Part 10

How does this sense of smell help us? You say we can smell the flowers and the fresh air after the rain, and cookies baking, and all the things that we like so well. Yes, and these give us pleasure; but how about the bad smells? The bad smells are warnings. If there is a dead mouse or rat about, we smell it; and that leads us to look for it and take it away. We smell the dirt and get rid of it, and thus keep away sickness. When we walk into a room, if the air is bad we smell it at once and open a window or a door, and so save ourselves from being poisoned.

Some people hurt their noses by smoking tobacco. The inside skin of the nose is very delicate, and the smoke going back and forth through the nose and the throat keeps them from doing their work properly. It is very bad for little children even to smell tobacco smoke. It seems in some way to keep them from growing as they would in clear fresh air. What a silly habit smoking is! It does no one any good. It hurts not only the people who make the smoke, but the people who have to smell it. Most of the people who smoke tobacco have to learn to like it. It almost always makes them very sick when they first begin.

Sir Walter Raleigh, or the men he sent to America, first taught our great-great-great-grandfathers to smoke. His men bought tobacco of the Indians here and took it back to England; and Sir Walter himself learned to smoke and made smoking fashionable. The first time that Sir Walter's servant saw him smoking, he thought his master was on fire; so what did he do but bring a big bucket of water and throw it all over him! I wish that that bucket of water had settled the matter, so that Sir Walter had stopped smoking and had never taught anyone else to smoke. If it had, think how much money might have been put to better use, for smoking is a very costly habit. And it is not only wasteful of money, but, worse still, of health; for it is the cause of a great deal of poor health and disease.

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 picture shows the brain, or "Central," and the thick nerve cord that runs down through the backbone, and the principal nerves of the back and the arms.]

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.