give us. But these are not enough; we need besides some of the foods that plants give us, because, as I have told you, we need different kinds of food at one time to keep the body fires going briskly.

What are some of the foods that plants give us? Bread is made from a plant—from wheat. Oatmeal comes from the oat plant; and hominy, from corn. Some of our plant foods, such as potatoes, turnips, onions, sweet potatoes, parsnips, and radishes, grow under ground. Some, such as peas and beans, grow on vines. Then there are lettuce and cabbage and celery. And there are fruits—cherries, apples, peaches, plums, pears, melons, tomatoes, berries.

Nature has given us all these foods, and many more; and she wants us to use them all. She wants us to use, every day and every meal, some foods that come from plants and some that come from animals.

A good dinner would be a slice of roast beef or mutton, a potato, a helping of some sort of vegetable like peas or beans or onions or tomatoes or celery; and a dish of milk pudding or apple dumpling, or stewed fruit with bread and butter, or pie that has only an upper crust or its under crust very well baked. When you are eating bread, remember that the crusts are the very best part, because they are well cooked and really taste the best. They are good for your teeth, too.



Perhaps, while I am talking about a good meal, I ought to talk a little about the way to eat and how to make mealtime pleasant.

Of course, to make our food soft, we must take little bites, eat slowly, and chew each mouthful a long time. Be sure to remember this. So many of the children I know eat so fast that you'd think they had to catch a train! Did you ever see anyone try to talk and chew at the same time or forget to shut his mouth while he was chewing? Wasn't it a very awkward, disagreeable sight? Think a moment, if you are tempted to talk with your mouth full, or put your knife into your mouth, or make a noise while you are eating, that these things are not pleasant for your neighbors.

Do you tell funny stories at the table and talk about happy tramps you have taken or games you have played, or about your pets or your books? If you do, your food will do you more good, and you will be helping the other people at the table, too. Mealtimes should be the happiest times in the day.



A PLEASANT EVENING

When the supper things have been cleared away, you have two hours or so before going to bed, and I dare say you look forward to these as one of the pleasantest parts of the day.

It is always best for you to take things rather easily and quietly and pleasantly for at least fifteen or twenty minutes after every meal; and after the heaviest meal of the day, whether this comes at noon or in the evening, it is better to stretch the time to half or three quarters of an hour. If you try to work or play hard right after a hearty meal, you will be drawing away to your brain or to your muscles, the blood that the stomach is trying to get for the digesting and melting of your food. I suppose that you have all found this out for yourselves; for, if you run and play too hard right after dinner, you are very soon out of breath, and if you keep up the exercise, you are quite likely to have an attack of indigestion or stomach ache. If you sit down to study directly after a meal, you soon feel heavy and lazy, and what you read doesn't seem clear to you, and in a little while you probably have a headache and an unpleasant taste in your mouth. If you try to do two important things like digestion and hard work with your brain or the muscles of your arms and legs at the same time, you will be very likely to do both of them badly.

Even if you have studying to do at night, it will be much better for you to spend half an hour or an hour in laughing and chatting, or in reading some good story, or in playing some of the many pleasant parlor games that rest you instead of tiring you, before you settle down to your books. You will find that when you do start to work, you get your lessons much more quickly and easily than if you had started in after eating.

Perhaps your sister is just waiting to show you that girls can play checkers better than boys can—"So there!" Or some of your friends have come in for a game of dominoes or authors or snap or parcheesi or stage coach or pussy-wants-a-corner, or to try that new song you learned last week; and you will be surprised how quickly the time flies away and bedtime or study hour comes.

Most evenings, however, you will probably get out your favorite magazine, or that good story that you are reading, and you will all sit around the big lamp on the center table and go off on adventures to the uttermost parts of the earth, with the best and most lasting friends that you will ever make—friends who will never grow tired of you and will always come when you want them and are always willing to talk or play—the people that live in books. Be sure to pick out the best of them for your chums—the bravest and the kindest and the most courteous, and the cleanest and the most honorable. You have the whole world to choose from; and it is never worth your while to get acquainted with cheap, badly behaved, second-rate people when you can have your pick of the best. Your mother and your father and your teacher will help you to choose, and you will soon find that what they call "good literature" is good stories, and about the right sort of men and women and boys and girls—the kind that you would like to know, and that you would want to be like. Once try it, and you find that you like that kind of reading better than you do the cheap, slangy, trashy stuff, just as you like, and never get tired of, good bread and butter and roast beef and apples and milk and cream and pudding and pie. Good sound stories of home life and adventure and travel are just as important in making your minds wholesome and happy as these good foods are in keeping your bodies strong and healthy.

Be sure that the paper of the books and magazines you read is white and not glossy, and is fairly thick and firm; for this makes them much easier to read and strains your eyes less. See, too, that the type is large and clear; for small, close type and yellow or shiny paper are very hard on the eyes.

Be sure, of course, when you sit down to read not to sit with your face to the lamp and your head bending forward; but settle yourself in a comfortable chair with your back to the light, and hold your book so that you can keep your chin up and your head erect while you read. You can breathe better, and read better, and enjoy what you read better in this position than in any other.

Even if you have sums or writing to do, it is better to sit with your back, or at least your left side, toward the light; and often you will find it a great help to sit down with your back to the light in a large easy chair and do your writing on a big, thin book, or light piece of board, on a cushion on your knee.

In winter, you will find that for the first half hour or so that you are reading after supper, you will want to keep fairly near the fire, because the blood is being drawn in from your skin to your stomach for purposes of digestion; but be sure to see that at least one, and better two, windows in the room are open six inches or so at the top, so that there is plenty of fresh air pouring into the room.



When study hour comes, take up your books and go briskly to work, forgetting that there is anything else in the world, and you will be astonished how quickly you will learn your lessons. Besides, you will be learning one of the most valuable lessons in life—to do with your might whatever your hands, or minds, find to do.



GOOD NIGHT

I. GETTING READY FOR BED

By and by the clock strikes eight or nine, and your mother says, "Children, time to go to bed!"

Sometimes you will have just come to the interesting point in the story, and would give anything to go on and finish it. But often you will be just nodding over your book, or beginning to wonder why the story is not quite so interesting as it was, or why the lines seem to be running into one another, and the book inclined to swing up and bump your nose.

If you have had a lively, busy, happy day, you are quite sleepy enough to be ready for bed—that is, if you could drop into it with all your clothes on, without all the bother and fuss of undressing. So you pull yourself together bravely and answer, "All right, mother," and say "Good night" to everybody, and upstairs you go.

Of course, you must take off your clothes, because you would find them most uncomfortable to sleep in. Besides, the little pores all over your skin have been pouring out perspiration all day long; and a great deal of this has been caught by your clothes, just as it is caught by the bedclothes while you sleep.

So it is a good thing to take off your clothes, and let your skin be well aired and cooled. Don't leave your clothes all in a heap on the floor just where you happen to shed them, but hang them up over the back of a chair or on pegs, so that the air can blow through them all night long and sweeten and clean and dry them. Clothes that are worn continuously become sour with perspiration, and for this same reason your mother gives you regularly, once or twice a week, clean underwear and clean shirts or dresses.

After you have undressed for bed, wash your face and neck and hands; and if you have a nice warm room or bathroom, take a quick splash, or sponge bath, all over, before you put on your nightgown. This will wash away from your skin everything that the perspiration has been leaving on it all day long, as well as any dust, or dirt, that may have got on it during the day.

If the room is not warm enough for you to do this, it is a good thing for you to strip to your waist and then to swing your arms about, much as you did in the morning, only not quite so long, and to rub your arms and neck and shoulders all over with your hands. This gives them an air bath, and rubs off any of the little scales of skin that may be ready to be shed, and gives you a sort of dry wash, which is next best to a wet one.

Then, when you have put on your nightdress, give your hair a thorough brushing. This is the best time of the day to do it. Dust, smoke, soot, and germs have been blowing into your hair all day long, and a thoroughly good brushing will not only get these out of it before they have had time to work their way in and lodge on the scalp, but will keep the hair bright and healthy.

Before you get into bed, give your nails a quick scrub with a nail brush and hot water and soap, and go over them with a blunt-pointed nail cleaner, cleaning out any dirt that may be under their edges, and rounding off any ragged or broken points with the file. Once a week or so, when you take your hot bath, it is a good thing to go over your toe nails in the same way, trimming them and cleaning them. Remember, however, not to round off your toe nails at the corners, but to leave them square, as in this way you will prevent them from ingrowing under the pressure of your shoes.

There is one thing that you should be very sure of before you get into bed, and that is that your teeth are as clean as it is possible for you to make them. If you attended to this also directly after supper, so much the better; for just as it is important to clean the dishes and knives and forks that you have been using, so it is important to thoroughly clean the ivory knives and forks that grow in your mouth. Talk about being "born with a silver spoon in your mouth"! You were born with something much prettier and far more valuable.

Even though your teeth make a firm and even line in front and on their cutting edges, yet there are many little gaps and spaces between their roots, where bits of food can stick. If these scraps of food are not thoroughly and carefully removed after each meal, the warmth and moisture in the mouth makes them begin to decay. The acids from this decay will be likely not only to upset your stomach and digestion, but to act upon the glassy coating of your teeth. After a little while, spots will begin to form on the surface of your teeth; they will lose their bright, shiny, pearly look; the acids will eat further into the teeth, and very soon there will be holes, or cavities.

Though your teeth are very hard and glassy looking on the surface, they are much softer and chalkier inside; this glassy coating covers only the crown, or free part, of the tooth, which you can see. It leaves the softer inside part of the tooth bare just at the edge of the gums, and particularly between the roots of the teeth, where little scraps of food lodge and decay. When the acids that are formed by the decaying food have eaten away a good deal of the inside of the tooth, the hard, shiny surface is left just like a thin shell; and one day you happen to bite down upon a piece of bone in your food, or try to crack a nut with your teeth, and "crack" goes this brittle shell of your hollow tooth.



Right in the middle of each tooth is a tiny hollow, or cavity, filled with a soft, living pulp containing one or two very sensitive nerves; and when the decay has eaten into the tooth far enough to reach this nerve pulp, it makes it ache, and then you have toothache.

The one and only thing that is necessary in order to avoid all this decay and breaking away of your teeth, and throbbing toothache, is to keep the surface of your teeth, and particularly the sides where they are next one another, clean and smooth and unbroken. And all that is needed to keep your teeth perfectly clean and smooth is to use your toothbrush thoroughly after every meal and at bedtime; and then, if there are any little scraps of food between the teeth that have not been brushed away, to pick them out gently with a quill toothpick, or take a piece of silk or linen thread, push it up between the teeth, and gently saw backward and forward until you have cleaned out the space between the roots. You should take at least three to five minutes after every meal and before you go to bed at night to brush your teeth; and you should brush not only your teeth, but the whole surface of your gums close up to where they join the lips.

It is almost as important to keep your gums pink and hard and healthy as it is to keep your teeth clean; and the same thorough brushing will do both. If the gums are perfectly healthy, they will come well down over the roots of the teeth, and keep them safely covered right down to where the glassy outer coating begins, and so leave no gap where the acids of decay can attack the teeth. Be sure to brush your teeth, not merely straight backward and forward, but up and down and round and round as well, both to clean out thoroughly all the grooves and openings between them and to brush the gums well down over the teeth.

It may seem strange, but one of the best ways to keep your teeth from growing crooked and irregular is to keep your nose clear and healthy, so that you can breathe through it freely at all times, both day and night. Crooked jaws and irregular teeth are more often caused by mouth breathing than by any other one thing.

You can see why it is best to be careful not to get grit or dirt or bits of bone in your food, and not to crack nuts or hard candy with your teeth. If you do, you may crack or scratch the delicate glassy coating of your teeth. But, on the other hand, it is a good thing to give the teeth plenty to do, and particularly to eat the crusts of bread, and some of the tougher parts of meat, and parched corn or other grains, and to eat celery, apples, and other foods that take a great deal of chewing. The teeth are like everything else in the body—they need plenty of vigorous work in order to keep them healthy.

Be very careful, though, to keep out of your mouth anything that might possibly crack or scratch the glassy coating, such as pins, pennies, pieces of wire, or slate pencils. It is best not even to try to bite off threads or pieces of string. There is, of course, another reason for not putting pencils and pennies and such things into your mouth: they may have dirt, or germs, on them and infect you with disease or at least upset your digestion.

II. THE LAND OF NOD

Now you are all ready for bed; and the white pillow and the nice, clean sheets and the warm blankets look very good to you, and you are ready to go to the "Land of Nod."

You need not be afraid of the cold at night. Open your bedroom windows. Have plenty of light-weight, warm covers; then the cold breezes won't hurt you, but will make you strong. Just think how many hours you are in bed,—nearly half of your life,—and you need fresh, moving air all the time. Be sure to open your windows from the top as well as from the bottom. You know why: your breath is warm so that it floats and rises like smoke; and if you open the window only at the bottom, this bad air, which rises to the top of the room, can't get out. It is best to have windows on two sides of a bedroom, so that the air can be kept moving through it all night long. If you don't breathe fresh air while you sleep, you will feel dull and stupid in the morning and perhaps have a headache.

So run your window shades right up to the top and throw your curtains, or shutters, back, as well as open the windows. If you don't, the fresh air cannot blow through the room properly. Even if this does let more light or noise into the room, this is of no importance whatever compared with abundance of fresh air. If you have played long enough out of doors in the daytime and have eaten a good supper and not stayed up too late, you will sleep soundly without being bothered at all by either lights or noises coming in through the windows. And no matter how cold or how light it is, don't put your head under the bedclothes. Why?

It is best for you to close your mouth while you are going to sleep, and breathe through your nose, so that the air will be properly purified and warmed before it reaches your lungs. If you can't do this, your mother can perhaps give you something to wash out your nose, so that you can breathe freely. If that does not help, you had better see a doctor, and he will find some way to clear your head so that you can use your nose comfortably.

Suppose you take a pencil and paper and write down all you did yesterday. Wasn't it enough to make you tired and sleepy and want a chance to rest? Even while you sleep, your heart keeps beating, and you don't stop breathing, of course. But your muscles are quiet, and your food tube rests. Your brain rests, too,—better in sleep than at any other time,—so that when morning comes you are as "lively as a cricket" and quite ready for the new day.