ALCOHOL.
[Illustration: A]LCOHOL looks like water, but it is not at all like
water.
Alcohol will take fire, and burn if a lighted match is held near it; but
you know that water will not burn.
When alcohol burns, the color of the flame is blue. It does not give
much light: it makes no smoke or soot; but it does give a great deal of
heat.
A little dead tree-toad was once put into a bottle of alcohol. It was
years ago, but the tree-toad is there still, looking just as it did the
first day it was put in. What has kept it so?
It is the alcohol. The tree-toad would have soon decayed if it had been
put into water. So you see that alcohol keeps dead bodies from
decaying.
Pure alcohol is not often used as a drink. People who take beer, wine,
and cider get a little alcohol with each drink. Those who drink brandy,
rum, whiskey, or gin, get more alcohol, because those liquors are nearly
one half alcohol.
You may wonder that people wish to use such poisonous drinks at all. But
alcohol is a deceiver. It often cheats the man who takes a little, into
thinking it will be good for him to take more.
Sometimes the appetite which begs so hard for the poison, is formed in
childhood. If you eat wine-jelly, or wine-sauce, you may learn to like
the taste of alcohol and thus easily begin to drink some weak liquor.
The more the drinker takes, the more he often wants, and thus he goes on
from drinking cider, wine, or beer, to drinking whiskey, brandy, or rum.
Thus drunkards are made.
People who are in the habit of taking drinks which contain alcohol,
often care more for them than for any thing else, even when they know
they are being ruined by them.
REVIEW QUESTIONS.
1. How does alcohol look?
2. How does alcohol burn?
3. What will alcohol do to a dead body?
4. What drinks contain a little alcohol?
5. What drinks are about one half alcohol?
6. How does alcohol cheat people?
7. When is the appetite sometimes formed?
8. Why should you not eat wine-sauce or
wine-jelly?
9. How are drunkards made?