It is astonishing what thirsty work studying is! Scarcely is the
second recitation over before your throat begins to feel dry, and up
goes your hand--"May I get a drink?"
If anyone even says the word "water," it makes you thirsty. It is so
good that just the thought of it makes you want some. I should like
you to notice how much water you drink every day. Perhaps a glass in
the morning when you get up, and one at night before you go to bed,
and three or four in between.
Why do we need so much water? Well, how much do you weigh? Perhaps you
will find it hard to believe, but more than half of that weight is
water; and because we are always giving off water from the skin and
from the body, we need plenty more to take its place.
No living thing can grow without water. Take a bean, for instance, and
put it in an empty glass on the window sill; and even if the sun
shines full upon it, nothing will happen, except that after a few days
it will shrivel and dry up. But fill the glass with water, and in a
few hours the bean will begin to swell; and in a few days it will
burst, and a little shoot will grow out of one end of it and a tiny
root at the other. The water and the warmth together have made it
sprout and grow.
[Illustration: A DRINKING-CUP EASILY MADE]
Children at school and people on trains should have their own private
cups, for serious diseases may be caught from the mouths of other
people. You can get a metal pocket folding cup for ten or fifteen
cents, or paper ones for a few cents a dozen. If you don't have your
own cup, I hope you will get one and carry it. Here is a pattern for a
paper cup that you can easily make for yourselves. Try it and see.
When you have once learned how, you can make it very quickly and have
a fresh cup every time you want one; but of course you should be sure
first that the paper itself is clean.
If you drink milk, this takes the place of some of the water and gives
you food as well. It is both drink and food; and a very good food for
children it is, too. You know, babies can live on it because it has
everything in it to make them grow.
Do you know why it is that people are so careful nowadays about having
milk and drinking-water very clean? It is because they have found that
the tiny plants, called germs, that make people sick are often carried
about in these drinks. A disease called _typhoid fever_ is carried in
this way.
Fifty years ago, cities and towns used to be very careless about where
they got their water supply, and would often take it out of streams
into which other cities emptied their sewage. Now, however, they are
much more particular; and the health officers, or Boards of Health,
are insisting that public water supply, such as is brought into our
houses in pipes, shall be taken either from some spring or
deep-flowing well, or from a stream or lake up in the hills, into
which no drainage from houses or farmyards, and no dirty water from
factories, empties.
[Illustration: A PIPE FOR THE CITY WATER SUPPLY
This pipe is laid for many miles to bring water from the distant
hills.]
We are still, however, far from being as careful as we should be about
this; and I am sorry to say that America has had more deaths from
typhoid fever than any other civilized country. Germany, which, of all
countries in the world, is the most particular about keeping its water
supply pure, has the fewest deaths from this cause, in proportion to
its population--scarcely one fifth as many as we have.
Therefore, by taking proper care, it would be quite possible to
prevent at least two thirds of our nearly 400,000 cases of typhoid
fever and 35,000 deaths from typhoid, every year.
It is not only cities and towns that ought to be careful of their
water supply. In fact, now, out on the farms and in the healthy
country districts, the death rate from typhoid fever has actually
become higher than it is in our large cities. The main cause of this
is the custom of digging the well in such a place that the waste water
thrown out from the house, or the drainage from the barnyard or the
pigpen or the chicken-house may wash into it, soaking down through the
porous soil. Far more typhoid fever now is spread by means of infected
well water than by any other means.
Most dangerous of all is the leakage from the privy vault; as, by this
means, the germs of typhoid fever and other diseases that affect the
food tube and digestion may drain through the soil till they reach the
drinking water in the well. These dangers can be avoided either by
having the well dug at some distance from the house and in higher
ground, or by having the drainage from the house, barns, and
out-buildings piped and carried to a safe distance from the well.
Fortunately, there are only a few kinds of germs that make us sick.
Most germs are helping us all the time; we could not live without
them. Some of them make our butter taste good, and others make our
crops grow, and others eat up the dirt that would make us sick. But
since disease germs are so tiny that we cannot possibly see them with
the naked eye, we must know where the water and milk that we use come
from, and whether or not they are perfectly clean. Boiling the water
will kill these germs and make the water pure. It is better not to
boil milk if it can be had from a dairy where the stable and the cows
and the milkmen and the pails and bottles are quite clean.
The fruits and fruit juices--lemon and orange and raspberry and lime
and grape--give nice wholesome drinks. Home-made juices are much
better than those you buy; you can be sure that they are pure and
really made from fruit. And just here I want to caution you against
buying "pink lemonade" or soda water or any other drink of that sort
from the penny venders and open stalls on the street. The drinks they
sell are not made from pure fruit juices, but from different flavoring
extracts that are made to taste like the fruit and are colored with
cheap dyes. Even the sweetening in them is not pure sugar, and they
are often made or handled in a careless, dirty manner, or exposed to
the dust of the street, and to flies.
Not long ago I was at the home of a friend where for supper we had the
nicest grape juice I ever tasted. When I said, "How good it is!" one
of the little girls piped up, "Billy and I picked the grapes, and
sister made it all by herself. She learned how at cooking school."
When I was packing my suitcase to leave, this little girl brought out
a big bottle of grape juice and wanted me to take it with me to
remember her by. It was all beautifully sealed with wax, and even this
she had done by herself! Do you think I could have kept it that way
very long? Perhaps not, it was so good; but if I had wanted it for a
keepsake, I could have kept it, sealed as it was, for years and years,
and it would have been just as sweet and fresh as when it was given to
me.
Suppose, instead of keeping it in its bottle, I had poured it out into
a glass. Can you tell me what would have happened to it then?
In a few days little bubbles would have come, one after another, up to
the top of the juice; and soon it would have been all full of bubbles.
What causes the bubbles? Floating all about in the air and sunshine
are tiny specks called _spores_. These are to the tiny _yeast_ plants
what seeds are to other plants. Seeds fall into the ground and grow,
but these yeast spores fall into the grape juice and grow. While they
are growing in the grape juice, they eat what they want from the
juice; and, as they eat, they make bubbles of carbon dioxid,--which,
you remember, forms in our lungs and looks like air,--and of another
substance called _alcohol_. Of course, when they have changed the
juice in this way, it tastes very different. It is then what we call
_fermented_.
_Fermented drinks are harmful_; but some people like bubbling drinks
so much that they leave good fresh grape juice open on purpose to let
the little yeast plants get into it and make it into what we call
_wine_. They treat apple juice in just the same way to make _cider_;
and they even take fresh rye and barley and corn, and mash them up,
and put yeast plants into the mash to ferment them and make them into
_whiskey_ and _beer_. It does seem a pity, doesn't it, to take good
foods like wheat and apples and grapes and make them into these things
that really do us harm if we drink them.
A very wise man named Solomon, who lived thousands of years ago,
warned people not to drink wine, not even to look at it when it
sparkled in the cup. He said no really wise man would drink it. Of
course not; the wise man uses the food and drink that make his body
grow strong and his brain work true, and no fermented drink can do
that.
There is no better drink for anyone than clear pure water, and no
better food and drink in one than pure fresh milk.
[Illustration: A SCHOOL KITCHEN WHERE BOTH BOYS AND GIRLS LEARN
TO COOK]