Part 31

“Yes, there is,” snapped Mrs. Sharpless. “And my eyes have been seeing and seeing straight for a good many more years than yours.”

“The more credit to them and the less to you, if you’ve maltreated them with such sight-murdering print as that. Haven’t you another Bible?”

Grandma Sharpless sat down again. “I have another,” she said, “with large print; but it’s so heavy.”

“Prescription: one reading-stand. Now, Mrs. Clyde.”

The mother of the family looked up from her magazine with a smile.

“You can’t say that I haven’t large print or a good light,” she said.

“The print is good, but the paper bad,” said the Health Master. “Bad, that is, as you are holding it under a full, unqualified electric light. In reading from glazed paper, which reflects like a mirror, you should use a very modified light. In fact, I blame myself from not having had all the electric globes frosted long since. Now, I’ve kept the worst offender for the last.”

Charley detached his nose from his geography and looked up. “That’s me, I suppose,” he remarked pessimistically and ungrammatically. “I’m always coming in for something special. But I can’t make anything out of these old maps without digging my face down into ‘em.”

“That’s a true bill against the book concern which turns out such a book, and the school board which permits its use. Charley, do you know why Manny isn’t playing football this year?”

“Manny” was the oldest son of the family, then away at school.

“Mother wanted him not to, I suppose,” said the boy.

“No,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Dr. Strong persuaded me that the development he would get out of the game would be worth the risk.”

“It was his eyes,” said the Health Master. “He is wearing glasses this year and will probably wear them next. After that I hope he can stop them. But his trouble is that he—or rather his teachers—abused his eyes with just such outrageous demands as that geography of yours. And while the eye responded then, it is demanding payment now.”

“But a kid’s got to study, hasn’t he? Else he won’t keep up,” put in Bobs, much interested.

“Not at the expense of the most important of his senses,” returned the Health Master. “And never at night, at Charley’s age, or even yours, Bobs.”

“Then he gets dropped from his classes,” objected Bobs.

“The more blame to his classes. Early learning is much too expensive at the cost of eye-strain and consequent nerve-strain. If we force a student in the early years to make too great demands on his eyes, the chances are that he will develop some eye or nervous trouble at sixteen or seventeen and lose far more time than he has gained before, not reckoning the disastrous physical effects.”

“But if other children go ahead, ours must,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Perhaps the others who go ahead now won’t keep ahead later. There is a sentence in Wood and Woodruff’s textbook on the eye which every public-school teacher and every parent should learn by heart. It runs like this: ‘That child will be happier and a better citizen as well as a more successful man of affairs, who develops into a fairly healthy, though imperfectly schooled animal at twenty, than if he becomes a learned, neurasthenic asthenope at the same age.’”

Commoner Diseases of the Eye, by Casey A. Wood and Thomas A. Woodruff, pp. 418, 419.

“Antelope?” put in Bettina, who was getting weary of her exclusion from the topic. “I’ve got a picture of that. It’s a little deer.”

“So are you, Toddles,” cried the doctor, seizing upon her with one hand and Susan Nipper with the other, and setting one on each shoulder, “and we’re going to keep those very bright twinklers of yours just as fit’as possible, both to see and be seen.”

“But what of Charley and the twins?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“Everything right, so far. They’re healthy young animals and can meet the ordinary demands of school life. But no more study at night, for some years, for Charley; and no more, ever, of fine-printed maps. Some day, Charley, you may go to the Orinoco. It’s a good deal more desirable that you should be able to see what there is to be seen there, then, than that you should learn, now, the name of every infinitesimally designated town on its banks.”

“In my childhood,” observed Mrs. Sharpless, with the finality proper to that classic introductory phrase, “we thought more of our brains than our eyes.”

“An inverted principle. The brain can think for itself. The eye can only complain, and not always very clearly in the case of a child. Moreover, Mrs. Sharpless, in your school-days the eye wasn’t under half the strain that it is in our modern, print-crowded world. The fact is, we’ve made a tremendous leap forward, and radically changed a habit and practice built up through hundreds and thousands of years, and Nature is struggling against great difficulties to catch up with us.”

“I don’t understand what you are getting at,” said Mrs. Clyde, letting her magazine drop.

“Have you tried walking on all fours lately?” inquired the physician.