Part 12

Young Manny Clyde grinned. “What’s the use, Dr. Strong?” he said. “Nothing to breathe but air, you know.”

“True enough, youngster; but you can pick your air to some extent, so it’s worth while to know where it’s good and where it’s bad. Take Chicago, for instance. It has a very high pneumonia rate, and no wonder! The air there is a whirling mass of soot. After breathing that stuff a while, the lungs lose something of their power to resist, and the pneumococcus bacillus—that’s the little fellow that brings pneumonia and is always hanging about, looking for an opening in unprotected breathing apparatus—gets in his deadly work. Somewhere I’ve seen it stated that one railroad alone which runs through Chicago deposits more than a ton of cinders per year on every acre of ground bordering on its track. Now, no man can breathe that kind of an atmosphere and not feel the evil effects. Pittsburg is as bad, and Cincinnati and Cleveland aren’t much better. We save on hard coal and smoke-consumers, and lose in disease and human life, in our soft-coal cities. When I go to any of them I pick the topmost room in the highest hotel I can find, and thus get above the worst of it.”

“Don’t tell me that New York is unfit to breathe in!” said Mrs. Clyde, with a woman’s love for the metropolis.

“Thus far it’s pretty clean. The worst thing about New York is that they dry-sweep their streets and throw all the dust there is right in your face. The next worst is the subway. When analysis was made of the tube’s air, the experimenters were surprised to find very few germs. But they were shocked to find the atmosphere full of tiny splinters of steel. It’s even worse to breathe steel than to breathe coal.”

“Any railroad track must be bad, then,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Not necessarily. A steam railroad track runs mostly in the open, and that great cleaner, the wind, takes care of most of the trouble it stirs up. By the way, the cheaper you travel, the better you travel.”

“That sounds like one of those maxims of the many that only the few believe,” remarked Mrs. Clyde.

“You won’t practice it, but you can safely believe it,” retorted the doctor. “The atmosphere in a day coach is always better than in a parlor car, because there’s an occasional direct draft through. As for a sleeping-car,—well, I never get into one without thinking of the definition in ‘Life’s’ dictionary: ‘Sleeping-Car—An invention for the purpose of transporting bad air from one city to another.’”

“The poor railroads!” chuckled Mr. Clyde. “They get blamed for everything, nowadays.”

“It may not be the Pullman Company’s fault that I don’t sleep well in traveling, but they are certainly to blame for clinging to a type of conveyance specially constructed for the encouragement of dirt and disease. Look at the modern sleeping-car: heavy plush seats; soft hangings; thick carpets; fripperies and fopperies all as gorgeous, vulgar, expensive, tawdry, and filthy as the mind of man can devise. Add to that, windows hermetically sealed in the winter months and you’ve got an ideal contrivance for the encouragement of mortality. Never do I board a sleeper without a stout hickory stick in my suit-case. No matter how low the temperature is, I pry the window of my lower berth open, and push the stick under.”

“And sleep in that cold draft!” cried Mrs Clyde.

“My dear Mrs. Clyde,” replied the doctor suavely, “will you tell me the difference between a draft and a wind?”

“Is it a conundrum?”

“No; but I’ll answer it for you. A draft is inside a house; a wind outside. You’re not afraid of wind, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then to you an air-current is like a burglar. It’s harmless enough outside the room, but as soon as it comes through a window and gets into the room, it’s dangerous.”

“Sound common sense!” put in Granny Sharpless. “Young man, I believe you’re older than you look.”

“I’m old enough to know that pure air is better than foul warm air, anyway. Here; I want you youngsters to understand this,” he added, turning to the children. “When the blood has circulated through the system, doing all the work, it gets tired out and weak. Then the lungs bring air to it to freshen it up, and the oxygen in the air makes it strong to fight against disease and cold. But if the air is bad, the blood becomes half starved. So the man who breathes stuffy, close air all night hasn’t given his blood the right supply. His whole system is weakened, and he ‘catches cold,’ not from too much air, but too little.”

“It’s often struck me,” said Mr. Clyde, “that I feel better traveling in Europe than in America. Yet our Pullmans are supposed to be the best in the world.”

“The worst!” declared Dr. Strong forcefully. “The best in luxuries, the worst in necessities. The only real good and fairly sanitary cars operated by the Pullman Company, outside of the high-priced stateroom variety, are the second class transcontinentals, the tourist cars. They have straw seats instead of plush; light hangings, and, as a rule, good ventilation. If I go to the Pacific Coast again, it will be that way.”

There was a pause, in which rose the clear whisper of Bobs, appealing to his mentor, Julia, for information.

“Say, Junkum, how did we get so far away from home?”

“High time we came back, isn’t it, Bobs?” approved the doctor. “Well, suppose we return by way of the school-house. All of you go to Number Three but Betsey, don’t you?”

“And I’m go-un next year,” announced that young lady.

“Perhaps not,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Don’t you think, Doctor, that children are liable to catch all sorts of things in the public schools?”

“Unquestionably.”

“More so than in private schools, aren’t they?”

“Hum! Well, yes; since they’re brought into contact with a more miscellaneous lot of comrades.”