Chapter 2
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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