Part 26

HELEN: But how does the bath room look?

MOTHER: It is a pretty pink color and seems much like a very fine sponge. If we could go inside we should find the passages divided again and again, till there are thousands and thousands of tiny air tubes, each ending in a little pouch quite like a bunch of grapes, only you should think of the grapes as being as small as a grain of sand. When the lungs are full of air, they grow larger, and when we breathe it out, they grow small.

ELMER: That is like a pair of bellows.

MOTHER: Very much the same, and the bellows will help us understand how we breathe. Try to think of a little tree with its trunk, limbs, and leaves all hollow. If air were blown through the trunk, it would make every leaf puff out, and when no air was blown in, they would fall together again. It is the same with our lungs. They keep swelling out and falling together about eighteen times every minute.

AMY: But how is the blood washed in air, mother?

MOTHER: Perhaps it would be better to say it is aired, the same as we hang a garment in the sunshine and wind to make it fresh and sweet. You will remember that the blood takes oxygen, which is a part of the air, to every part of the body-house, and this makes it warm. In exchange the muscles give the blood a poison called carbonic acid gas. This gives the blood a dark, purplish color, and it must carry away the gas and get more oxygen before it can do any more work in mending the body.

PERCY: But I would like to know how it gets into the bath room.

MOTHER: The right side of the heart, which has nothing but soiled blood in it all the time, sends it to the lungs in a hurry, and it fills the thousands of hair-like veins which are in every part of the lungs. The walls of the veins are so thin that the oxygen in the lungs soaks through into the blood, and the poison in the blood goes through into the air, and is breathed out of the body. Do you understand it now?

PERCY: I think so.

MOTHER: If I should tie a piece of bladder over a glass of milk and place the glass in a bucket of water, the milk would come through into the water, and the water would pass into the milk, even though they were in separate dishes. Another way to show how the blood is cleansed would be to say that blood and air keep running near together, each in its own room, and as they pass they say, “Good-day;” air washes blood so it becomes bright and clean, and blood makes air very dirty with its poison gas; and, after trading in this way, both hurry along as fast as they came in.

ELMER: It must be that good air is needed more than good food.

MOTHER: Why, yes; for while we need to eat only two or three times a day, we must take in air more than twenty-five thousand times. If we could not breathe for six or seven minutes, we would die, while we could live without food quite a number of days. How thankful we ought to be for pure, fresh air! And there is so much of it that we can have it without money and without price.

HELEN: Which is best, to breathe through the nose or the mouth?

MOTHER: Through the nose; for that was made for the air to pass through. Serious sickness of the throat and lungs is sometimes caused by breathing through the mouth. When the air goes this way, the person makes a very strange noise when asleep. The air seems to be trying to wake somebody up to shut the folding doors so it can go the right way. We call it snoring.

PERCY: I should think when there are so many people and animals, and all must have air to breathe, that it would soon become unfit to use.

MOTHER: We live in an ocean of air, as fishes live in the sea. The winds sweep it round and round, and everything that grows helps to make it pure.

AMY: How can that be?

MOTHER: It may be said that plants breathe, as well as people, only they need the poison gas we breathe out, and they give out the oxygen we need to breathe in. There is no danger but we can get all the air we need if we will let it into our rooms.

ELMER: But isn’t night air bad to breathe, mother?

MOTHER: No; for when it is night we can get nothing but night air. It is true that if air is shut up in a room it soon becomes unfit to breathe, whether it is night or day.

PERCY: On frosty mornings my breath looks like steam as it comes out. Is that the poison gas, mother?

MOTHER: No; we can not see the gas, but what you see is the water we breathe out. We take in about a pint of air at every breath, and it is said that every time we breathe out we spoil half a barrelful of air, making it unfit to breathe. I will let you find out how many barrelfuls of fresh air we would need in an hour.

PERCY: Why, that would be over five hundred barrels! Who ever thought that we needed such a lot of fresh air in just one hour!

MOTHER: And who, then, would think of using only one roomful in a whole night! It is no wonder that many people have a headache when they wake in the morning.

HELEN: But, mother, we can’t get clean air always, even when we are not in the house. This very day a man puffed tobacco smoke into my face as I was passing him.

AMY: But do you think it is right, mother, for any one to poison the pure, fresh air God has given us, with tobacco smoke, and make it unfit to use?

MOTHER: No; I do not; and a true gentleman will not do it. It is both rude and wrong. He not only wrongs others but harms himself. You know how it feels to get smoke into your eyes, and it is just as bad for the throat and lungs. Bad smells of any kind poison the air, making it unfit to breathe, so we should be careful to keep our rooms and everything about the house sweet and clean.

PERCY: I met a man in the street, and I could smell the whisky he had drunk. Did that come from his lungs?