Chapter 9 A DRINK OF WATER

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

A SCHOOL KITCHEN WHERE BOTH BOYS AND GIRLS LEARN TO COOK