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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Health Master, by Samuel Hopkins Adams

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and

-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms

-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at

-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you

-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before

-using this eBook.

-

-Title: The Health Master

-

-Author: Samuel Hopkins Adams

-

-Release Date: August 2, 2018 [eBook #57543]

-[Most recently updated: April 14, 2021]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

-

-Produced by: David Widger

-

-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HEALTH MASTER ***

-

-

-

-

-THE HEALTH MASTER

-

-By Samuel Hopkins Adams

-

-Associate Fellow of the American Medical Association

-

-Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company

-

-1913

-

-

-

-

-_To George W. Goler, M.D., a type of the courageous, unselfish, and

-far-sighted health official, whom the enlightened and progressive city

-of Rochester, N. Y., hires to keep it well, on the “Chinese plan,” this

-book is inscribed, with the hope that it may, by exercising some

-influence in the hygienic education of the public, aid the work which

-he and his fellow guardians of the public health are so laboriously and

-devotedly performing throughout the nation._

-

-

-Contents

-

- INTRODUCTORY NOTE

- I. THE CHINESE PLAN PHYSICIAN

- II. IN TIME OF PEACE

- III. REPAIRING BETTINA

- IV. THE CORNER DRUG-STORE

- V. THE MAGIC LENS

- VI. THE RE-MADE LADY

- VII. THE RED PLACARD

- VIII. HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS

- IX. THE GOOD GRAY DOCTOR

- X. THE HOUSE THAT CAUGHT COLD

- XI. THE BESIEGED CITY

- XII. PLAIN TALK

- 

-

-

-

-INTRODUCTORY NOTE

-

-

-To dogmatise on questions of medical practice is to invite controversy

-and tempt disaster. The highest wisdom of to-day may be completely

-refuted by to-morrow’s discovery. Therefore, for the simple principles

-of disease prevention and health protection which I have put into the

-mouth of my Health Master, I make no claim of finality. In support of

-them I maintain only that they represent the progressive specialized

-thought of modern medical science. So far as is practicable I have

-avoided questions upon which there is serious difference of belief

-among the authorities. Where it has been necessary to touch upon these,

-as, for example, in the chapter on methods of isolation in contagious

-diseases, a question which arises sooner or later in every household, I

-have advocated those measures which have the support of the best

-rational probability and statistical support.

-

-Not only has the book been prepared in consultation with the recognized

-authorities on public health and preventive medicine, but every chapter

-has been submitted to the expert criticism of specialists upon the

-particular subject treated. My own ideas and theories I have advanced

-only in such passages as deal with the relation of the physician and of

-the citizen to the social and ethical phases of public health. To the

-large number of medical scientists, both public and private, whose

-generous aid and counsel have made my work possible, I gratefully

-acknowledge my debt. My thanks are due also for permission to reprint,

-to the _Delineator_, in which most of the chapters have appeared

-serially; to _Collier’s Weekly_, and to the _Ladies’ Home Journal_.

-

-The Author.

-

-

-

-

-I.

-THE CHINESE PLAN PHYSICIAN

-

-

-THE eleven-o’clock car was just leaving Monument Square when Mr. Thomas

-Clyde swung aboard with an ease and agility worthy of a younger and

-less portly man. Fortune favored him with an unoccupied seat, into

-which he dropped gratefully. Just in front of him sprawled a

-heavy-shouldered young man, apparently asleep. Mr. Clyde was

-unfavorably impressed both by his appearance and by the manner of his

-breathing, which was as excessive as it was unusual. As the car swung

-sharply around a curve the young man’s body sagged at the waist, and

-lopped over toward the aisle. Before Mr. Clyde’s restraining hand could

-close upon his shoulder, he had tumbled outward to the floor, and lay

-quiet, with upturned face. There was a stir through the car.

-

-“The horrid drunken creature!” exclaimed a black-clad woman opposite

-Mr. Clyde. “Why do they allow such people on the cars?”

-

-The conductor hurried forward, only to find his way blocked by a very

-tall, slender man who had quietly stepped, from a seat next the window,

-over an intervening messenger boy and the box he was carrying. The new

-arrival on the scene of action stooped over the prostrate figure. One

-glance apparently satisfied him. With a swift, sharp motion he slapped

-the inert man forcefully across the cheek. The sound of the impact was

-startlingly loud. The senseless head rolled over upon the left

-shoulder, only to be straightened out by another quick blow. A murmur

-of indignation and disgust hummed and passed, and the woman in black

-called upon the conductor to stop the assault. But Mr. Thomas Clyde,

-being a person of decision and action, was before the official. He

-caught the assailant’s arm as it swung back again.

-

-“Let him alone! What do you mean by beating a helpless man that way!”

-

-“Do you know more about this affair than I do?” The crisp query was

-accompanied by a backward thrust of the tall man’s elbow which broke

-Mr. Clyde’s hold, and—smack! smack!—the swift double blow rocked the

-victim’s head again. This time the man groaned. The car was in an

-uproar. Mr. Clyde instantly and effectively pinned the tall man’s

-elbows from behind. Some one pulled the bell, and the brakes ground,

-throwing those forward who had pressed into the aisle. Against this

-pressure, Mr. Clyde, aided by the conductor, began dragging his man

-backward. The stranger was helpless to resist this grip; but as he was

-forced away he perpetrated a final atrocity. Shooting out one long leg,

-he caught the toe of his boot under the outstretched man’s jawbone and

-jerked the chin back. This time, the object of the violence not only

-groaned, but opened his eyes.

-

-“I’ll have you in jail for that!” panted Mr. Clyde, his usually placid

-temper surging up.

-

-Other passengers began to lift the victim.

-

-“Drop him!” snapped the tall man, with such imperative decisiveness,

-that the helping hands involuntarily retracted. “Let him lie, you

-fools! Do you want to kill him?”

-

-Misgivings beset and cooled Mr. Thomas Clyde. He had now reached the

-rear platform, still holding in his powerful and disabling grasp the

-unknown man, when he heard a voice from an automobile which had been

-halted by the abrupt stop of the car.

-

-“Can I be of any help?”

-

-“Dr. Magruder!” exclaimed Mr. Clyde, “come in here, will you, and look

-at a sick man?”

-

-As the doctor stepped aboard, the captive with a violent wrench freed

-himself from Mr. Clyde’s relaxing hold and dropped from the platform

-into the darkness. Dr. Magruder forced his way through the crowd, took

-one look at the patient, and, right and left, struck him powerfully

-across the cheeks time and again, until the leaden-lidded eyes opened

-again. There was a quick recourse to the physician’s little satchel;

-then—

-

-“All right,” said the doctor cheerfully. “He’ll do now. But, my friend,

-with that heart of yours, you want to sign the pledge or make your

-will. It was touch and go with you that time.”

-

-Waiting to hear no more, Mr. Thomas Clyde jumped from the rear step and

-set off at a rapid pace, looking about him as he ran. He had not gone a

-block when he saw, by the radiance of an electric light, a tall figure

-leaning against a tree in an attitude of nerveless dejection. The

-figure straightened up.

-

-“Don’t try to man-handle me again,” advised the man, “or you may meet

-with a disappointment.”

-

-“I’ve come to apologize.”

-

-“Very well,” returned the other coolly; “I appreciate it. Many a fool

-wouldn’t go even so far.” Mr. Clyde smiled. “I own to the soft

-impeachment. From what Dr. Magruder said I judge you saved that fellow

-from the hospital.”

-

-“I judge I did—no thanks to you! You’ve a grip like a vise.”

-

-“Yes; I keep in good training,” said the other pleasantly. “A man of my

-age has to, if he is to hold up his work.” He looked concernedly at the

-stranger who had involuntarily lapsed against the tree again. “See

-here,” he added, “I don’t believe you’re well.”

-

-“No; I don’t believe I am,” answered the tall man in uncompromising

-tones; “but I do believe that it is peculiarly my own affair whether I

-am or not.”

-

-“Nonsense! Man, your nerves are on the jump. You used yourself up on

-that chap in the street car. Come across to my club and take something

-to brace you up.”

-

-People usually found it hard to resist Mr. Clyde’s quiet

-persuasiveness. The stranger, after a moment of consideration, smiled.

-

-“Begin with a fight and end with a drink?” he asked. “That’s a reversal

-of the usual process. If your cuisine runs to a cup of hot milk as late

-as this, I’d be glad to have it.”

-

-As they entered the club, Mr. Clyde turned to his guest.

-

-“What name shall I register?”

-

-The stranger hesitated. “Strong,” he said finally.

-

-“Dr. Strong?”

-

-“Well—yes—Dr. Strong if you will.”

-

-“Of what place?”

-

-“Any place—Calcutta, Paris, Mexico City, Philadelphia, Rio. I’ve tried

-‘em all. I’m a man without a country, as I am without a profession.” He

-spoke with the unguarded bitterness of shaken nerves.

-

-“Without a profession! But you said ‘Doctor.’”

-

-“A title isn’t a profession,” returned the guest shortly.

-

-Turning that over in his mind, Mr. Clyde led the way to a quiet table

-in the corner of the diningroom, where he gave his order. Observing

-that his new acquaintance was _distrait_, he swung into the easy

-conversational flow of a cultured man of the world, at the same time

-setting his keen judgment of men to work upon the other. There was much

-there to interest a close observer. The face indicated not much over

-thirty years; but there were harsh lines in the broad and thoughtful

-forehead, and the hair that waved away from it was irregularly blotched

-with gray. The eyes, very clear and liquid, were marred by an

-expression of restlessness and stress. The mouth was clear-cut, with an

-expression of rather sardonic humor. Altogether it was a face to remark

-and remember; keen, intellectual, humorous, and worn. Mr. Thomas Clyde

-decided that he liked the man.

-

-“You’ve been a traveler, Doctor?” he asked.

-

-“Yes. I’ve seen life in many countries—and death.”

-

-“And traced the relations between them, I suppose?”

-

-“Oh, I’ve flashed my little pin-point lantern at the Great Darkness in

-the fond hope of discovering something,” returned the other cynically.

-

-“In a way, I’m interested in those matters,” continued Mr. Clyde.

-“They’ve organized a Public Health League here, and made me president

-of it. More from finance than fitness,” he added, humorously.

-

-“Finance has its part, too,” said the other. “Give me millions enough

-and I’ll rid any city of its worst scourge, tuberculosis.”

-

-“Then I wish to Heaven you had the millions to spend here in

-Worthington! We’re in a bad way. Two years ago we elected a reform

-administration. The Mayor put in a new Health Officer and we looked for

-results. We’ve had them—the wrong kind. The death rate from

-tuberculosis has gone up twenty-five per cent, and the number of cases

-nearly fifty per cent since he took office.”

-

-“You don’t say so!” said the stranger, showing his first evidence of

-animation. “That’s good.” Mr. Clyde stared. “You think so? Then you’ll

-undoubtedly be pleased to learn that other diseases are increasing

-almost at the same rate: measles, scarlet fever, and so on.”

-

-“Fine!” said Dr. Strong.

-

-“And finally, our general mortality rate has gone up a full point. We

-propose to take some action regarding it.”

-

-“Quite right. You certainly ought to.” Something in his guest’s tone

-made Mr. Clyde suspicious. “What action would you suggest, then? he

-asked.

-

-“A vote of confidence in your Health Officer.”

-

-“You propose that we indorse the man who is responsible for a marked

-rise in our mortality figures?”

-

-“Certainly.”

-

-“In the name of all that’s absurd, why?”

-

-“Let me answer that by another question. If disease appears in your

-household, do you want your doctor to conceal it or check it?”

-

-Mr. Clyde took that under advisement. “You mean that this city has been

-concealing its diseases, and that Dr. Merritt, our new Health Officer,

-is only making known a condition which has always existed?” he asked

-presently.

-

-“Haven’t you just told me so?”

-

-“When did I tell you anything of the sort?” The younger man smiled.

-“That’s five questions in a row,” said he. “Time for an answer. You

-said that deaths from tuberculosis had increased twenty-five per cent

-since the new man came in.”

-

-“Well?”

-

-“You’re wrong. Tuberculosis doesn’t increase in sudden leaps. It isn’t

-an epidemic disease, rising and receding in waves. It’s endemic, a

-steady current.”

-

-“But look at the figures. Figures don’t lie, do they?”

-

-“Usually, in vital statistics,” was the imperturbable reply. “In this

-case, probably not. That is, they don’t lie to me. I’m afraid they do

-to you.” Mr. Clyde looked dubiously at the propounder of this curious

-suggestion and shook his head.

-

-“Don’t get it?” queried Dr. Strong. “Perhaps you recall the saying of

-Thoreau—I think it the profoundest philosophical thought of the New

-World—that it takes two to tell the truth, one to speak and one to hear

-it.”

-

-“You mean that we’ve misinterpreted the figures? Why, they’re as plain

-as two and two.”

-

-“Truth lies behind figures, not in them,” said Dr. Strong. “Now, you’re

-worried because of a startling apparent swelling of the tuberculosis

-rate. When you find that sort of a sudden increase, it doesn’t signify

-that there’s more tuberculosis. It signifies only that there’s more

-knowledge of tuberculosis. You’re getting the disease more honestly

-reported; that’s all. Dr. Merritt—did you say his name is?—has stirred

-up your physicians to obey the law which requires that all deaths be

-promptly and properly reported, and all new cases of certain

-communicable diseases, as well. Speaking as a doctor, I should say

-that, with the exception of lawyers, there is no profession which

-considers itself above the law so widely as the medical profession.

-Therefore, your Health Officer has done something rather unusual in

-bringing the doctors to a sense of their duty. As for reporting, you

-can’t combat a disease until you know where it is established and

-whither it is spreading. So, I say, any health officer who succeeds in

-spurring up the medical profession, and in dragging the Great White

-Plague out of its lurking-places into the light of day ought to have a

-medal.”

-

-“What about the other diseases? Is the same true of them?”

-

-“Not to the same extent. No man can tell when or why the epidemic

-diseases—scarlet fever, measles, whooping-cough, and diphtheria—come

-and go. By the way, what about your diphtheria death rate here?”

-

-“That is the exception to the rule. The rate is decreasing.”

-

-Dr. Strong brought his hand down flat on the table with a force which

-made his cup jump in its saucer. “And your misnamed Public Health

-League proposes to take some action against the man who is shown, by

-every evidence you’ve suggested thus far, to be the right man in the

-right place!”

-

-“How does the diphtheria rate show in his favor any more than the other

-death rates against him?”

-

-“Because diphtheria is the one important disease which your medical

-officer can definitely control, and he seems to be doing it.”

-

-“The only important one? Surely smallpox is controllable?”

-

-“Smallpox is the poisoned arrow of the fool-killer. It is controllable;

-but it isn’t important, except to fools and anti-vaccination bigots.”

-

-Mr. Thomas Clyde softly rubbed his cleanshaven chin, a sign and token

-with him that his mind was hard at work.

-

-“You’re giving me a new view of a city in which I’ve lived for the

-first and last forty-five years of my life,” he said presently. “Are

-you familiar with conditions here?”

-

-“Never have been here before, and have no reason to suppose that I

-shall ever return. Traveling at night is too much for me, so I stopped

-over to have a look at a town which has been rather notorious among

-public health officials for years.”

-

-“Notorious!” repeated Mr. Clyde, his local pride up in arms.

-

-“For falsifying its vital statistics. Your low mortality figures are a

-joke. Worthington has been more jeered at, criticized, and roasted by

-various medical conventions than any other city in the United States.”

-

-“Why, I’ve never seen anything of that sort in the papers.”

-

-Dr. Strong laughed. “Your newspapers print what you want to read; not

-what you don’t want to read. They follow the old adage, ‘What you don’t

-know won’t hurt you.’ It’s a poor principle in matters of hygiene.”

-

-“So one might suppose,” returned the host dryly. “Still you can

-scarcely expect a newspaper to run down its own city. I’ve known

-business to suffer for a year from sensational reports of an epidemic.”

-

-The other grunted. “If a pest of poisonous spiders suddenly bred and

-spread in Worthington, the newspapers would be full of it, and

-everybody would commend the printing of the facts as a necessary

-warning and safeguard. But when a pest of poisonous germs breeds and

-spreads, Business sets its finger to its lips and says, ‘Hush!’ and the

-newspapers obey. You’re a business man, I assume, Mr. Clyde? Frankly, I

-haven’t very much sympathy with the business point of view.”

-

-He rose and pushed his chair back.

-

-“Wait a moment,” said the other. “Sit down. I have something that may

-be of importance to suggest to you. It occurs to me that Worthington

-would be the better for having a man with your ideas as a citizen. Now,

-supposing the Public Health League should offer you—”

-

-“I am not at present in medical practice,” broke in the other.

-

-“Even at that, I was thinking that you would be of use as an advisory

-physician and scientific lookout.”

-

-For a moment, the other’s face brightened, an indication which Mr.

-Clyde was quick to note. But instantly the expression of eagerness died

-out.

-

-“Ten hours a day?” said Dr. Strong. “It couldn’t be done properly in

-less time. And I’m a mere nervous wreck, bound for the scrap-heap.”

-

-“Would you mind,” said Mr. Clyde very gently, “telling me what’s wrong?

-I’m not asking without a purpose.”

-

-Dr. Strong held out his long arms before him. “I’m a surgeon without a

-right hand, and a bacteriologist without a left.” The sinewy and pale

-hands shook a little. “Neuritis,” he continued. “One of the diseases of

-which we doctors have the most fear and the least knowledge.”

-

-“And with the loss of your occupation, general nervous collapse?” asked

-Mr. Clyde. Being himself a worker who put his heart into his work, he

-could guess the sterile hopelessness of spirit of the man banned from a

-chosen activity.

-

-Dr. Strong nodded. “I may still be fit for the lecture platform as a

-dispenser of other men’s knowledge. Or perhaps I’ll end up as medical

-watchdog to some rich man who can afford that kind of pet. Pleasing

-prospect, isn’t it, for a man who once thought himself of use in the

-world?”

-

-“Good idea,” said Mr. Clyde quietly. “Will you try the position with my

-family?”

-

-The other stared in silence at his questioner.

-

-“Just consider my situation for a moment. As you know, I’m a layman,

-interested in, but rather ignorant of, medical subjects. As wealth goes

-in a city of one hundred and fifty thousand population, I’m a rich man.

-At any rate, I can afford a considerable outlay to guard against

-sickness. In the last five years I suppose disease has cost my

-household ten thousand dollars in money, and has cost me, in worry and

-consequent incapacity for work, ten times that amount. Even at a large

-salary you would doubtless prove an economy. Come, what do you say?”

-

-“You know absolutely nothing of me,” suggested the other.

-

-“I know that you are a man of quick and correct judgment, for I saw you

-in action.” The other smiled. “You are, for reasons which are your own,

-not very expansive, as to your past professional career. I’m content

-with that attitude of yours, and I’m quite satisfied to base my offer

-on what I have been able to judge from your manner and talk. Without

-boasting, I may say that I have built up a great manufacturing plant

-largely on my judgment of men. I think I need you in my business of

-raising a family.”

-

-“How much of a family?”

-

-“Five children, their mother and their grandmother. I may warn you at

-once that you’ll have a jealous rival in Grandma. She’s the household

-guardian, and pretty ‘sot’ in her ideas. But the principal thing is for

-you to judge me as I’ve judged you, and determine whether we could work

-out the plan together.”

-

-Dr. Strong set his chin in one thin, cupped hand and gazed

-consideringly upon the profferer of this strange suggestion. He saw a

-strong-built, clear-skinned man, whose physical aspect did not suggest

-the forty-five years to which he had owned. Mr. Clyde recommended

-himself at first sight by a smooth-voiced ease of manner, and that

-unostentatious but careful fitness of apparel which is, despite wise

-apothegms to the contrary, so often an index of character. Under the

-easy charm of address, there was unobtrusively evident a quick

-intelligence, a stalwart self-respect, and a powerful will.

-

-Yet, the doctor noted, this man had been both ready and fair in

-yielding his judgment, under the suggestion of a new point of view.

-Evidently he could take orders as well as give them.

-

-“Well,” said Mr. Clyde, “have you appraised me?”

-

-The weary eyes of the other twinkled a little. “Physically you disclose

-some matters plainly enough, if one wishes to show off in the Sherlock

-Holmes manner. For instance, you’ve recently been in the tropics; your

-eyesight is better than your hearing, you drink lightly if at all, and

-don’t use tobacco in any form; you’ve taken up athletics—handball

-principally—in recent years, as the result of a bad scare you got from

-a threatened paralytic attack; and your only serious illness since then

-has been typhoid fever.”

-

-Mr. Clyde laughed outright. “If you had started our acquaintance that

-way,” he said, “I’d have thought you a fortune-teller. Part of it I can

-follow. You noticed that I kept my left ear turned, of course; and the

-fact that my nose shows no eyeglass marks would vouch for my eyesight.

-Did you judge me a non-smoker because I forgot to offer you a

-cigar—which deficiency I’ll gladly make up now, if it isn’t too late.”

-

-“Partly that—no, thank you. I’m not allowed to smoke—but principally

-because I noticed you disliked the odor of my hot milk. It is

-offensive, but so faint that no man without a very keen sense of smell

-would perceive it across a table; no tobacco-user preserves his sense

-of smell to any such degree of delicacy. As for the drink, I judged

-that from your eyes and general fitness.”

-

-“And the handball, of course, from my ‘cushioned’ palms.”

-

-“Obviously. A man at the heart of a great business doesn’t take up

-violent indoor exercise without some special reason. Such a reason I

-saw on the middle finger of your left hand.”

-

-Holding up the telltale member, Mr. Clyde disclosed a small dark area

-at the side of the first joint.

-

-“Leaky fountain-pen,” he remarked.

-

-“As you are right-handed naturally, but write with your left hand, it’s

-clear that you’ve had an attack of writer’s paralysis—”

-

-“Five years ago,” put in Mr. Clyde.

-

-“And that your doctor made good use of the salutary scare it gave you,

-to get you to take up regular exercise.”

-

-“And, incidentally, to cut out my moderate, occasional cocktail. Now,

-as to the tropics and the typhoid?”

-

-“The latter is a guess; the former a certainty. Under your somewhat

-sparse long hair in front there is an outcropping of very fine hairs.

-Some special cause exists for that new growth. The most likely cause,

-at your age, is typhoid. As you’ve kept in good training, it isn’t

-likely that you’d have had any other serious ailment recently. On that

-I took a chance. The small scars at the back of your ears could be

-nothing but the marks of that little pest of the tropics, the _bête

-rouge_. I’ve had him dug out of my skin and I know something of him.”

-

-“Right on every count,” declared Mr. Clyde. “You’ve given me cumulative

-proof of your value to me. I’ll tell you. Forget formalities. Let me

-‘phone for a cab; we’ll go to your hotel, get your things, and you come

-back with me for the night. In the morning you can look the ground

-over, and decide, with the human documents before you, whether you’ll

-undertake the campaign.”

-

-The younger man smiled a very pleasant and winning smile. “You go

-fast,” said he. “And as in all fast motion, you create a current in

-your direction. Certainly, if I’m to consider your remarkable plan I’d

-best see the whole family. But there’s one probable and perhaps

-insurmountable obstacle. Who is your physician?”

-

-“Haven’t such a thing in the house, at present,” said Mr. Clyde

-lightly. Then, in a graver tone, “Our old family physician died six

-months ago. He knew us all inside and out as a man knows a familiar

-book.”

-

-“A difficult loss to replace. Knowledge of your patient is half the

-battle in medicine. You’ve had no one since?”

-

-“Yes. Six weeks ago, my third boy, Charley, showed signs of fever and

-we called a distant cousin of mine who has a large practice. He felt

-quite sure from the first that it was diphtheria; but he so managed

-matters that we had no trouble with the officials. In fact, he didn’t

-report it at all, though I believe it was a very light case of the

-disease.”

-

-Dr. Strong’s eyes narrowed. “At the outset, I’ll give you two bits of

-advice, gratis, Mr. Clyde. First, don’t ever call your doctor-cousin

-again. He’s an anarchist.”

-

-“Just what do you mean by that?”

-

-“It’s plain enough, isn’t it? Anarchist, I said: a man who doesn’t

-believe in law when it contravenes his convenience.”

-

-Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin again. “Hum,” he remarked. “Well! the second

-gift of advice?”

-

-“That you either respect the law yourself or resign the presidency of

-the Public Health League.” A distinct spot of red appeared on each of

-the elder man’s smooth cheeks. “Are you trying to provoke me to a

-quarrel?” he asked brusquely.

-

-Then his expression mollified. “Or are you testing me?”

-

-“Neither. I’m giving you my best and most honest advice. If you expect

-me to do as your substitute physician did, to guard your household in

-violation of the law which tries to protect the whole public equally,

-you’ve got the wrong man, and your boasted judgment has gone askew,”

-was the steady reply.

-

-Mr. Clyde turned and left the room. When he returned his hand was

-outstretched.

-

-“I’ve taken three swallows of cold air, and sent for a cab,” he said.

-“Shake hands. I think you and I will be friends. Only—train me a little

-gently at the outset. You’ll come with me?”

-

-“Yes,” said Dr. Strong, and the two men shook hands.

-

-During the drive Mr. Clyde expounded the virtues and characteristics of

-his native city to his new acquaintance, who was an excellent listener.

-Long afterward he found Dr. Strong acting on remembered and shrewdly

-analyzed information given in that first long talk. When they reached

-the big, rambling, many-windowed house which afforded the growing Clyde

-family opportunity to grow, the head of the household took his guest to

-an apartment in one of the wings.

-

-“These two rooms are yours,” he said. “I hope you’ll be like Coleridge

-who came to visit with one satchel and stayed five years.”

-

-“That remains to be seen to-morrow,” said Dr. Strong. “By the way, as I

-usually read myself to sleep, you might leave me some of your local

-health reports. Thus I can be looking the ground over.”

-

-“All I’ve got you’ll find on the shelf over the desk. Good-night!”

-

-Being of that type of man who does his thinking before and not after a

-decision, Mr. Thomas Clyde arose in the morning with an untroubled mind

-as to his new venture in household economics. Voices from the library

-attracted him thither, as he came downstairs, and, entering, he beheld

-his guest hedged in a corner by the grandmother of the Clyde household.

-

-“Don’t tell me, young man,” the old lady was saying, in her clear,

-determined voice. “You’ve not slept well for ages! I know that kind of

-an eye.”

-

-“Mrs. Sharpless has been diagnosing my case, Mr. Clyde,” called the

-guest, with a rather wry smile.

-

-“You stay here for a while,” said she vigorously, “and I’ll cocker you

-up. I don’t believe you even eat properly. Do you?”

-

-“Maybe not,” admitted the young man. “We doctors are sometimes less

-wise for ourselves than for others.”

-

-“Oh! So you’re a doctor?” asked the grandmother with a shrewd,

-estimating glance.

-

-“Dr. Strong is, I hope, going to stay with us awhile,” explained her

-son-in-law.

-

-“Good!” said Mrs. Sharpless. “And I’ll take care of him.”

-

-“It’s a strong inducement,” said Dr. Strong gracefully. “But I want a

-little more material on which to base a decision.”

-

-“Between us Grandma and I ought to be able to answer any questions,”

-said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“About sickness, then, in the family. I’ve already introduced myself to

-Mrs. Clyde and questioned her; but her information isn’t definite.”

-

-“Myra seldom is,” observed Mr. Clyde. “It’s part of her charm. But

-Grandma Sharpless has been keeping a daybook for years. Everything

-that’s ever happened, from the cat’s fits to the dressmaker’s misfits,

-is in that series. I’ve always thought it might come in handy

-sometime.”

-

-“Just the thing!” said Dr. Strong heartily. “Will you bring it, Mrs.

-Sharpless? I hope you’ve included your comment on events as well as the

-events themselves.”

-

-“My opinions are generally pronounced enough so that I can remember

-‘em, young man,” returned Mrs. Sharpless, as she departed for the

-desired volumes.

-

-“That last remark of yours sounded a little like making fun of

-Grandma,” suggested Mr. Clyde, as the door closed after her.

-

-“Far from it,” retorted Dr. Strong quickly. “Can’t you see that she’s a

-born diagnostician? She’s got the sixth sense sticking out all over

-her. Women more often have it than men. When a doctor has it, and

-sometimes when he’s only able to counterfeit it, he becomes great and

-famous.”

-

-“Now that you speak of it, I remember my wife’s saying that when she

-was a girl and lived in the country, her mother was always being sent

-for in cases of illness.”

-

-Dr. Strong nodded. “Heretical though it is to say so, I would rather

-have the diagnosis of such a woman, in an obscure case, than of many a

-doctor. She learns in the school of experience.”

-

-Here, Mrs. Sharpless returned, carrying several diaries.

-

-“These go five years back,” said she. “You’ll find ‘em pretty complete.

-We’ve had our fair share of trouble; measles, whooping-cough,—I thought

-Betsy was going to bark her poor little head off,—mumps, and

-chicken-pox. I nursed ‘em through, myself.”

-

-“All of them?”

-

-“All of ‘em didn’t have all the things because Tom Clyde sent the rest

-away when one of ‘em came down. All nonsense, I say. Better let ‘em get

-it while they’re young, and have done with it.”

-

-“One of the worst of the old superstitions,” said Dr. Strong quietly.

-

-“Don’t tell me, young man! Doctor or no doctor, you can’t teach me

-about children’s diseases. There isn’t any of those measly and mumpy

-ones that I’m afraid of. Bobs _did_ scare me, though, with that queer

-attack of his.”

-

-“Bobs,” explained Mr. Clyde, “is Robin, one of the eight-year-old

-twins.”

-

-“Tell me about the attack.”

-

-“When _was_ it?” said the grandmother, running over the leaves of a

-selected diary. “Oh, here it is. Last March. It was short and sharp.

-Only lasted three days; but the child had a dreadful fever and pretty

-bad cramps.”

-

-“Anything else?”

-

-“Why, yes; though that idiot of a cousin of Tom’s snubbed me when I

-told him about it. The boy seemed kind of numb and slow with his hands

-for some time after.”

-

-“And now?” So sharp came the question that Mr. Clyde glanced at the

-speaker, not without apprehension.

-

-“Nothing left of it that I can see.”

-

-“What had you in mind?” asked Mr. Clyde of the doctor, curiously.

-

-“Speaking technically, anterior poliomyelitis.” Grandma Sharpless

-laughed comfortably. “I’ve noticed that a very long name like that

-usually means a sore toe or a pimple behind your ear. It’s the short

-names that bring the undertaker.”

-

-“Shrewdly said, but exception noted,” said Dr. Strong.

-

-“As for Bobs, I remember two cases I saw at Clinton years ago, like

-that attack of his. One of ‘em never walked afterward, and the other

-has a shriveled hand to this day.”

-

-Dr. Strong nodded. “To come down nearer to English, that’s infantile

-paralysis, one of the mysteries of medicine. I’ll tell you some things

-about it some day. Your Bobs had a narrow escape.”

-

-“You’re sure it is an escape?” asked the father anxiously.

-

-“If Mrs. Sharpless is satisfied that there’s no trace left, I am.”

-

-“Come in to breakfast,” said Mrs. Clyde, entering the room with a child

-attached to either hand. She was a tall, fair woman with the charm of

-fresh coloring and regular features, large, intelligent eyes, and a

-somewhat restless vigor and vitality. That her husband and children

-adored her was obvious. One had to look twice to perceive that she was

-over thirty; and even a careful estimate did not suggest her real age

-of thirty-seven.

-

-During the introductory meal, Dr. Strong talked mostly to her, but he

-kept watching the children. And when it was over, he went to his study

-and made an inventory, in the order of age.

-

-GRANDMA SHARPLESS;

-_Probably 70; sound and firm as a good apple; ought to live to be 90.

-Medical demands, none._

-

-MR. CLYDE;

-_45; sturdy, restrained, active, phlegmatic: Tends to

-over-concentration; his own best physician._

-

-MRS. CLYDE;

-_35; possibly more. Quick-witted, nervously active; eager, perhaps a

-little greedy of enjoyment. Somewhat intemperate; probably in eating,

-possibly in the use of tea or candy. An invariably loving mother; not

-invariably a wise one._

-

-MAYNARD, _otherwise_ “MANNY” CLYDE;

-_14 years old; rangy, good-tempered, intelligent boy with a good

-physical equipment._ (_Note: watch his eyes._)

-

-ROBIN, _alias_ BOBS _and_ JULIA (_mysteriously_) JUNKUM;

-_8-year old twins; Bobs, quick and flashing like his mother; Julia,

-demure, thoughtful, a little lethargic, and with much of her father s

-winning quality of friendliness._ (_Note: test Bobs for reflexes. Watch

-Julia's habits of play._)

-

-CHARLES;

-_Aged 7; strong rough-and-tumble urchin, the particular pet of his

-grandmother._ (_Note: watch his hand motions._)

-

-BETTINA, _alias variously_ BETSY, TOOTS, TWINKLES, _and the_ CHERUB;

-_4 years old; a Duck_ [here the human side of the doctor broke

-through], _though a little spoiled by her father._ (_Note: a

-mouth-breather; the first case to be considered._)

-

-ADDENDUM;

-_Various servants, not yet identified or studied; but none the less

-members of our household community._

-

-

-This catalogue Dr. Strong put away, with Grandma Sharpless’s day books,

-for further notation and amplification. Then he made three visits: one

-to the Health Bureau, one to the Water Department, and one to the City

-Engineer’s office, where he spent much time over sundry maps. It was

-close upon dinner-time when he returned, and immediately looked up Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“Well?” said that gentleman.

-

-“Assuming that I accept your offer it should be understood that I’m

-only a guardian, not, a physician.”

-

-“Meaning—”

-

-“That I shall expect, in emergency, to call in such physicians or

-others as I consider best equipped for the particular task.”

-

-“Very well. But why that phrase ‘or others’?”

-

-“I’ve suggested before that I am a heretic. In certain instances I

-might want an osteopath, or, if I were dealing with a sick soul causing

-a sick body, I might even send for a Christian Scientist.”

-

-“You have a refreshingly catholic breadth of view.”

-

-“I’m trying to map out for you, a rich man, as good treatment as a very

-poor man would have in a hospital—that is, the best technical advice

-for every hygienic emergency that may arise—plus some few extensions of

-my own. Now we come to what is likely to prove the stumbling-block.”

-

-“Set it up.”

-

-“If I’m to take this job, I must be the autocrat, in so far as my own

-department is concerned. As you know, a city health official’s powers

-are arbitrary. He can burn your house down; he can imprison you; he can

-establish a military régime; he can override or undo the laws which

-control the ordinary procedure of life. Hygienic law, like martial law,

-supersedes rights in crises. You are asking me to act as health officer

-of your house. If I’m to do my work, I must have full sway, and I shall

-expect you to see that every member of your household obeys my

-orders—except,” he added, with a twinkle, “Grandma Sharpless. I expect

-she’s too old to take orders from any one. Diplomacy must be my agent

-with her.”

-

-Mr. Clyde pondered. “That’s a pretty wide authority you’re asking.”

-

-“Yes, but I shall use it only in extreme cases. I shall deal

-extensively in advice and suggestion, which you may take or leave as

-you choose. But an order will mean a life or death matter.”

-

-“Agreed. Now, as to terms—”

-

-“Let the terms go, until we see how much I can save you. Meantime,

-don’t overestimate what I undertake to do. Suppose you just run through

-the roster of what you consider the danger points, and I’ll tell you

-how far I can promise anything.”

-

-“First, then, tuberculosis, of course.”

-

-“Practical immunity from that, as long as you maintain your present

-standards of life.”

-

-“Typhoid fever. As I told you, we’ve had one visitation.”

-

-“There’s no reason why you should ever have another if the children

-will take ordinary precautions.”

-

-“Diphtheria?”

-

-“We can’t guarantee the youngsters against getting it, though we can do

-something to protect them. And if they do get it, we can be pretty

-certain of pulling them through.”

-

-“Scarlet fever and measles?”

-

-“Why not add whooping-cough and influenza? The former kills as many

-people as either scarlet fever or measles, and the latter twice as

-many. They’re all in the same category; medical science is pretty near

-helpless against their onset. You and your family may be as rigidly

-careful as they will; if the family next door, or a family at the

-farthermost end of the town, is careless, we’re as likely as not to

-suffer for their sins. All that I can promise, then, is hope against

-the occurrence of these diseases, and the constant watchfulness, when

-they come, which they call for but don’t always get.”

-

-“Cancer?”

-

-“Eternal vigilance, again; so that, if it does come, we may discover it

-in time.”

-

-“Let me see,” mused Mr. Clyde; “what else is there? Oh—nervous and

-functional disorders.”

-

-“Functional disorders mean, usually, either a bad start, or the

-heritage of some disease like scarlet fever or grippe, or excess or

-carelessness in living. I think your household is free from them; and

-it should remain free. As for nervous ailments, they commonly mean lack

-of self-discipline. It may be overindulgence in work”—he glanced down

-at his right hand—“or it may be overindulgence in play.” His glance

-wandered significantly to the doorway, through which the voice of Mrs.

-Clyde could be heard. “By the way, you’ve left out the greatest

-destroyer of all—perhaps because you’re beyond the danger point.”

-

-“Tuberculosis is the greatest destroyer, isn’t it?”

-

-“Not numerically. It is beaten out by the death record of intestinal

-poisoning in the very young. Your flock has run the gamut and come

-through with undiminished vitality. Two of them, however, are running

-life’s race under a handicap”—the father’s eyelids went up—“which I’ll

-take up shortly, when I’ve fully determined the causes. They can be

-repaired, one readily, the other in time. Finally, I hope to be able to

-teach them the gospel of the sound, clean mind in the sound, clean

-body. In a desert I might guarantee immunity from most of the ills that

-flesh is heir to. Amid the complexities of our civilization, disease

-and death are largely social; there is no telling from what friend the

-poison may come. No man can safeguard his house. The most he can hope

-for is a measure of protection. I can offer you nothing more than that,

-under our compact.”

-

-“That is enough,” returned Mr. Clyde. He took from his inner pocket a

-folded paper, which he handed over to the young man. “There’s the

-contract, duly signed. Come in, Grandma.”

-

-Mrs. Sharpless, entering the door, stopped on seeing the two men.

-

-“Business, Tom?” she asked.

-

-“Business that you’re interested in,” said her son-in-law, and briefly

-outlined his plan.

-

-Grandma Sharpless shook a wise gray head. “I’m glad you’re going to

-stay, young man,” said she. “You need looking after. But as for the

-scheme, I don’t hold much with these new-fangled notions.”

-

-“Perhaps it isn’t as new-fangled as you suppose,” returned the head of

-the household. “I’ve just given Dr. Strong a contract, and where do you

-suppose I got it?”

-

-“That lawyer man of yours, probably,” said Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“Well, he looked it over and made sure it was sound in American law.

-But essentially it’s a copy of a medical contract in force before

-Hippocrates ever rolled a pill. It’s the old logical Chinese form,

-whereby the doctor’s duty is prescribed as warding off sickness, not

-curing it. Is that old-fashioned enough for you, grandma?”

-

-“Chinese! My land!” said the old lady. “What do they know about

-sickness?”

-

-“They know the one most important fact in all medical practice, ma’am,”

-said Dr. Strong, “that the time for locking the stable door is before

-the horse is stolen, and that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound

-of cure.”

-

-

-

-

-II.

-IN TIME OF PEACE

-

-

-“How is the Chinese plan working?” asked Mr. Thomas Clyde, stretching

-himself on the lounge in Dr. Strong’s study.

-

-One week before, the doctor had been officially installed, on the

-Oriental principle of guarding the Clyde household against intruding

-sickness. In that time he had asked few questions. But Mr. Clyde,

-himself a close observer, noted the newcomer’s quietly keen observation

-of the children, and sometimes of Mrs. Clyde, as they met at mealtime.

-He had remarked, too, that the nervous tension of the man was relaxing;

-and guessed that he had found, in his new and unique employment,

-something of that panacea of the troubled soul, congenial work. Now,

-having come to Dr. Strong’s wing of the house by request, he smilingly

-put his question, and was as smilingly answered.

-

-“Your Chinese physician has been making what the Chinese call a

-‘go-look-see.’ In other but less English terms, a reconnaissance.”

-

-“In what department?”

-

-“Earth, air, and water.” The other waved an inclusive hand.

-

-“Any results?”

-

-“Oh, all kinds. Preliminary report now ready. I’d like to make it a

-sort of family conference.”

-

-“Good idea! I’ll send for Mrs. Clyde and Grandma Sharpless.”

-

-“Children out of town?” inquired Dr. Strong suggestively.

-

-“Of course not. Oh, I see. You want us all. Servants, too?”

-

-“The cook certainly. She should be very important to our council of

-war. Perhaps we might leave the rest till later.”

-

-They gathered in the spacious study; and Grandma Sharpless glanced

-round approvingly.

-

-“It’s like family prayers,” she commented.

-

-“Concerted effort _is_ a sort of prayer, if it’s honest,” said Dr.

-Strong gravely. “I’ve never had much of an opinion of the man who gets

-up in meeting to beg the Lord for sound health for himself and family

-and then goes home and sleeps with all his windows closed.”

-

-“There are no closed windows in this house,” said Grandma Sharpless

-emphatically. “I see to that, having been brought up on fresh air

-myself.”

-

-“You show it,” returned the doctor pleasantly.

-

-“And I’ve noticed that this house breathes deep at night, through

-plenty of open windows. So I can save my own breath on that topic. Just

-now I want to talk milk.”

-

-“All our milk comes from my farm,” said the head of the family. “Cows

-are my hobby. You ought to see the place, Strong; it’s only ten miles

-out.”

-

-“I have seen the place.”

-

-“What do you think of it?”

-

-“I think you’d better get your milk somewhere else for a while.”

-

-“Why, Dr. Strong!” protested Mrs. Clyde. “There isn’t a woman among my

-friends who doesn’t envy me our cream. And the milk keeps sweet—oh, for

-days, doesn’t it, Katie?”

-

-“Yes’m,” replied the cook. “Three days, or even four, in the ice-box.”

-

-“Doesn’t that show it’s pure?” asked Mrs. Clyde triumphantly.

-

-Dr. Strong shook his head. “Hardly proof,” he said. “Really clean milk

-will keep much longer. I have drunk milk from the Rochester municipal

-supply that was thirteen days old, and as sweet as possible. And that

-was in a hot August.”

-

-“Thirteen days old! I’d be ashamed to tell it!” declared Grandma

-Sharpless, with so much asperity that there was a general laugh, in

-which the doctor joined.

-

-“I shouldn’t care to try it with your milk. It is rich, but it isn’t by

-any means pure. Eternal vigilance is the price of good milk. I don’t

-suppose you inspect your farm once a month, do you, Mr. Clyde?”

-

-“No; I leave that to the farmer. He’s an intelligent fellow. What’s

-wrong?”

-

-“Scientifically speaking, from 300,000 to 500,000 bacteria per cubic

-centimeter.”

-

-“Do we drink all those things when we have a glass of milk, Dr.

-Strong?” inquired “Manny” Clyde, the oldest boy.

-

-“Four or five times that many for every teaspoonful,” said the doctor.

-“But it isn’t as bad as it sounds, Manny. One hundred thousand is

-considered a fairly safe allowance, though _very_ good milk—the kind I

-drank when it was thirteen days old—may contain only two or three

-thousand. When the count runs up to half a million or so, it shows that

-some kind of impurity is getting in. The bacteria in your milk may not

-be disease germs at all; they may all be quite harmless varieties. But

-sooner or later, if dirt gets into milk, dangerous germs will get in

-with it. The high count is a good danger signal.”

-

-“If Bliss, the farmer, has been allowing dirt to get into the milk,

-he’ll find himself out of a place,” said Mr. Clyde decisively.

-

-“Don’t be too hard on him,” advised the doctor. “His principal fault is

-that he’s getting the milk dirty trying to keep it clean. He is washing

-his cans with water from an open well near the barnyard. The water in

-the well is badly contaminated from surface drainage. That would

-account for the high number of bacteria; that and careless milking.”

-

-“And on that account you advise me to give up the milk?” asked Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“Only temporarily. There are other more immediate considerations. For

-one thing, there are both diphtheria and typhoid near by, and the

-people on the farm are in contact with them. That’s dangerous. You see,

-milk under favorable conditions is one of the best cultures for germs

-that is known. They flourish and multiply in it past belief. The merest

-touch of contamination may spread through a whole supply, like fire

-through flax. One more thing: one of your cows, I fear, is

-tuberculous.”

-

-“We might pasteurize, I suppose,” suggested Mrs. Clyde anxiously.

-

-Dr. Strong returned a decisive negative. “Pasteurized milk is better

-than poisoned milk,” he said; “but it’s a lot worse than good raw milk.

-Pasteurizing simply means the semi-cooking of all the varieties of

-germs, good and bad. In the process of cooking, some of the nutritive

-quality is lost. To be sure, it kills the bad germs, but it also kills

-the good ones.”

-

-“Do you mean that some of the germs are actually useful?” asked Mrs.

-Clyde.

-

-“Very useful, in certain rôles. For example, the lactic acid bacteria

-would be unpopular with you, Mrs. Clyde, because they are responsible

-for the souring of milk. But they also perform a protective work. They

-do their best to destroy any bacilli of disease which may invade their

-liquid home. Now, when you pasteurize, you kill all these millions of

-defenders; and any hostile germs that come along afterward and get into

-the milk, through dust or other mediums, can take possession and

-multiply without hindrance. Therefore pasteurized milk ought to be

-guarded with extra care after the process, which it seldom is. I once

-visited a large pasteurizing plant which made great boasts of its

-purity of product, and saw flies coming in from garbage pail and manure

-heap to contaminate the milk in the vats; milk helpless to protect

-itself, because all its army of defense had been boiled to death.”

-

-“If we are allowed neither to use our farm milk raw nor to pasteurize

-it, what shall we do with it?” inquired Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Full directions are in there,” answered Dr. Strong, pointing to an

-envelope on his desk. “If you’ll look over what I’ve written, and

-instruct your farmer to follow it out, you’ll have milk that is

-reasonably good. I’ll go further than that; it will be even good enough

-to give to the babies of the tenements, if you should have any left

-over.”

-

-Mr. Thomas Clyde proceeded to rub his chin, with some degree of

-concentration, whereby Dr. Strong knew that his hint had struck in.

-

-“Meantime,” said Mrs. Clyde, with a trace of sarcasm, “do you expect us

-to live on condensed milk?”

-

-“Not at all; on certified milk.”

-

-“What’s that mean?” asked Miss Julia, who had a thirst for information.

-

-“What’s a certificate, Junkum?” retorted the doctor.

-

-“That’s what I get when I pass my examinations.”

-

-“Right! Well, milk coming from a farm that passes all its examinations

-gets a certificate from the Medical Society, which keeps a pretty

-constant watch over it. The society sees that all the cattle are tested

-for tuberculosis once in so often; that the cows are brushed off before

-milking; that the milking is done through a cloth, through which no

-dirt or dust can pass, into a can that has been cleaned by steam—not by

-contaminated water—so that no germs will remain alive in it; then

-cooled and sealed up and delivered. From the time the milk leaves the

-cow until it comes on your table, it hasn’t touched anything that isn’t

-germ-proof. That is the system I have outlined in the paper for your

-farmer.”

-

-“It sounds expensive,” commented Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Yes; that is the drawback. Certified milk costs from fifteen to twenty

-cents a quart. But when you consider that nearly half the dead babies

-were poisoned by bad milk it doesn’t seem so expensive, does it?”

-

-“All very well for us,” said Mr. Clyde thoughtfully. “We can afford it.

-But how about the thousands who can’t?”

-

-“There’s the pity of it. Theoretically every city should maintain a

-milk standard up to the requirements of the medical certification, and

-allow no milk to be sold which falls short of that. It’s feasible, and

-it could be done at a moderate price if we could educate the farmer to

-it. Copenhagen’s milk supply is as good as the best certified milk in

-this country, because the great Danish Milk Company cooperates with the

-farmer, and doesn’t try to make huge profits; and its product sells

-under five cents a quart. But, to answer your question, Mr. Clyde: even

-a family of very moderate means could afford to take enough certified

-milk for the baby, and it would pay in doctor’s bills saved. Older

-children and grown-ups aren’t so much affected by milk.”

-

-“I’ll go out to the farm to-morrow,” said Mr. Clyde. “What’s next?”

-

-“Water, Mr. Clyde. I’ve found out where you got your typhoid, last

-summer.”

-

-“Pooh! I could have told you that,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “There was

-sewer-gas in the house. It smelled to heaven the day before he was

-taken down.”

-

-“Isn’t it curious how our belief in ghosts sticks to us!” commented the

-doctor, chuckling,—“malaria rising from swamps; typhoid and diphtheria

-rising in sewer-gas; sheeted specters rising from country

-graveyards—all in the same category.” Grandma Sharpless pushed her

-spectacles up on her forehead, a signal of battle with her. “Do you

-mean to tell me, young man, that there’s no harm in sewer-gas?”

-

-“Far from it! There’s harm enough in sewer-gas, but no germs. The harm

-is that the gas reduces vitality, and makes one more liable to disease

-attack. It’s just as true of coal-gas as of sewer-gas, and more true of

-ordinary illuminating gas than either. I’d much rather have bad

-plumbing in the house than even a small leak in a gas-pipe. No, Mrs.

-Sharpless, if you waited all day at the mouth of a sewer, you’d never

-catch a germ from the gas. Moreover, typhoid doesn’t develop under ten

-days, so your odorous outbreak of the day before could have had nothing

-to do with Mr. Clyde’s illness.”

-

-“Perhaps you’ll give us _your_ theory,” said the old lady, with an

-elaboration of politeness which plainly meant, “And whatever it is, I

-don’t propose to believe it.”

-

-“Not mine, but the City Water Commissioner’s. Mr. Clyde’s case was one

-of about eighty, all within a few weeks of each other. They were all

-due to the criminal negligence of a city official who permitted the

-river supply, which isn’t fit to drink and is used only for fire

-pressure, to flood into the mains carrying the drinking supply.”

-

-“Then why didn’t the whole city get typhoid?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Because only a part of the system was flooded by the river water. The

-problem of the city’s experts was to find out what part was being

-contaminated with this dilute sewage. When the typhoid began to appear,

-the Health Department, knowing the Cypress supply to be pure, suspected

-milk. Not until a score of cases, showing a distribution distinct from

-any milk supply, had appeared, was suspicion directed to the water

-supply. Then the officials of the Water Department and Health

-Department tried a very simple but highly ingenious test. They dumped a

-lot of salt into the intake of the river supply, and tested hydrant

-after hydrant of the reservoir supply, until they had a complete

-outline of the mixed waters. From that it was easy to ascertain the

-point of mixture, and stop it.”

-

-“Our river water is always bad, isn’t it?” said Mr. Clyde. “Last summer

-I had to keep Charley away from swimming-school because the tank is

-filled from the river, and two children got typhoid from swallowing

-some of it.”

-

-“All foolishness, I say,” announced the grandmother. “Better let ‘em

-learn to swim.”

-

-“Can’t you swim at all?” asked Dr. Strong, turning to the

-seven-year-old.

-

-“I went five strokes once,” said Charley. “Hum-m-m! Any other

-swimming-school near by?”

-

-“No.”

-

-“And are the children about water at all?” Dr. Strong asked the mother.

-

-“Well; there are the canal and the river both near us, you know.”

-

-“Then it comes down to this,” said the doctor. “The liability of

-typhoid from what water Charley would swallow in the tank isn’t very

-great. And if he should get it, the chances are we could pull him

-through. With the best care, there should be only one chance in fifty

-of a fatal result. But if Charley falls in the canal and, not knowing

-how to swim, is drowned, why, that’s the end of it. Medical science is

-no good there. Of two dangers choose the lesser. Better let him go on

-with the swimming, Mrs. Clyde.”

-

-“Well!” said Grandma Sharpless, “I—I—I—swanny!” This was extreme

-profanity for her. “Young man, I’m glad to see for once that you’ve got

-sense as well as science!”

-

-“Do you consider the Cypress supply always safe to drink? Several times

-it has occurred to me to outfit the house with filters,” said Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“No need, so long as the present Water Department is in office,”

-returned Dr. Strong. “I might almost add, no use anyway.”

-

-“Isn’t filtered water good?” asked Manny. “They have it at the

-gymnasium.”

-

-“No house filter is absolutely sure. There’s just one way to get a

-guaranteeable water: distill it. But I think you can safely use the

-city supply.”

-

-“What next, the water problem being cleared up?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“By no means cleared up. Assuming that you are reasonably safeguarded

-at home, you’re just as likely—yes, even more likely—to pick up typhoid

-somewhere else.”

-

-“Why more likely?”

-

-“For some mysterious reason a man accustomed to a good water supply is

-the easiest victim to a bad. Pittsburg, for many years the most

-notorious of American cities for filthy drinking, is a case in point.

-Some one pointed out that when Pittsburg was prosperous, and wages

-high, the typhoid rate went up; and when times were hard, it went down.

-Dr. Matson, of the Health Bureau, cleared up that point, by showing

-that the increase in Pittsburg’s favorite disease was mainly among the

-newcomers who flocked to the city when the mills were running full

-time, to fill the demand for labor. An old resident might escape, a new

-one might hardly hope to. Dr. Matson made the interesting suggestion

-that perhaps those who drank the diluted sewage—for that is what the

-river water was—right along, came, in time, to develop a sort of

-immunity; whereas the newcomer was defenseless before the bacilli.”

-

-“Then a man, in traveling, ought to know the water supply of every city

-he goes to. How is he to find out?”

-

-“In your case, Mr. Clyde, he’s to find out from his Chinese doctor,”

-said the other smiling. “I’m collecting data from state and city health

-boards, on that and other points. Air will now come in for its share of

-attention.”

-

-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.”

-

-“Which is exactly why I have insisted on our sticking to the regular

-schools,” put in Mr. Clyde, with the air of quiet decisiveness. “I want

-our children to be brought up like other children!” The mother shook

-her head dubiously. “I wish I were sure it is the right place for

-them.”

-

-“You ought to be sure. I might even say—if you will forgive the implied

-criticism—that you ought to be surer than you are.”

-

-Alarmed at his tone, the mother leaned forward. “Is there anything the

-matter at Number Three?”

-

-“Several things. Nothing that you need worry about immediately,

-however. I’ve been talking with some of the teachers, and found out a

-few points. Charley’s teacher, for instance, tells me that she has a

-much harder time keeping the children up to their work in the winter

-term than at other times.”

-

-“I remember Charley’s tantrums over his arithmetic, last winter,” said

-Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“My head felt funny. Kinder thick,” defended Charley.

-

-“That is bad,” said Dr. Strong, “very bad. I’ve reported the teacher in

-that grade to Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer.”

-

-“Reported teacher?” said Charley, his eyes assuming a prominence quite

-startling. “What for?”

-

-“Starving her grade.”

-

-Mrs. Clyde fairly bounced in her chair. “Our children are not supposed

-to eat at school, Dr. Strong.”

-

-“Starving her grade,” continued the doctor, “in the most important need

-of the human organism, air.”

-

-“How do you reach that conclusion?”

-

-“Evidence and experience. I remember in my college days that the winter

-term was considered to be the most difficult in every year. The

-curriculum didn’t seem to show it, but every professor and every

-undergraduate knew it. Bad air, that’s all. The recitation rooms were

-kept tightly closed. The human brain can’t burn carbon and get a bright

-flame of intelligence without a good draft, and the breathing is the

-draft. Now, on the evidence of Charley’s teacher, when winter comes

-percentages go down, although the lessons are the same. So I asked her

-about the ventilation and found that she had a superstitious dread of

-cold.”

-

-“I remember Miss Benn’s room,” said Julia thoughtfully. “It used to get

-awful hot there. I never liked that grade anyway, and Bobs got such bad

-deportment marks.”

-

-“Both of the twins had colds all the winter they were in that room,”

-contributed Grandma Sharpless.

-

-Up went Dr. Strong’s hands, the long fingers doubled in, in a curious

-gesture which only stress of feeling ever drove him to use.

-

-“‘When will the substitute mothers and fathers who run our schools

-learn about air!” he cried. “Air! It’s the first cry of the newly born

-baby. Air! It’s the last plea of the man with the death-rattle in his

-throat. It’s the one free boon, and we shut it out. If I’m here next

-winter, I think I’ll load up with stones and break some windows!”

-

-“Lemme go with you!” cried Charley, with the eagerness of destruction

-proper to seven years. “On the whole, Charley,” replied the other,

-chuckling a little, “perhaps it’s better to smash traditions. Not

-easier, but better.”

-

-“But you wouldn’t have them study with all the windows open on a zero

-day!” protested Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Wouldn’t I! Far rather than choke them in a close room! Why, in

-Chicago, the sickly children have special classes on the roof, or in

-the yards, all through the cold weather. They study in overcoats and

-mittens. And they _learn_. Not only that, but they thrive on it.”

-

-Mr. Clyde was rubbing his chin hard. “Perhaps our school system isn’t

-all I bragged,” he observed.

-

-“Not in all respects. You still stick to that relic of barbarism, the

-common drinking-cup, after filtering your water. That’s a joke!”

-

-“I don’t see the point,” confessed Mr. Clyde. “Whom is the joke on?”

-

-“All of you who pay for the useless filters and then settle doctors’

-bills for the disease spread by the drinking-cups. Don’t you understand

-that in the common contagious diseases, the mouth is the danger point?

-Now, you may filter water till it’s dry, but if in drinking it you put

-your lips to a cup soiled by the touch of diseased lips, you’re in

-danger. We think too much of the water and too little of what contains

-it. I’ve seen a school in Auburn, New York, and I’ve seen a golf course

-at the Country Club in Seattle, where there isn’t a glass or cup to be

-found; and they have two of the best water supplies I know. A tiny

-fountain spouts up to meet your lips, and your mouth touches nothing

-but the running water. The water itself being pure, you can’t possibly

-get any infection from it.”

-

-“Can you get me a report on that for the Board of Education?” asked Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“It’s already here,” said Dr. Strong quietly. “That is part of my

-Chinese job of watch-dog. One other matter. A teacher in another grade,

-at Number Three, with whom I talked, stood with a pencil, which she had

-taken from one of her scholars, pressed to her lips. While we talked

-she gave it back to the child.”

-

-“Well, land sakes!” said Grandma Sharpless, “where’s the harm? I

-suppose the poor girl was clean, wasn’t she?”

-

-“How do I know? How does anybody know? There is a case on record where

-a teacher carried the virulent bacilli of diphtheria in her throat for

-three months. Suppose she had been careless about putting her lips to

-the various belongings of the children. How many of them do you suppose

-she would have killed with the deadly poison?”

-

-“Didn’t she know she had diphtheria?” asked Junkum, wide-eyed.

-

-“She hadn’t, dear. She was what we call a ‘carrier’ of disease. For

-some reason which we can’t find out, a ‘carrier’ doesn’t fall ill, but

-will give the disease to any one else as surely as a very sick person,

-if the germs from the throat reach the throat or lips of others.”

-

-“Some lectures on hygiene might not be amiss in Number Three,” said Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“That’s what medical school inspectors are for—to teach the teachers.

-The Board of Education should be getting it started.”

-

-“What are you doing over there, Twinkles?” said Mr. Clyde to Bettina,

-who had slipped from his knee and was sliding her chubby fist along the

-window-pane.

-

-The child looked around. “Thwat that fly,” she explained with perfect

-seriousness.

-

-“She has heard the other children talking about the fly-leaflets that

-have been scattered around. Where’s the fly, Toodles?”

-

-“Up they-arr,” replied Bettina, pointing to a far corner of the pane

-where a big “green-bottle” bumped its head against the glass. “Come

-down, buzzy fly.”

-

-“Now, where,” cried Mrs. Clyde, in despair, “do you suppose that

-wretched creature came from? I’m so particular always to keep the rooms

-screened and darkened.”

-

-“Please’m, it might have come from the kitchen,” suggested Katie.

-“There’s a plenty of ‘em there.”

-

-“And before that it came from your next-door neighbor’s manure-heap,”

-added Dr. Strong. “That particular kind of fly breeds only in manure.

-The fact is that the fly is about the nastiest thing alive. Compared to

-it, a hog is a gentleman, and a vulture an epicure. It loves filth, and

-unhappily, it also loves clean, household foods. Therefore the path of

-its feet is direct between the two—from your neighbor’s stable-yard to

-your dinner-table.”

-

-“Disgusting!” cried Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Worse than disgusting: dangerous,” returned Dr. Strong, unmoved by her

-distaste. “A fly’s feet are more than likely to be covered with

-disease-bearing matter, which he leaves behind him.”

-

-“Something ought to be done about Freeman’s manure-heap, next door.

-I’ll see to it,” announced Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Doubtless you could report him for maintaining a nuisance,” admitted

-Dr. Strong; “in which case he might—er—conceivably retort upon you with

-your unscreened garbage-pails, which are hatcheries for another variety

-of fly.”

-

-“That’s a beam in the eye for you, Tom,” said Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“Meantime I’ll have the kitchen windows and doors screened at once,”

-declared Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“That will help,” said Dr. Strong, “though it won’t cure. You can gain

-some idea, from this matter of the flies, how intricate a social

-problem health really is. No man sins to himself alone, in hygiene, and

-no man can thoroughly protect himself against the misdeeds of his

-neighbor. It’s true that there is such a thing as individual

-self-defense by a sort of personal fortifying of the body—I’ll take

-that up some other time—but it’s very limited. You can carry the fight

-into the enemy’s country and eradicate the evil conditions that

-threaten all, only by identifying yourself with your environment, and

-waging war on that basis. Mr. Clyde, do you know anything about the row

-of wooden tenements in the adjoining alley?”

-

-“Saddler’s Shacks? Not much, except that a lot of Italians live there.”

-

-“Some live; some die. The whole settlement is a scandal of

-overcrowding, dirt, and disease. I’ve made out a little local health

-report of the place, for the year. Of course, it’s incomplete; but it’s

-significant. Look it over.”

-

-Mr. Clyde read aloud as follows:—

-

-Diphtheria	11 cases	2 deaths Measles	20	1 Typhoid

-fever	4	2 Scarlet fever	13	1 Whooping-cough	20	3

-Acute intestinal trouble	45	10 Influenza	16	1

-Tuberculosis	6	1 Pneumonia	9	4

-

-“What do you think of it?” asked Dr. Strong.

-

-“It’s a bad showing.”

-

-“It’s a bad showing and a bad property. Why don’t you buy it?”

-

-“Who? I? Are you advising me to buy a job-lot of diseases?” queried Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“Well—as a protective investment. We’d be safe here if those tenements

-were run differently.”

-

-“But we aren’t in touch with them at all. They are around the corner on

-another block.”

-

-“Nevertheless, visitors pass daily between your house and Saddler’s

-Shacks. One of the young men from there delivers bread, often with his

-bare and probably filthy hands. Two of the women peddle fruit about the

-neighborhood. What Saddler’s Shacks get in the way of disease, you may

-easily get by transmission from them. Further, the sanitary

-arrangements of the shacks are primitive, not to say prehistoric, and,

-incidentally, illegal. They are within the area of fly-travel from

-here, so both the human and the winged disease-bearers have the best

-possible opportunity to pick up infection in its worst form.”

-

-“Ugh!” said Mrs. Sharpless. “I’ll never eat with a fly again as long as

-I live!”

-

-“Wouldn’t it be a simple matter to have the Bureau of Health condemn

-the property?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“It would not.” Dr. Strong spoke with curt emphasis.

-

-“Certain features, you said, are illegal.”

-

-“But pull is still stronger than law in this city.”

-

-“Who owns Saddler’s Shacks?” asked Grandma Sharpless, going with

-characteristic directness to the point.

-

-“Mrs. Carson Searle.”

-

-“Why, then, it’s all right,” asserted Mrs. Clyde. “I know Mrs. Searle

-very well. She’s a leader in church and charitable work. Of course, she

-doesn’t know about the condition of the property.”

-

-“She knows enough about it,” retorted Dr. Strong grimly, “to go to the

-Mayor over the Health Officer’s head, and put a stop to Dr. Merritt’s

-order for the premises to be cleaned up at the owner’s expense. She

-wants her profits undisturbed. And now, before the conference breaks

-up, I propose that we organize the Household Protective Association.”

-

-“Oh, can we children belong?” cried Julia.

-

-“Of course. There are offices and honors enough for all. Mr. Clyde

-shall be president; Mrs. Sharpless, vice-president and secretary; Mrs.

-Clyde, treasurer, and each one of the rest of you shall have a

-committee. Katie, I appoint you chairman of the Committee on Food, and

-if any more flies get into your kitchen, you can report ‘em to the

-Committee on Flies, Miss Bettina Clyde, chairman; motto, ‘Thwat that

-fly!’ Manny, you like to go to the farm; you get the Committee on Milk

-Supply. Junkum, your committee shall be that of school conditions.

-Bobs, water is your element. As Water Commissioner you must keep watch

-on the city reports. I’ll see that they are sent you regularly; and the

-typhoid records.”

-

-“You haven’t left anything for me,” protested Charley.

-

-“Haven’t I! You’ve got one of the biggest of all jobs, air. If the

-windows aren’t properly wide when the house is asleep, I want to know

-it from you, and you’ll have to get up early to find out. If the Street

-Cleaning Department sweeps the air full of dust because it’s too lazy

-to wash down the roadway first, we’ll make a committee report to the

-Mayor.”

-

-Bettina, _alias_ Toots, _alias_ Twinkles, _alias_ the Cherub, trotted

-over and laid two plump hands on the doctor’s knee.

-

-“Ain’t you goin’ to be anyfing in the play?” she asked.

-

-“I?” said Dr. Strong. “Of course, Toots. Every real association has to

-have officers and membership, you know. I’m the Member.”

-

-

-

-

-III.

-REPAIRING BETTINA

-

-

-“Medicine would be the ideal profession if it did not involve giving

-pain,” said Dr. Strong, setting a paper-weight upon some school reports

-which had just come in.

-

-“You’ve been here three months and you haven’t hurt any one yet,” said

-Mr. Clyde easily.

-

-“No. I’ve been cautious, and perhaps a little cowardly. My place as

-Chinese doctor has been such a sinecure that I’ve let things go.

-Moreover, I’ve wanted to gain Mrs. Clyde’s confidence as much as

-possible, before coming to the point.”

-

-The expression of Mr. Clyde’s keen, good-humored face altered and

-focused sharply. He scrutinized the doctor in silence. “Well, let’s

-have it,” he said at length. “Is it my wife?”

-

-“No. It’s Bettina.”

-

-The father winced. “That baby!” he said. “Serious?”

-

-“On the contrary, quite simple. _If_ it is handled wisely. But it

-means—pain. Not a great deal; but still, pain.”

-

-“An operation?”

-

-Dr. Strong nodded. “Merely a minor one. I’ve sounded Mrs. Clyde,

-without her knowing it, and she will oppose it. Mrs. Sharpless, too, I

-fear. You know how women dread suffering for the children they love.”

-

-Again Mr. Clyde winced. “It’s—it’s necessary, of course,” he said.

-

-“Not to do it would be both stupid and cruel. Shall we call in the

-women and have it out with them?”

-

-For reply, Mr. Clyde pressed a button and sent the servant who

-responded, for Mrs. Clyde and her mother. Grandma Sharpless arrived

-first, took stock of the men’s grave faces, and sat down silently,

-folding her strong, competent hands in her lap. But no sooner had Mrs.

-Clyde caught sight of her husband’s face than her hand went to her

-throat.

-

-“What is it?” she said. “The children—”

-

-“Nothing to be alarmed about, Mrs. Clyde,” said Dr. Strong quickly. He

-pushed a chair toward her. “Sit down. It’s a question of—of what I

-might call carpenter-work”—the mother laughed a nervous relief—“on

-Betty.”

-

-“Betty?” Her fears fluttered in her voice. “What about Betty?”

-

-“She needs repairing; that’s all.”

-

-“I don’t know what you mean! Is she hurt?”

-

-“Not at all. She is breathing wrong. She breathes through her mouth.”

-

-“Oh!” There was reassurance and a measure even of contempt in Mrs.

-Clyde’s voice. “Lots of children do that. Perhaps she’s got a little

-cold.”

-

-“It isn’t that. This is no new thing with her. She is a

-mouth-breather.”

-

-“I’ll see that it’s corrected,” promised the mother.

-

-“Only one thing can correct it,” said Dr. Strong gravely. “There’s a

-difficulty that must be removed.”

-

-“You mean an operation? On that baby? Do you know that she isn’t five

-yet? And you want to cut her with a knife—”

-

-“Steady, Myra,” came Mr. Clyde’s full, even speech. “Dr. Strong doesn’t

-_want_ to do anything except what he considers necessary.”

-

-“Necessary! Supposing she does breathe through her mouth! What excuse

-is that for torturing her—my baby!”

-

-“I’ll answer that, Mrs. Clyde,” said the doctor, with patient

-politeness. Walking over to the window he threw it up and called, “Oh,

-Tootles! Twinkles! Honorable Miss Cherub, come up here. I’ve got

-something to show you.” And presently in came the child, dragging a

-huge and dilapidated doll.

-

-She was a picture of rosy health, but, for the first time, the mother

-noted the drooping of the lower jaw, and the slight lift of the upper

-lip, revealing the edges of two pearly teeth. Dr. Strong took from a

-drawer a little wooden box, adjusted a lever and, placing the ear

-pieces in Betty’s ears, bade her listen. But the child shook her head.

-Again he adjusted the indicator. This time, too, she said that she

-heard nothing. Not until the fourth change did she announce delightedly

-that she heard a pretty bell, but that it sounded very far away.

-

-“Now we’ll try it on mother,” said the experimenter, and added in a low

-tone as he handed it to Mrs. Clyde, “I’ve set it two points less loud

-than Betty’s mark. Can you hear it?”

-

-Mrs. Clyde nodded. A look of dread came into her eyes.

-

-“Now, Tootles, open your mouth,” directed the doctor, producing a

-little oblong metal contrivance.

-

-“I haven’t got any sore froat,” objected the young lady.

-

-“No, but I want to look at the thoughts inside your head,” he explained

-mysteriously.

-

-With entire confidence the child opened her mouth as wide as possible,

-and Dr. Strong, setting the instrument far back against her tongue,

-applied his eye to the other end.

-

-“All right, Toots,” he said, after a moment. “Get your breath, and then

-let mother look.”

-

-He showed Mrs. Clyde how to press the tiny button setting aglow an

-electric lamp and lighting up the nasal passages above the throat,

-which were reflected on a mirror within the contrivance and thus made

-clear to the eye. Following his instructions, she set her eye to the

-miniature telescope as the physician pressed it against the little

-tongue.

-

-“Well, Betty,” said Dr. Strong, as the implement was again withdrawn,

-“you’ve got very nice thoughts inside that wise little head of yours.

-Now you can continue bringing up your doll in the way she should go.”

-

-As the door closed behind her the mother turned to Dr. Strong.

-

-“Is she going to be deaf?” she asked breathlessly.

-

-“Of course not,” he reassured her. “That will be taken care of. What

-did you see above the back of the throat?”

-

-“Little things like tiny stalactites hanging down.”

-

-“Adenoids.”

-

-“Where could she have gotten adenoids?” cried Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“From her remotest imaginable ancestor, probably.”

-

-“Why, aren’t they a disease?”

-

-“No. An inheritance. The race has always had them. Probably they’re

-vestigial salivary glands, the use of which we’ve outgrown.

-Unfortunately they may overdevelop and block up the air-passages. Then

-they have to come out.”

-

-For the first time in the conference Grandma Sharpless gathered force

-and speech.

-

-“Young man,” she said solemnly—rather accusingly, in fact—“if the Lord

-put adenoids in the human nose he put ‘em there for some purpose.”

-

-“Doubtless. But that purpose, whatever it may have been, no longer

-exists.”

-

-“Everything in the human body has some use,” she persisted.

-

-“Had,” corrected Dr. Strong. “Not has. How about your appendix?”

-

-Mrs. Sharpless’s appendix, like the wicked, had long since ceased from

-troubling, and was now at rest in alcohol in a doctor’s office, having,

-previous to the change of location, given its original proprietress the

-one bad scare of her life. Therefore, she blinked, not being provided

-with a ready answer.

-

-“The ancestors of man,” said Dr. Strong, “were endowed with sundry

-organs, like the appendix and the adenoids, which civilized man is

-better off without. And, as civilized man possesses a God-given

-intelligence to tell him how to get rid of them, he wisely does so when

-it’s necessary.”

-

-“What have the adenoids to do with Betty’s deafness?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Everything. They divert the air-currents, thicken the tubes connecting

-throat and ear, and interfere with the hearing. Don’t let that little

-deficiency in keenness of ear bother you, though. Most likely it will

-pass with the removal of the adenoids. Even if it shouldn’t, it is too

-slight to be a handicap. But I want the child to be repaired before any

-of the familiar and more serious adenoid difficulties are fixed on her

-for life.”

-

-“Are there others?” asked Mrs. Clyde apprehensively.

-

-“Oh, every imaginable kind. How could it be otherwise? Here’s the very

-first principle of life, the breath, being diverted from its proper

-course, in the mouth-breather; isn’t a general derangement of functions

-the inevitable result? The hearing is affected, as I’ve shown you

-already. The body doesn’t get its proper amount of oxygen, and the

-digestion suffers. The lungs draw their air-supply in the wrong way,

-and the lung capacity is diminished. The open mouth admits all kinds of

-dust particles which inflame the throat and make it hospitable to

-infection. By incorrect breathing the facial aspect of the

-mouth-breather is variously modified and always for the worse; since

-the soft facial bones of youth are altered by the continual striking of

-an air-current on the roof of the mouth, which is pushed upward,

-distorting the whole face.”

-

-“None of _our_ children are distorted. You won’t find a better-looking

-lot anywhere,” challenged Mrs. Sharpless, the grandmother’s pride up in

-arms.

-

-“True. None of them has had overdeveloped adenoids, except Betty. The

-others all breathe through their noses. See how different their mouths

-are from Betty’s lifting upper lip—very fascinating now, but

-later—Well, I’ve gone so far as to prepare an object-lesson for you.

-Three extreme types of the mouth-breathers are here from school by my

-invitation to have some lemonade and cakes. They are outside now. When

-they come in, I want each of you to make an analysis of one of them,

-without their seeing it, of course. Talk with them about their work in

-school. You may get ideas from that. Mrs. Sharpless, you take the

-taller of the girls; Mrs. Clyde, you study the shorter. The boy goes to

-you, Mr. Clyde.”

-

-The trio of visitors entered, somewhat mystified, but delighted to be

-the guests of their friend, Dr. Strong, who had a faculty of

-interesting children. So shrewdly did he divert and hold their

-attention that they concluded their visit and left without having

-suspected the scrutiny which they had undergone.

-

-“Now, Mrs. Clyde,” said Dr. Strong, after the good-byes were said,

-“what about your girl?”

-

-“Nothing in particular except that she’s mortally homely and doesn’t

-seem very bright.”

-

-“Homely in what respect?”

-

-“Well, hatchet-faced, to use a slang term.”

-

-“It’s not a slang term any more; it’s a medical term to describe a

-typical result of mouth-breathing. The diversion of the breath destroys

-the even arch of the teeth, pushes the central teeth up, giving that

-squirrel-like expression that is so unpleasantly familiar, lengthens

-the mouth from the lower jaw’s hanging down, and sharpens the whole

-profile to an edge, and an ugly one. Adenoids!”

-

-“My tall girl I thought at first was dull, but I found the poor thing

-was a little deaf,” said Grandma Sharpless. “She’s got a horrid skin;

-so sallow and rough and pimply. I don’t think her digestion is good. In

-fact, she said she had trouble with her stomach.”

-

-“Naturally. Her teeth are all out of place from facial malformation

-caused by mouth-breathing. That means that she can’t properly chew her

-food. That means in turn that her digestion must suffer. That, again,

-means a bad complexion and a debilitated constitution. Adenoids! What’s

-your analysis, Mr. Clyde?”

-

-“That boy? He’s two grades behind where he should be in school. It

-takes him some time to get the drift of anything that’s said to him. I

-should judge his brain is weak. Anyway, I don’t see where he keeps it,

-for the upper part of his face is all wrong, the roof of the mouth is

-so pushed up. The poor little chap’s brain-pan must be contracted.”

-

-“Perfectly correct, and all the result of adenoids again. The boy is

-the worst example I’ve been able to find. But all three of the children

-are terribly handicapped; one by a painful homeliness, one by a ruined

-digestion, and the boy by a mental deficiency—and all simply and solely

-because they were neglected by ignorant parents and still more ignorant

-school authorities.”

-

-“Would you have the public schools deal with such details?” asked Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“Certainly. Have you ever heard what Goler, the Health Officer of

-Rochester, asked that city? ‘Oughtn’t we to close the schools and

-repair the children?’ he asked, and he kept on asking, until now

-Rochester has a regular system of looking after the noses, mouths, and

-eyes of its young. They want their children, in that city, to start the

-battle of life in fighting trim.”

-

-“But you don’t see many misshapen children about,” objected Mrs.

-Sharpless.

-

-“Then it’s because you don’t look. Call to your mind Hogarth’s

-caricatures. Do you remember that in his crowds there are always

-clubfooted, or humpbacked, or deformed people? In those days such

-deformities were very common because medical science didn’t know how to

-correct them in the young. To-day facial deformities, to the scientific

-eye, are quite as common, though not as obvious. We’re just learning

-how to correct them, and to know that the hatchet-face is a far more

-serious clog on a human being’s career than is the clubfoot.”

-

-“If Betty had a clubfoot, of course—” began Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Of course, you’d have it repaired at whatever cost of suffering. You’d

-submit her to a long and serious operation; and probably to the

-constant pain of a rigid iron frame upon her leg for months, perhaps

-years. To obviate the deformity you’d consider that not too high a

-price to pay, and rightly. Well, here is the case of a more

-far-reaching malformation, curable by a minor operation, without

-danger, mercifully quick, with only the briefest after-effects of pain,

-and you draw back from it. Why?”

-

-“The thought of the knife on that little face. Is—is that all there is

-to be done?”

-

-“No, there are the teeth. They should be looked to.”

-

-“Nonsense! They’re only first teeth,” said

-

-Grandma Sharpless vigorously. “What does a doctor know about teeth?”

-

-“Lots, if he knows his business. There would be fewer dyspeptics if

-physicians in general sent their patients to the dentist more promptly,

-and kept them in condition to chew their food.”

-

-“That’s all very well, when people have their real, lasting teeth,”

-returned the grandmother. “But Betty’s first set will be gone in a few

-years. Then it will be time enough to bother the poor child.”

-

-“Apparently, Mrs. Sharpless,” said Dr. Strong mildly, “you consider

-that teeth come in crops, like berries; one crop now, a second and

-distinct crop later. That isn’t the way growth takes place in the human

-mouth. The first teeth are to the second almost what the blossom is to

-the fruit. I shall want immediately to take Betty to the dentist, and

-have him keep watch over her mouth with the understanding that he may

-charge a bonus on every tooth he keeps in after its time. The longer

-the first lot lasts, the better the second lot are. But there is no use

-making the minor repairs unless the main structure is put right first.”

-

-“I must see Betty,” said Mrs. Clyde abruptly, and left the room. Mrs.

-Sharpless followed. “Now comes the first real split.” Dr. Strong turned

-to Mr. Clyde. “They’re going to vote me down.”

-

-“If it comes to a pinch,” said Mr. Clyde quietly, “my wife will accept

-my decision.”

-

-“That is what I want to avoid. Where would my influence with her be, if

-I were obliged to appeal to you on the very first test of professional

-authority? No, I shall try to carry this through myself, even at the

-risk of having to seem a little brutal.”

-

-Mr. Clyde lifted his eyebrows, but he only nodded, as the door opened

-and the two women reentered.

-

-“Doctor,” said Mrs. Clyde, “if, in a year from now, Betty hasn’t

-outgrown the mouth-breathing, I—I—you may take what measures you think

-best.”

-

-“In a year from now, the danger will be more advanced. There is not the

-faintest chance of correction of the fault without an operation.”

-

-“I can’t help it! I can’t stand the thought of it, now,” said Mrs.

-Clyde brokenly. “You should see her, poor baby, as she looks now,

-asleep on the lounge in the library, and even you, Doctor” (the doctor

-smiled a little awry at that), “couldn’t bear to think of the blood and

-the pain.” She was silent, shuddering.

-

-“My dear Mrs. Clyde, the blood will be no more than a nosebleed, and

-the pain won’t amount to much, thanks to anaesthesia. Let me see.” He

-stepped to the door and, opening it softly, looked in, then beckoned to

-the others to join him.

-

-The child lay asleep on her side, one cupped pink hand hanging, the

-other back of her head. Her jaw had dropped and the corner of the mouth

-had slackened down in an unnatural droop. The breath hissed a little

-between the soft lips. Dr. Strong closed the door again.

-

-“Well?” he said, and there was a suggestion of the sternness of

-judgment in the monosyllable.

-

-“I am her mother.” Mrs. Clyde faced him, a spot of color in each cheek.

-“A mother is a better judge of her children than any doctor can be!”

-

-“You think so?” said Dr. Strong deliberately. “Then I must set you

-right. Do you recall sending Charley away from the table for

-clumsiness, two days ago?”

-

-“Why, yes.” Mrs. Clyde’s expressive eyes widened. “He overturned his

-glass, after my warning him.”

-

-“And once last week for the same thing?”

-

-“Yes, but what—”

-

-“Pardon me, do you think your mother-judgment was wise then?”

-

-“Well, really, Dr. Strong,” said Mrs. Clyde, flushing, “you will hardly

-assume the right of control of the children’s manners—”

-

-“This is not a question of manners. There is where your error lies,”

-interrupted the doctor. “Against your mother-judgment I set my

-doctor-judgment, and I tell you now”—his voice rose a little from its

-accustomed polished smoothness, and took on authority—“I tell you that

-the boy is no more responsible for his clumsiness than Betty is for bad

-breathing. It’s a disease, very faint but unmistakable.”

-

-“Not Charley!” said his father incredulously, “Why, he’s as husky as a

-colt.”

-

-“He will be, please God, in a few years, but just now he has—don’t be

-alarmed; it’s nothing like so important as it sounds—he has a slight

-heart trouble, probably the sequel to that light and perhaps mismanaged

-diphtheria attack. It’s quite a common result and is nearly always

-outgrown, and it shows in almost unnoticeable lack of control of hands

-and feet. I observed Charley’s clumsiness long ago; listened at his

-heart, and heard the murmur there.”

-

-“And you never told us!” reproached the grandmother.

-

-“What was the use? There’s nothing to be done; nothing that needs to be

-done, except watch, and that I’ve been doing. And I didn’t want to

-worry you.”

-

-“Then I’ve been punishing him for what wasn’t his fault,” said Mrs.

-Clyde in a choked voice.

-

-“You have. Don’t punish Betty for what isn’t hers,” countered the

-physician, swiftly taking advantage of the opening. “Give her her

-chance. Mrs. Clyde, if Betty were my own, she could hardly have wound

-herself more closely around my heartstrings. I want to see her grow

-from a strong and beautiful child to a strong and beautiful girl, and

-finally to a strong and beautiful woman. It rests with you. Watch her

-breathing to-night, as she sleeps—and tell me to-morrow.”

-

-He rose and left the room. Mr. Clyde walked over and put a hand softly

-on his wife’s soft hair; then brushed her cheek with his lips.

-

-“It’s up to you, dearest,” he said gently.

-

-Three days later, Betty, overhanging the side fence, was heard, by her

-shamelessly eavesdropping father, imparting information to her

-next-door neighbor and friend.

-

-“You’d ought to get a new nothe, Thally. It don’t hurt much, an’

-breathin’ ith heapth more fun!”

-

-Pondering a chain of suggestions induced by this advice, Mr. Clyde

-walked slowly to the house. As was his habit in thought, he proceeded

-to rub the idea into his chin, which was quite pink from friction by

-the time he reached the library. There he found Dr. Strong and Mrs.

-Sharpless in consultation.

-

-“What are you two conspiring about?” he asked, ceasing to rub the

-troubled spot.

-

-“Matter of school reports,” answered the doctor. He glanced at the

-other’s chin and smiled. “And what is worrying you?” he asked.

-

-“I’m wondering whether I haven’t made a mistake.”

-

-“Quite possibly. It’s done by some of our best people,” remarked the

-physician dryly.

-

-“Not a pleasant possibility in this case. You remember quoting

-Rochester as to closing the schools and repairing the children. To-day,

-as I heard Betty commenting on her new nose, it suddenly came to me

-that I was obstructing that very system of repairs by which she is

-benefiting, for less fortunate youngsters in our schools.”

-

-“You!” said Dr. Strong in surprise.

-

-“As president of the Public Health League. The Superintendent of

-Schools came to me with a complaint against Dr. Merritt, the Health

-Officer, who, he claimed, was usurping authority in his scheme for a

-special inspection system to examine all schoolchildren at regular

-intervals.”

-

-“Ought to have been established long ago,” declared Dr. Strong.

-

-“The Superintendent thinks otherwise. He claims that it would interfere

-with school routine. It’s the duty of the health officials, he says, to

-control epidemics from without, to keep sickness out of the schools,

-not to hunt around among the children, scaring them to death about

-diseases that probably aren’t there.”

-

-Dr. Strong muttered something which Grandma Sharpless pretended not to

-hear. “And you’ve agreed to support him in that attitude?” he queried.

-

-“Well, I’m afraid I’ve half committed myself.”

-

-“Heaven forgive you! Why, see here, Clyde, your dodo of a

-superintendent talks of keeping sickness out of the schools. Doesn’t

-that mean keeping sickness out of the pupils? There’s just one way to

-do that: get every child into the best possible condition of

-repair—eyes, ears, nose, throat, teeth, stomach, everything, and

-maintain them in that state. Then disease will have a hard time

-breaking down the natural resistance of the system. Damaged organs in a

-child are like flaws in a ship’s armor-plate; a vital weakening of the

-defenses. And remember, the child is always battling against one

-besieging germ or another.”

-

-“Why can’t medical science wipe out the germs?” demanded Mrs.

-Sharpless. “It’s always claiming to do such wonders.”

-

-“In a few instances it can. In typhoid we fight and win the battle from

-the outside by doing that very thing. In smallpox, and to a lesser

-extent in diphtheria, we can build up an effective artificial barrier

-by inoculation. But, as medical men are now coming to realize, in the

-other important contagions of childhood, measles, whooping-cough, and

-scarlet fever, we must fight the disease from inside the individual;

-that is, make as nearly impregnable as possible the natural

-fortifications of the body to resist and repel the invasion. That is

-what school medical inspection aims at.”

-

-“You wouldn’t rank whooping-cough and measles with scarlet fever, would

-you?” said Mrs. Sharpless incredulously.

-

-“Why not? Although scarlet fever has the worst after-effects,—though

-not much more serious than those of measles,—the three are almost equal

-so far as the death-rate is concerned.”

-

-“Surely not!” protested the old lady. “Why, I’d rather have measles in

-the house ten times, or whooping-cough either, than scarlet fever

-once.”

-

-“You’re about ten times as likely to have.”

-

-She looked puzzled. “But what did you mean by saying that one of ‘em is

-as bad as the other?”

-

-“That it’s as dangerous to the community, though not to the

-individual.”

-

-“Just a little deep for me, too,” confessed Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Yet it’s perfectly simple. Here, take an example. Would you rather be

-bitten by a rattlesnake or a mosquito?”

-

-“A mosquito, of course.”

-

-“Naturally. Yet a rattlesnake country is a good deal safer than a

-mosquito country. You wouldn’t hesitate, on account of your health, to

-move to Arizona, where rattlesnakes live?”

-

-“I suppose not.”

-

-“But you _would_ be afraid to establish your family in the malarious

-swamps of the South?”

-

-“Certainly.”

-

-“Well, people who die of malaria die of mosquito bite, since the

-mosquito is the only agency of infection. Thus, it reduces to this:

-that while the individual rattler is more dangerous than the individual

-mosquito, the mosquito, in general, kills her thousands where the snake

-kills one. Now—with considerable modification of the ratio—scarlet

-fever is the rattlesnake; whooping-cough and measles are the

-mosquitoes. It is just as important to keep measles out of a community

-as it is to shut out scarlet fever. In fact, if you will study the

-records of this city, you will find that in two out of the last three

-years, measles has killed more people than scarlet fever, and

-whooping-cough more than either of them.”

-

-“What are we going to do about it?” asked the practical-minded Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“Ah, if some one would only tell us that! In measles the worst of the

-harm is done before the disease announces itself definitely. The most

-contagious stage is previous to the appearance of the telltale rash.

-There’s nothing but a snuffling nose, and perhaps a very little fever

-to give advance notice that the sufferer is a firebrand.”

-

-“Well, you can’t shut a child out of school for every little sore

-throat,” observed Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“As to that I’m not so sure,” replied the physician slowly and

-thoughtfully. “A recent writer on school epidemics has suggested

-educating the public to believe that every sore throat is contagious.”

-

-“That isn’t true, is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“No. Personally I believe that, while a physician is often justified in

-deceiving his patient, he is never justified in fooling the public. In

-the long run they find him out and his influence for good is lessened.

-Yet that sore-throat theory is near enough true to be a strong

-temptation. Every sore throat is suspicious; that isn’t too much to

-say. And, with a thorough school-inspection system, it is quite

-possible that epidemics could be headed off by isolating the

-early-discovered cases of sore throat. But, an epidemic of the common

-contagions, once well under way, seems to be quite beyond any certainty

-of control.”

-

-“Do you mean to say that quarantine and disinfection and isolation are

-all useless?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“No. I won’t go as far as that. They may exercise a check in some

-cases. But I will say this: that all our cumbersome and expensive and

-often harassing hygienic measures in the contagious diseases haven’t

-made good. Obviously, if they had, we should see a diminution of the

-ills which they are supposed to limit. There is no diminution. No,

-we’re on the wrong tack. Until we know what the right tack is, we

-perhaps ought to keep on doing what we can in the present line. It’s a

-big, complicated subject, and one that won’t be settled until we find

-out what scarlet fever, measles, and whooping-cough really are, and

-what causes them. While we’re waiting for the bacteriologist to tell us

-that, the soundest principle of defense that we have is to keep the

-body up to its highest pitch of resistance. That is why I support

-medical inspection for schools as an essential measure.”

-

-“To repair the children without closing the schools, if I may modify

-Dr. Goler’s epigram,” suggested Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Exactly. Eventually we shall have to build as well as repair. A very

-curious thing is happening to Young America in the Eastern States. The

-growing generation is shrinking in weight and height.”

-

-“Which is almost contradictory enough for a paradox,” remarked Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“It’s a melancholy and literal fact. You know, there’s a height and

-weight basis for age upon which our school grading system rests. The

-authorities have been obliged to reconstruct it because the children

-are continuously growing smaller for their years. _There’s_ work for

-the inspection force!”

-

-“You’d put the children on pulleys and stretch ‘em out, I suppose!”

-gibed Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“That might work, too,” replied the doctor, unruffled. “The Procrustean

-system isn’t so bad, if old Procrustes had only sent his victims to the

-gymnasium instead of putting them to bed. Yes, a quarter of an hour

-with the weight-pulleys every day would help undersized kiddies a good

-deal. But principally I should want the school-inspectors to keep the

-youngsters playing.”

-

-“You don’t have to teach a child to play,” sniffed Grandma Sharpless,

-with womanly scorn of mere man’s views concerning children.

-

-“Pardon me, Mrs. Sharpless, you taught your children to play.”

-

-“I! Whatever makes you think that?”

-

-“The simple fact that they didn’t die in babyhood.”

-

-Mrs. Sharpless looked at him with a severity not unmingled with

-suspicion. “Sometimes, young man,” she observed, “you talk like a—a—a

-gump!”

-

-“Take that, Strong!” said Mr. Clyde, joining in the doctor’s laugh

-against himself.

-

-“Facts may sometimes sound foolish,” admitted Dr. Strong. “If they do,

-that’s the fault of the speaker. And it _is_ a fact that every mother

-teaches her baby to play. Watch the cat if you don’t believe me. The

-wisest woman in America points out in her recent book that it is the

-mother’s playing with her baby which rouses in it the will to live.

-Without that will to live none of us would survive.”

-

-“I don’t know who your wisest woman in America may be, but I don’t

-believe she knows what she is talking about,” declared Grandma

-Sharpless flatly.

-

-“I’ve never known her when she didn’t,” retorted the doctor. “If Jane

-Addams of Hull House isn’t an expert in life, mental, moral, and

-physical, then there’s no such person! Why, see here, Mrs. Sharpless;

-do you know why a baby’s chance of survival is less in the very best

-possible institution without its mother, than in the very worst

-imaginable tenement with its mother, even though the mother is unable

-to nurse it?”

-

-“It isn’t as well tended, I expect.”

-

-“All its physical surroundings are a thousand times more advantageous:

-better air, better food, better temperature, better safeguarding

-against disease; yet babies in these surroundings just pine away and

-die. It’s almost impossible to bring up an infant on an institutional

-system. The infant death-rate of these well-meaning places is so

-appalling that nobody dares tell it publicly. And it is so, simply

-because there is no one to play with the babies. The nurses haven’t the

-time, though they have the instinct. I tell you, the most wonderful,

-mystic, profound thing in all the world, to me, is the sight of a young

-girl’s intuitive yearning to dandle every baby she may see. That’s the

-universal world-old, world-wide, deep-rooted genius of motherhood,

-which antedates the humankind, stirring within her and impelling her to

-help keep the race alive—by playing with the baby.”

-

-“H’m! I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” confessed Grandma Sharpless.

-“There may be something in what you say, young man. But by the time

-children reach school age I guess they’ve learned that lesson.”

-

-“Not always. At least, not properly, always. Let’s consult the

-Committee on School of our household organization.”

-

-He sent for eight-year-old Julia.

-

-“Question to lay before you, Miss Chairwoman,” said Dr. Strong. “How

-many of the girls in your grade hang around the hall or doorways during

-recess?”

-

-“Oh, lots!” said Julia promptly.

-

-“Are they the bigger girls? or the smaller ones?” The Committee on

-School considered the matter gravely. “Mary Hinks, she’s tall, but

-she’s awful thin and sickly,” she pronounced. “Dot Griswold and Cora

-Smith and Tiny Warley—why, I guess they’re most all the littlest girls

-in the class.”

-

-Dr. Strong nodded. “Sure to be the undernourished, anaemic, lethargic

-ones,” said he. “They’re forgetting the lessons of their babyhood.

-Insensibly they are losing the will to live. But there’s nobody to tell

-them so. A thorough medical inspection service would correct that. It

-would include school-nurses who would go to the homes of the children

-and tell the parents what was the matter. Such a system might not be

-warranted to keep epidemics out of our schools, but it would stretch

-out and fill out those meager youngsters’ brains as well as bodies, and

-fit them to combat illness if it did come. The whole theory of the

-school’s attitude toward the child seems to me misconceived by those

-who have charge of the system. It assumes too much in authority and

-avoids too much in responsibility.

-

-“Take the case of John Smith, who has two children to bring up under

-our enlightened system of government. Government says to John Smith,

-‘Send your children to school!’ ‘Suppose I don’t wish to?’ says John

-Smith. ‘You’ve got to,’ says Government. ‘It isn’t safe for me to have

-them left uneducated.’ ‘Will you take care of them while they’re at

-school?’ says John Smith. ‘I’ll train their minds,’ says Government.

-‘What about their bodies?’ says John Smith. ‘Hm!’ says Government;

-‘that’s a horse of another color.’ ‘Then I’ll come with them and see

-that they’re looked after physically,’ says John Smith. ‘You _will_

-not!’ says Government. ‘I’m _in loco ‘parentis_, while they’re in

-school.’ ‘Then you take the entire _loco_ of the _parentis_,’ says John

-Smith. ‘If you take my children away on the ground that you’re better

-fitted to care for their minds than I am, you ought to be at least as

-ready to look after their health. Otherwise,’ says John Smith, ‘go and

-teach yourself to stand on your head. You can’t teach _my_ children.’

-Now,” concluded Dr. Strong, “do you see any flaws in the Smith point of

-view?”

-

-“Just plain common sense,” approved Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“Clyde,” said Dr. Strong, with a twinkle, “if you don’t stop rubbing a

-hole in your chin, I’ll have to repair _you_. What’s preying on your

-mind?”

-

-“I am trying,” replied Mr. Clyde deliberately, “to figure out, with

-reference to the School Superintendent and myself, just how a man who

-has made a fool of himself can write a letter to another man who has

-helped the first man make a fool of himself, admitting that he’s made a

-fool of himself, and yet avoid embarrassment, either to the man who has

-made a fool of himself or to the other man who aided the man in making

-a fool of himself. Do you get that?”

-

-Dr. Strong rose. “I’m a Chinese doctor,” he observed, “not a Chinese

-puzzle-solver. That’s a matter between you and your ink-well. Meantime,

-having attained the point for which I’ve been climbing, I now declare

-this session adjourned.”

-

-

-

-

-IV.

-THE CORNER DRUG-STORE

-

-

-“No, it won’t add to the attractiveness of the neighborhood, perhaps,”

-said Mrs. Clyde thoughtfully. “But how convenient it will be!”

-

-Mr. Clyde had come home with the news that a drug-store was to be

-opened shortly on the adjacent corner. Shifting his position to dodge a

-foliage-piercing shaft of sunlight—they were all sitting out on the

-shady lawn, in the cool of a September afternoon—Dr. Strong shook his

-head.

-

-“Too convenient, altogether,” he observed.

-

-“How’s that?” queried Mr. Clyde. “A drugstore is like a gun in Texas:

-you may not need it often, but when you do need it, you need it like

-blazes.”

-

-“True enough. But most people over-patronize the drug-store.”

-

-“Not this family; at least, since our house-doctor came to keep us well

-on the Chinese plan,” said Mrs. Clyde gracefully.

-

-But Dr. Strong only looked rueful. “Your Chinese doctor has to plead

-guilty to negligence of what has been going on under his very nose.”

-

-“Oh, not more trouble!” pleaded Mrs. Clyde. She had come through the

-dreaded ordeal of little Betty’s operation for adenoids—which had

-proved to be, after all, so slight and comparatively painless—with a

-greatly augmented respect for and trust in Dr. Strong; but her nerves

-still quivered.

-

-“Nothing to trouble you,” the doctor assured her, “but enough to make

-me feel guilty—and stupid. Have you noticed any change in Manny,

-lately?”

-

-“Manny” was fourteen-year-old Maynard Clyde, the oldest of the

-children; a high school lad, tall, lathy, athletic, and good-tempered.

-

-“The boy is as nervous as a witch,” put in Grandma Sharpless. “I’ve

-noticed it since early summer.”

-

-“Then I wish you had taught me my trade,” said Dr. Strong. “Manny is so

-husky and active that I’ve hardly given him a thought.”

-

-“Well, what’s wrong with him?” asked the father anxiously.

-

-“Too much drug-store,” was the prompt reply. “Not drugs!” cried Mrs.

-Clyde, horrified. “That child!”

-

-“Well, no; not in the sense you mean it. Wait; there he is now. Manny!”

-he called, raising his voice. “Come over here a minute, will you?” The

-boy ambled over, and dropped down on the grass. He was brown, thin, and

-hard-trained; but there was a nervous pucker between his eyes, which

-his father noted for the first time. “What’s this? A meeting of the

-Board? Anything for the Committee on Milk Supply to do?” he asked.

-

-“Not at present,” answered Dr. Strong, “except to answer a question or

-two. You don’t drink coffee, do you?”

-

-“Of course not. I’m trying for shortstop on the junior nine, you know.”

-

-“How are you making out?”

-

-“Rotten!” said the boy despondently. “I don’t seem to have any grip on

-myself this year. Sort o’ get the rattles.”

-

-“Hm-m-m. Feel pretty thirsty after the practice, and usually stop in at

-the soda-fountain for some of those patent soft drinks advertised to be

-harmless but stimulating, don’t you?”

-

-“Yes,” said the boy, surprised.

-

-“Ah,” said the doctor carelessly; “three or four glasses a day, I

-suppose?”

-

-Manny thought a moment. “All of that,” he said.

-

-“Well, you quit it,” advised the doctor, “if you want to make the ball

-team. It will put you off your game worse than tea or coffee. Tell the

-athletic instructor I said so, will you?”

-

-“Sure!” said the boy. “I didn’t know there was any harm in it.”

-

-As Manny walked away, Dr. Strong turned to

-

-Mr. Clyde. “I found out about Manny by accident. No wonder the boy is

-nervous. He’s been drinking that stuff like water, with no thought of

-what’s in it.”

-

-“What _is_ in it?” said Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Caffeine, generally. The most widely used of the lot is a mixture of

-fruit syrups doctored up with that drug. There’s as much

-nerve-excitation in a glass of it—yes, and more—than in a cup of strong

-coffee. What would you think of a fourteen-year-old boy who drank five

-cups of strong coffee every day?”

-

-“I’d think his parents were fools,” declared Grandma Sharpless bluntly.

-

-“Or his physician,” suggested Dr. Strong. “I’ve seen cases of people

-drinking twenty to twenty-five glasses of that ‘harmless’ stuff every

-day. Of course, they were on the road to nervous smash-up. But the

-craving for it was established and they hadn’t the nerve to stop.”

-

-“The soda-fountain as a public peril,” said Mr. Clyde, with a smile.

-

-“There’s more in that than can be smiled away,” retorted the doctor

-vigorously. “What between nerve-foods that are simply disguised

-‘bracers,’ and dangerous, heart-depressing dopes, like bromo-seltzer,

-the soda-fountain does its share of damage in the community.”

-

-“What about soda-water; that is innocent, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Yes. If the syrups are pure, soda-water is a good thing in moderation.

-So are the mineral waters. But there is this to be said about

-soda-water and candy, particularly the latter—”

-

-“I’ve always said,” broke in Grandma Sharpless, “that candy-eating

-would ruin any digestion.”, “Then you’ve always been wrong, ma’am,”

-said Dr. Strong. “Candy, well and honestly made, is excellent food at

-the proper time. The trouble is, both with candy and with the heavy,

-rich soda-waters, that people are continually filling up with them

-between meals. Now the stomach is a machine with a great amount of work

-to do, and is entitled to some consideration. Clyde, what would happen

-to the machines in your factory, if you didn’t give them proper

-intervals of rest?”

-

-“They’d be very short-lived,” said Mr. Clyde. “There’s a curious thing

-about machinery which everybody knows but nobody understands: running a

-machine twenty-four hours a day for one week gives it harder wear than

-running it twelve hours a day for a month. It needs a regular rest.”

-

-“So with the machinery of digestion,” said the doctor. “The stomach and

-intestines have their hard work after meals. How are they to rest up,

-if an odd lot of candy or a slab of rich ice-cream soda come sliding

-down between whiles to be attended to? Eat your candy at the end of a

-meal, if you want it. It’s a good desert. But whatever you eat, give

-your digestion a fair chance.”

-

-“You can digest anything if you use Thingumbob Pills,” observed Mr.

-Clyde sardonically. “The newspapers say so.”

-

-“That’s the kind of doctrine that makes dyspeptics,” returned Dr.

-Strong. “The American stomach is the worst-abused organ in creation.

-Saliva is the true digestive. If people would take time to chew

-properly, half the dyspepsia-pill fakers would go out of business. If

-they’d take time to exercise properly, the other half would disappear.”

-

-“Liver pills were my regular dependence a few years ago,” remarked Mr.

-Clyde. “Since I took up hand-ball I haven’t needed them. But I suppose

-that half the business men in town think they couldn’t live without

-drugging themselves two or three times a week.”

-

-“Undoubtedly. Tell the average American any sort of a lie in print,

-about his digestion, and he’ll swallow it whole, together with the drug

-which the lie is intended to sell. Look at the Cascaret advertising.

-Its tendency is to induce, not an occasional recourse to Cascarets, but

-a steady use of them. Any man foolish enough to follow the advice of

-the advertisements would form a Cascaret habit and bring his digestion

-into a state of slavery. That sort of appeal has probably ruined more

-digestions and spoiled more tempers than any devil-dogma ever put into

-type.”

-

-“Castor-oil is good enough for me,” said Grandma Sharpless

-emphatically.

-

-“It’s good enough for anybody—that is to say, bad enough and nasty

-enough so that there isn’t much danger of its being abused. But these

-infernal sugar-coated candy cathartics get a hold on a man’s intestinal

-organization so that it can’t do its work without ‘em, and, Lord knows,

-it can’t stand their stimulus indefinitely. Then along comes

-appendicitis.”

-

-“But some of the laxative medicines advertise to prevent appendicitis,”

-said Mrs. Clyde.

-

-Dr. Strong’s face was very grim. “Yes, they advertise. Commercial

-travelers, because of their irregular habits, are great pill-guzzlers

-as a class. Appendicitis is a very common complaint among them. A

-Pittsburgh surgeon with a large practice among traveling men has kept

-records, and he believes that more than fifty per cent of the

-appendicitis cases he treats are caused by the ‘liver-pill’ and

-‘steady-cathartic’ habit. He explains his theory in this way. The man

-begins taking the laxative to correct his bad habits of life. Little by

-little he increases his dose, as the digestive mechanism grows less

-responsive to the stimulus, until presently an overdose sets his

-intestines churning around with a violence never intended by nature.

-Then, under this abnormal peristalsis, as it is called, the appendix

-becomes infected, and there’s nothing for it but the surgeon’s knife.”

-

-“Would you have people run to the doctor and pay two dollars every time

-their stomach got a little out of kilter?” asked Mrs. Sharpless

-shrewdly.

-

-“Run to the doctor; run to the minister; run to the plumber; run

-anywhere so long as you run far enough and fast enough,” answered Dr.

-Strong with a smile. “A mile a day at a good clip, or three miles of

-brisk walking would be the beginning of a readjustment. Less food more

-slowly eaten and no strong liquors would complete the cure in nine

-cases out of ten. The tenth case needs the doctor; not the

-newspaper-and-drug-store pill.”

-

-“But all patent medicines aren’t bad, are they?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-“Some have very good testimonials.”

-

-“Bought or wheedled. Any medicine which claims to _cure_ is a fraud and

-a swindle.”

-

-“Don’t tell me, young man!” said Grandma Sharpless. “You doctors are

-prejudiced against patent medicines, but we old folks have used ‘em

-long enough to know which are good and which are bad. Now I don’t claim

-but what the Indian herb remedies and the ‘ready reliefs’ and that lot

-are frauds. But my family was brought up on teething powders and

-soothing syrups.”

-

-“Then you’re fortunate,” said Dr. Strong sternly, “that none of them

-has turned out to be an opium fiend.”

-

-The instant he said it, he saw, with sharp regret, that his shaft had

-sped true to the mark. The clear, dark red of a hale old age faded from

-Grandma Sharpless’s cheeks. Mr. Clyde shot a quick glance of warning at

-him.

-

-“And speaking of Indian remedies,” went on the doctor glibly, “I

-remember as a boy—”

-

-“Stop a minute,” said Grandma Sharpless steadily. “The truth isn’t

-going to hurt me. Or, if it does hurt, maybe it’s right it should. I

-had a younger brother who died in a sanitarium for drug-habit when he

-was twenty-four. As a child he pretty nearly lived on soothing syrups;

-had to have them all the time, because he was such a nervous little

-fellow; always having earache and stomach-ache, until he was eight or

-nine years old. Then he got better and became a strong, active boy, and

-a robust man. After his college course he went to Philadelphia, and was

-doing well when he contracted the morphine habit—how or why, we never

-knew. It killed him in three years. Do you think—is it possible that

-the soothing syrups—I’ve heard they have morphine in them—had anything

-to do with his ruin?”

-

-“Why, Mrs. Sharpless,” said the other, very gently, “I can only put it

-before you in this way. Here is one of the most subtle and enslaving of

-all drugs, morphine. It is fed to a child, in the plastic and formative

-years of life, regularly. What surer way could there be of planting the

-seeds of drug-habit? Suppose, for illustration, we substitute alcohol,

-which is far less dangerous. If you gave a child, from the time of his

-second year to his eighth, let us say, two or three drinks of whiskey

-every day, and that child, when grown up, developed into a drunkard,

-would you think it strange?”

-

-“I’d think it strange if he didn’t.”

-

-“Apply the same logic to opium, or its derivative, morphine. There are

-a dozen preparations regularly used for children, containing opium, or

-morphine, such as Mrs. Winslow’s ‘Soothing Syrup,’ and Kopp’s ‘Baby

-Friend.’ This is well known, and it is also a recognized fact that the

-morphine and opium habit is steadily increasing in this country. Isn’t

-it reasonable to infer a connection between the two? Further, some of

-the highest authorities believe that the use of these drugs in

-childhood predisposes to the drink habit also, later in life. The

-nerves are unsettled; they are habituated to a morbid craving, and, at

-a later period, that craving is liable to return in a changed

-manifestation.”

-

-“But a drug-store can’t sell opium or morphine except on prescription,

-can it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“It can _in a patent medicine_,” replied the doctor. “That’s one of the

-ugly phases of the drug business. Yet it’s possible to find honest

-people who believe in these dopes and even give testimonials to them.”

-

-“Some testimonials are hard to believe,” said Mrs. Clyde, thankfully

-accepting the chance to shift the conversation to a less painful phase

-of the topic. “Old Mrs. Dibble in our church is convinced that she owes

-her health to Hall’s Catarrh Cure.” Dr. Strong smiled sardonically.

-“That’s the nostrum which offers one hundred dollars reward for any

-case it can’t cure; and when a disgusted dupe tried to get the one

-hundred dollars, they said he hadn’t given their remedy a sufficient

-trial: he’d taken only twenty-odd bottles. So your friend thinks that a

-useless mixture of alcohol and iodide of potassium fixed her, does

-she?”

-

-“Why shouldn’t she? She had a case of catarrh. She took three bottles

-of the medicine, and her catarrh is all gone.”

-

-“All right. Let’s extend her line of reasoning to some other cases.

-While old Mr. Barker, around on Halsey Street, was very ill with

-pneumonia last month, he fell out of bed and broke his arm.”

-

-“In two places,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “I saw him walking up the street

-yesterday, all trussed up like a chicken.”

-

-“Quite recovered from pneumonia, however. Then there was little Mrs.

-Bowles: she had typhoid, you remember, and at the height of the fever a

-strange cat got into the room and frightened her into hysterics.”

-

-“But she got well,” said Mrs. Clyde. “They’re up in the woods now.”

-

-“Exactly. Moral (according to Mrs. Dibble’s experience with Hall’s

-Catarrh Cure): for pneumonia, try a broken arm; in case of typhoid, set

-a cat on the patient.”

-

-Mr. Clyde laughed. “I see,” he said. “People get well in spite of these

-patent medicines, rather than by virtue of them. _Post hoc, non propter

-hoc_, as our lawyer friends say.”

-

-“You’ve got it. The human body keeps up a sort of drug-store of its

-own. As soon as disease fastens on it, it goes to work in a subtle and

-mysterious way, manufacturing a cure for that disease. If it’s

-diphtheria, the body produces antitoxin, and we give it more to help it

-on. If it’s jaundice, it produces a special quality of gastric juices

-to correct the evil conditions. In the vast majority of attacks, the

-body drives out the disease by its own efforts; yet, if the patient

-chances to have been idiot enough to take some quack ‘cure’ the credit

-goes to that medicine.”

-

-“Or to the doctor, if it’s a doctor’s case,” suggested Grandma

-Sharpless, with a twinkle of malice.

-

-“Show me a doctor who boasts ‘I can cure you,’ whether by word of mouth

-or in print, and I’ll show you a quack,” returned the other warmly.

-

-“But what is a doctor for in a sick-room, if not to cure?” asked Mrs.

-Clyde.

-

-“What is a captain for on a ship?” countered Dr. Strong. “He can’t cure

-a storm, can he? But he can guide the vessel so that she can weather

-it. Well, our medical captains lose a good many commands; the storm is

-often too severe for human skill. But they save a good many, too, by

-skillful handling.”

-

-“Then there is no such thing as an actual cure, in medicine?”

-

-“Why, yes. In a sense there are several. Antitoxin may be called a cure

-for diphtheria. Quinine is, to some extent, a specific in malaria. And

-Ehrlich’s famous ‘606’ has been remarkably, though not unfailingly,

-successful in that terrible blood-plague, born of debauchery, which

-strikes the innocent through the guilty. All these remedies, however,

-come, not through the quack and the drug-store, but through the

-physician and the laboratory.”

-

-“May not the patent medicines, also, help to guide the physical ship

-through the storm?” asked Mrs. Clyde, adopting the doctor’s simile.

-

-“On to the rocks,” he replied quickly. “Look at the consumption cures.

-To many consumptives, alcohol is deadly. Yet a wretched concoction like

-Duffy’s Malt Whiskey, advertised to cure tuberculosis, flaunts its lies

-everywhere. And the law is powerless to check the suicidal course of

-the poor fools who believe and take it.”

-

-“Why, I thought the Pure Food Law stopped all that,” said Mrs. Clyde

-innocently.

-

-“The Pure Food Law! The life has been almost crushed out of it.

-Roosevelt whacked it over the head with his Referee Board, which

-granted immunity to the food poisoners, and afterward the Supreme Court

-and Wickersham treated it to a course of ‘legal interpretations,’ which

-generally signify a way to get around a good law.”

-

-“But the patent medicines aren’t allowed to make false claims any more,

-as I understand it,” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“That applies only to the label on the bottle. So you’ll find that the

-words ‘alcohol,’ ‘opium,’ ‘acetanilid,’ ‘chloral,’ and other terms of

-poison, have sprouted forth there, in very small and inconspicuous

-type. But there’s a free field for the false promises on sign-boards,

-in the street-cars, in the newspapers, everywhere. Look in the next

-drug-store window you pass and you’ll see ‘sure cures’ exploited in

-terms that would make Ananias feel like an amateur.”

-

-“You make out a pretty poor character for the druggists, as a class,”

-observed Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Not at all. As a class, they’re a decent, self-respecting, honorable

-lot of men.”

-

-“Then why do they stick to a bad trade?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-Dr. Strong got to his feet. “Let one of them answer,” he said. “Mr.

-Gormley, who runs the big store in the Arcade, usually passes here

-about this time, and I think I see him coming now.”

-

-“They can talk all they like,” said Grandma Sharpless emphatically, as

-the doctor walked across to the front fence, “but I wouldn’t be without

-a bottle of cough syrup in the house.”

-

-“Nor I without my headache tablets,” added Mrs. Clyde. “I’d have had to

-give up the bridge party yesterday but for them.”

-

-Mr. Clyde shot a sharp glance, first, at his wife, then at her mother.

-“Well, I’d like to see the labels on your particular brands of

-medicine,” he remarked.

-

-“There’s nothing bad in mine,” asserted Mrs. Clyde. “Mrs. Martin

-recommended them to me; she’s been taking them for years.”

-

-At this point Dr. Strong returned, bringing with him a slim, elderly

-man, whose shrewd, wide eyes peered through a pair of gold-rimmed

-glasses.

-

-“So you want me to give away the secrets of my trade,” he remarked

-good-humoredly, after the greetings. “Well, I don’t object to relieving

-my mind, once in a while. So shoot, and if I can’t dodge, I’ll yell.”

-

-“Why do you deal in patent medicines if they’re so bad?” asked Grandma

-Sharpless bluntly. “Is there such a big profit in them?”

-

-“No profit, worth speaking of,” replied Mr. Gormley. “Though you’ll

-note that I haven’t admitted they are bad—as yet.”

-

-“The bulk of your trade is in that class of goods, isn’t it?” queried

-Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Worse luck, it is. They’ve got us through their hold on the public.

-And they not only force us to be their agents, but they grind us down

-to the very smallest profit; sometimes less than the cost of doing

-business.”

-

-“But you aren’t compelled to deal in their medicines,” objected Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“Practically I am. My really profitable trade is in filling

-prescriptions. There I can legitimately charge, not only for the drugs,

-but also for my special technical skill and knowledge. But in order to

-maintain my prescription trade I must keep people coming to my store.

-And they won’t come unless I carry what they demand in the way of

-patent medicines.”

-

-“Then there is a legitimate demand for patent medicines?” said Mr.

-Clyde quickly.

-

-“Legitimate? Hardly. It’s purely an inspired demand.”

-

-“What makes it persist, then?”

-

-“The newspapers. The patent-medicine advertisers fill the daily columns

-with their claims, and create a demand by the force of repeated

-falsehood. Do you know the universal formula for the cost of patent

-cures? Here it is: Drugs, 3 per cent; manufacturing plant, 7 per cent;

-printing ink, 90 per cent. It’s a sickening business. If I could afford

-it, I’d break loose like that fellow McConnell in Chicago and put a

-placard of warning in my show window. Here’s a copy of the one he

-displays in his drug-store.”

-

-Taking a card from his pocket, Mr. Gormley held it up for the circle to

-read. The inscription was:—

-

-“Please do not ask us what _any old patent, medicine_ is worth, for you

-embarrass us, as our honest answer must be that _it is worthless_.

-    “If you mean to ask us at what price we sell it, that is an

-    entirely different proposition. When sick, consult a good

-    physician. It is the only proper course. And you will find it

-    cheaper in the end than self-medication with _worthless ‘patent’

-    nostrums._”

-

-

-“Has that killed his trade in quackery?” asked Dr. Strong.

-

-“Nothing can kill that. It has cut it down by half, though. It’s a

-peculiar and disheartening fact that the public will believe the paid

-lie of a newspaper advertisement and disregard the plain truth from an

-expert. And see here, Dr. Strong, when you doctors get together and

-roast the pharmaceutical trade, just remember that it’s really the

-newspapers and not the drug-stores that sell patent medicines.”

-

-“Are all of them so bad?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“All that claim to _cure_. They’re either frauds, appealing to the

-appetite by a stiff allowance of booze, like Swamp Root and Peruna, or

-disguised dopes,—opium, hasheesh or chloral,—masquerading as soothing

-syrups, cough medicines, and consumption cures; or artificial devices

-for giving yourself heart disease by the use of coal-tar chemicals in

-the headache powders and anti-pain pills.”

-

-“Well, you can’t make me believe, Mr. Drug-man,” said Grandma Sharpless

-with a belligerent shake of her head, “that a patent medicine which

-keeps on being in demand for years, on its own merits, hasn’t something

-good in it.”

-

-“No, ma’am, I can’t,” agreed the visitor. “I wouldn’t want to. There

-isn’t any such patent medicine.”

-

-“There’s hundreds of ‘em,” contradicted the old lady, with the

-exaggeration of the disputant who finds the ground dropping away from

-underfoot.

-

-“Not that sell on their own merits. Advertising and more advertising

-and still more advertising is all that does it. Let any one of them

-drop out of the newspapers and off the bill-boards, and the demand for

-it would be dead in a year.”

-

-“Yet, as a student of business conditions,” said Mr. Clyde, “I’m

-inclined to side with Mrs. Sharpless and believe that any line of goods

-which has come down from yesterday to to-day must have some merit.”

-

-The druggist took off his glasses, wiped them and waved them in the

-air, with a flourish.

-

-And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

-The way to dusty death,

-

-

-he quoted sonorously. “We think ourselves heirs to the wisdom of the

-ages, without stopping to consider that we’re heirs to the foolishness,

-also. We’re gulled by the printed lie about Doan’s Kidney Pills, just

-as our fathers were by the cart-tail oratory of the itinerant quack who

-sold the ‘Wonderful Indian Secrets of Life’ at one dollar per bottle.”

-

-“Well, I hesitate to admit it,” said Mrs. Clyde, with a little laugh,

-“but we always have a few of the old remedies about.”

-

-“Suppose you name some of them over,” suggested the druggist.

-

-“Usually I keep some One-Night Cough Cure in the house. That’s

-harmless, isn’t it?”

-

-The druggist glanced at Dr. Strong, and they both grinned.

-

-“It _might_ be harmless,” said the druggist mildly, “if it didn’t

-contain both morphine and hasheesh.”

-

-“Goodness!” said Mrs. Clyde, horrified. “How could one suppose—”

-

-“By reading the label carefully,” interjected Dr. Strong. “Anything

-else?”

-

-“Let me think. I’ve always considered Jayne’s Expectorant good for the

-children when they have a cold.”

-

-“Tastes differ,” observed the druggist philosophically. “I wouldn’t

-consider opium good for _my_ children inside or outside of any

-expectorant. Next!”

-

-“But the names _sound_ so innocent!” cried Mrs. Clyde. “I’m almost

-afraid to tell any more. But we always have Rexall Cholera Cure on

-hand.”

-

-“Had much cholera in the house lately?” inquired the druggist, with an

-affectation of extreme interest.

-

-“Of course it’s only for stomach-ache,” explained Mrs. Clyde. “It

-certainly does cure the pain.”

-

-“Not cure,—drug it into unconsciousness,” amended Mr. Gormley. “The

-opium in it does that. Rather a heroic remedy, opium, for a little

-stomach-ache, don’t you think?”

-

-“What have you got to say against Kohler’s One-Night Cough Cure that I

-always keep by me?” demanded Grandma Sharpless.

-

-Mr. Gormley beamed on her in deprecatory good nature. “Who? Me?

-Gracious! I’ve got nothing to say against it worse than it says against

-itself, on its label. Morphine, chloroform, and hasheesh. What more

-_is_ there to say?”

-

-“How long has this house been full of assorted poisons?” asked Mr.

-Clyde suddenly of his wife.

-

-“Now, Tom,” she protested. “I’ve always been careful about using them

-for the children. Personally, I never touch patent medicines.”

-

-But at this her mother, smarting under their caller’s criticism of her

-cough syrup, turned on her.

-

-“What do you call those headache tablets you take?”

-

-“Those? They aren’t a patent medicine. They’re Anti-kamnia, a

-physician’s prescription.”

-

-“Yes; a fine prescription they are!” said the druggist. “Did you ever

-read the Anti-kamnia booklet? For whole-souled, able-bodied,

-fore-and-aft, up-and-down stairs professional lying, it has got most of

-the patent medicines relegated to the infant class. Harmless, they say!

-I’ve seen a woman take two of those things and hardly get out of the

-door before they got in their fine work on her heart and over she went

-like a shot rabbit.”

-

-“Not dead!”

-

-“No; but it was touch and go with her.”

-

-“What’s in that; opium, too?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“No; a coal-tar chemical which puts a clamp on the heart action. One or

-another of the coal-tar drugs is in all the headache powders. There’s a

-long list of deaths from them, not to mention cases of drug-habit.”

-

-“Habit?” cried Mrs. Clyde. “Do you mean I’m in danger of not being able

-to get along without the tablets?”

-

-“If you take them steadily you certainly are. If you take them

-occasionally, you’re only in danger of dropping dead one of these

-days.”

-

-Mr. Clyde’s chin abruptly assumed a prominence which he seldom

-permitted it. “Well, that settles _that_,” he observed; and it was

-entirely unnecessary for any one present to ask any amplification of

-the remark. Mrs. Clyde looked at her mother for sympathy—and didn’t get

-any.

-

-“Whenever I see a woman come into the shop,” continued the druggist,

-“with a whitey-blue complexion and little gray’ flabby wrinkles under

-her eyes, I know without asking what _she_ wants. She’s a

-headache-powder fiend.”

-

-“That queer look they have is from deterioration of the blood,” said

-Dr. Strong. “The acetanilid or acetphenetidin or whatever the coal-tar

-derivative may be, seems to kill the red corpuscles. In extreme cases

-of this I’ve seen blood the color of muddy water.”

-

-“It certainly makes a fright of a woman. ‘Orangeine’ gets a lot of ‘em.

-You’ ve seen its advertisements in the street-cars. The owner of

-Orangeine, a Chicago man, got the habit himself: used fairly to live on

-the stuff, until pop! went his heart. He’s a living, or, rather a dead

-illustration of what his own dope will do.”

-

-“But what are you to do for a splitting headache?” queried Mrs. Clyde,

-turning to Dr. Strong.

-

-“I don’t know, unless I know what causes it,” said Dr. Strong.

-“Headache isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom, a danger signal. It’s the

-body’s way of crying for help. Drugs don’t cure a headache. They simply

-interrupt it.”

-

-“What with the headache-powders breeding the drug habit, and the

-consumption cures and cough medicines making dope fiends, and the malt

-whiskey cures and Perunas furnishing quiet joy to the temperance trade,

-I sometimes wonder what we’re coming to,” remarked Mr. Gormley.

-

-Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “But poor people who can’t

-afford a doctor have no recourse but to patent medicines,” said he.

-

-“Can’t afford a doctor!” exclaimed Dr. Strong. “Why, don’t you know

-that nostrum-taking is the most expensive form of treatment? Did you

-ever happen to see A. B. Frost’s powerful cartoon called ‘Her Last

-Dollar’? A woman, thin, bent, and ravaged with disease, is buying,

-across the counter of a country store, a bottle of some kind of ‘sure

-cure,’ from the merchant, who serves her with a smile, half-pitying,

-half-cynical, while her two ragged children, with hunger and hope in

-their pinched faces, gaze wistfully at the food in the glass cases.

-There’s the whole tragedy of a wasted life in that picture. ‘Her Last

-Dollar!’ That’s what the patent medicine is after. A doctor at least

-_tries_ to cure. But the patent medicine shark’s policy is to keep the

-sufferer buying as long as there is a dollar left to buy with. Why, a

-nostrum that advertises heavily has got to sell six bottles or seven to

-each victim before the cost of catching that victim is defrayed. After

-that, the profits. Since you’ve brought up the matter of expense, I’ll

-give you an instance from your own household, Clyde.”

-

-“Here! What’s this?” cried Mr. Clyde, sitting up straight. “More patent

-dosing?”

-

-“One of the servants,—Maggie, the nurse. I’ve got her whole medical

-history and she’s a prime example of the Dupe’s Progress. She’s run the

-gamut of fake cures.”

-

-“Something must have been the matter with her to start her off,

-though,” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“That’s the joke—or would be if it weren’t pathetic. She started out by

-having headaches. Not knowing any better, she took headache-powders.”

-

-“One for you, Myra,” remarked Mr. Clyde to his wife, in an aside.

-

-“Bad heart action and difficulty in breathing—the natural result—scared

-her into the belief that she had heart trouble. Impetus was given to

-this notion by an advertisement which she found in a weekly, a

-religious weekly (God save the mark!), advising her not to drop dead of

-heart disease. To avoid this awful fate, which was illustrated by a

-sprightly sketch of a man falling flat on the sidewalk, she was

-earnestly implored to try Kinsman’s heart remedy. She did so, and, of

-course, got worse, since the ‘remedy’ was merely a swindle. About this

-time Maggie’s stomach began to ‘act up,’ partly from the medicines,

-partly from the original trouble which caused her headaches.”

-

-“You haven’t told us what that was, Strong,” remarked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Later. Maggie now developed catarrh of the stomach, superinduced by

-reading one of old Dr. Hartman’s Peruna ads. She took seven bottles of

-Peruna, and it cheered her up quite a bit—temporarily and

-alcoholically.”

-

-“Then it was _that_ that I smelled on her breath. And I accused her of

-drinking,” said Mrs. Clyde remorsefully.

-

-“So she had been; raw alcohol, flavored with a little caramel and

-doctored up with a few drugs. Toward the close of her Peruna career,

-her stomach became pretty sensitive. Also, as she wasn’t accustomed to

-strong liquor, her kidneys were affected somewhat. In her daily paper

-she read a clarion call from Dr. Kilmer of the Swamp Root swindle (the

-real Dr. Kilmer quit Swamp Root to become a cancer quack, by the way),

-which seemed to her to diagnose her case exactly. So she ‘tanked up’

-some more on that brand of intoxicant. Since she was constantly

-drugging herself, the natural resistance of her body was weakened, and

-she got a bad cold. The cough scared her almost to death; or rather,

-the consumption cure advertisements which she took to reading did; and

-she spent a few dollars on the fake factory which turns out Dr. King’s

-New Discovery. This proving worthless, she switched to Piso’s Cure and

-added the hasheesh habit to alcoholism. By this time she had acquired a

-fine, typical case of patent-medicine dyspepsia. That idea never

-occurred to her, though. She next tried Dr. Miles’s Anti-Pain Pills

-(more acetanilid), and finally decided—having read some advertising

-literature on the subject—that she had cancer. And the reason she was

-leaving you, Mrs. Clyde, was that she had decided to go to a

-scoundrelly quack named Johnson who conducts a cancer institute in

-Kansas City, where he fleeces unfortunates out of their money on the

-pretense that he can cure cancer without the use of the knife.”

-

-“Can’t you stop her?” asked Mrs. Clyde anxiously.

-

-“Oh, I’ve stopped her! You’ll find the remains of her patent medicines

-in the ash-barrel. I flatter myself I’ve fixed _her_ case.”

-

-Grandma Sharpless gazed at him solemnly. “‘Any doctor who claims to

-cure is a quack.’ Quotation from Dr. Strong,” she said.

-

-“Nearly had me there,” admitted he. “Fortunately I didn’t use the word

-‘cure.’ It wasn’t a case of cure. It was a case of correcting a stupid,

-disastrous little blunder in mathematics.”

-

-“Mathematics, eh?” repeated Mr. Clyde. “Have you reached the point

-where you treat disease by algebra, and triangulate a patient for an

-operation?”

-

-“Not quite that. But poor Maggie suffered all her troubles solely

-through an error in figuring by an incompetent man. A year ago she had

-trouble with her eyes. Instead of going to a good oculist she went to

-one of these stores which offer examinations free, and take it out in

-the price of the glasses. The examination is worth just what free

-things usually are worth—or less. They sold her a pair of glasses for

-two dollars. The glasses were figured out some fifty degrees wrong, for

-her error of vision, which was very slight, anyway. The nervous strain

-caused by the effort of the eyes to accommodate themselves to the false

-glasses and, later, the accumulated mass of drugs with which she’s been

-insulting her insides, are all that’s the matter with Maggie.”

-

-“That is, the glasses caused the headaches, and the patent medicines

-the stomach derangement,” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“And the general break up, though the glasses may have started both

-before the nostrums ever got in their evil work. Nowadays, the wise

-doctor, having an obscure stomach trouble to deal with, in the absence

-of other explanation, looks to the eyes. Eyestrain has a most potent

-and far-reaching influence on digestion. I know of one case of chronic

-dyspepsia, of a year’s standing, completely cured by a change of

-eyeglasses.”

-

-“As a financial proposition,” said Mr. Gormley, “your nurse must have

-come out at the wrong end of the horn.”

-

-“Decidedly,” confirmed the doctor. “She spent on patent medicines about

-forty dollars. The cancer quack would have got at least a hundred

-dollars out of her, not counting her railroad fare. Two hundred dollars

-would be a fair estimate of her little health-excursion among the

-quacks. Any good physician would have sent her to an oculist, who would

-have fitted proper glasses and saved all that expense and drugging. The

-entire bill for doctor, oculist, and glasses might have been

-twenty-five dollars. Yet they defend patent medicines on the ground

-that they’re the ‘poor man’s doctor.”

-

-Mr. Gormley rose. “Poor man’s undertaker, rather,” he amended. “Well,

-having sufficiently blackguarded my own business, I think I’ll go.

-Here’s the whole thing summed up, as I see it. It pays to go to the

-doctor first and the druggist afterward; not to the druggist first and

-the doctor afterward.”

-

-Dr. Strong walked over to the gate with him. On his return Mrs. Clyde

-remarked:

-

-“What an interesting, thoughtful man. Are most druggists like that?”

-

-“They’re not all philosophers of the trade, like Gormley,” said Dr.

-Strong, “but they have to be pretty intelligent before they can pass

-the Pharmaceutical Board in this state, and put out their colored

-lights.”

-

-“I’ve often meant to ask what the green and red lights in front of a

-drug-store stand for,” said Mrs. Clyde. “What is their derivation?”

-

-“Green is the official color of medical science,” explained the doctor.

-“The green flag, you know, indicates the hospital corps in war-time;

-and the degree of M.D. is signalized by a green hood in academic

-functions.”

-

-“And the red globe on the other side of the store: what does that

-mean?”

-

-“Danger,” replied Dr. Strong grimly.

-

-

-

-

-V.

-THE MAGIC LENS

-

-

-“No good fairy had ever bestowed such a gift as this magic lens,” said

-Dr. Strong, whisking Bettina up from her seat by the window and setting

-her on his knee. “It was most marvelously and delicately made, and

-furnished with a lightning-quick intelligence of its own. Everything

-that went on around it, it reported to its fortunate possessor as

-swiftly as thought flies through that lively little brain of yours. It

-earned its owner’s livelihood for him; it gave him three fourths of his

-enjoyments and amusements; it laid before him the wonderful things done

-and being done all over the world; it guided all his life. And all that

-it required was a little reasonable care, and such consideration as a

-man would show to the horse that worked for him.”

-

-“At the beginning you said it wasn’t a fairytale,” accused Bettina,

-with the gravity which five years considers befitting such an occasion.

-

-“Wait. Because the owner of the magic lens found that it obeyed all his

-orders so readily and faithfully, he began to impose on it. He made it

-work very hard when it was tired. He set tasks for it to perform under

-very difficult conditions. At times when it should have been resting,

-he compelled it to minister to his amusements. When it complained, he

-made light of its trouble.”

-

-“Could it speak?” inquired the little auditor.

-

-“At least it had a way of making known its wants. In everything which

-concerned itself it was keenly intelligent, and knew what was good and

-bad for it, as well as what was good and bad for its owner.”

-

-“Couldn’t it stop working for him if he was so bad to it?”

-

-“Only as an extreme measure. But presently, in this case, it threatened

-to stop. So the owner took it to a cheap and poor repair-shop, where

-the repairer put a little oil in it to make it go on working. For a

-time it went on. Then, one morning, the owner woke up and cried out

-with a terrible fear. For the magic light in the magic lens was gone.

-So for that foolish man there was no work to do nor play to enjoy. The

-world was blotted out for him. He could not know what was going on

-about him, except by hearsay. No more was the sky blue for him, or the

-trees green, or the flowers bright; and the faces of his friends meant

-nothing. He had thrown away the most beautiful and wonderful of all

-gifts. Because it is a gift bestowed on nearly all of us, most of us

-forgot the wonder and the beauty of it. So, Honorable Miss Twinkles, do

-you beware how you treat the magic lens which is given to you.”

-

-“To me?” cried the child; and then, with a little squeal of

-comprehension: “Oh, I know! My eyes. That’s the magic lens. Isn’t it?”

-

-“What’s that about Bettykin’s eyes?” asked Mr. Clyde, who had come in

-quietly, and had heard the finish of the allegory.

-

-“I’ve been examining them,” explained Dr. Strong, “and the story was

-reward of merit for her going through with it like a little soldier.”

-

-“Examining her eyes? Any particular reason?” asked the father

-anxiously.

-

-“Very particular. Mrs. Clyde wishes to send her to kindergarten for a

-year before she enters the public school. No child ought to begin

-school without a thorough test of vision.”

-

-“What did the test show in Bettykin’s case?”

-

-“Nothing except the defects of heredity.”

-

-“Heredity? My sight is pretty good; and Mrs. Clyde’s is still better.”

-

-“You two are not the Cherub’s only ancestors, however,” smiled the

-physician. “And you can hardly expect one or two generations to recast

-as delicate a bit of mechanism as the eye, which has been built up

-through millions of years of slow development. However, despite the

-natural deficiencies, there’s no reason in Betty why she shouldn’t

-start in at kindergarten next term, provided there isn’t any in the

-kindergarten itself.”

-

-Mr. Clyde studied the non-committal face of his “Chinese physician,” as

-he was given to calling Dr. Strong since the latter had undertaken to

-safeguard the health of his household on the Oriental basis of being

-paid to keep the family well and sound. “Something is wrong with the

-school,” he decided.

-

-“Read what it says of itself in that first paragraph,” replied Dr.

-Strong, handing him a rather pretentious little booklet.

-

-In the prospectus of their “new and scientific kindergarten,” the

-Misses Sarsfield warmly congratulated themselves and their prospective

-pupils, primarily, upon the physical advantages of their school

-building which included a large work-and-play room, “with generous

-window space on all sides, and finished throughout in pure, glazed

-white.” This description the head of the Clyde household read over

-twice; then he stepped to the door to intercept Mrs. Clyde’s mother who

-was passing by.

-

-“Here, Grandma,” said he. “Our Chinese tyrant had diagnosed something

-wrong with that first page. Do you discover any kink in it?”

-

-“Not I,” said Mrs. Sharpless, after reading it. “Nor in the place

-itself. I called there yesterday. It is a beautiful room; everything as

-shiny and clean as a pin.”

-

-“Yesterday was cloudy,” observed the Health Master.

-

-“It was. Yet there wasn’t a corner of the place that wasn’t flooded

-with light,” declared Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“And on a clear day, with the sun pouring in from all sides and being

-flashed back from those shiny, white walls, the unfortunate inmates

-would be absolutely dazzled.”

-

-“Do you mean to say that God’s pure sunlight can hurt any one?”

-challenged Mrs. Sharpless, who was rather given to citing the Deity as

-support for her own side of any question.

-

-“Did you ever hear of snow-blindness?” countered the physician.

-

-“I’ve seen it in the North,” said Mr. Clyde. “It’s not a pleasant thing

-to see.”

-

-“Glazed white walls would give a very fair imitation of snow-glare. Too

-much light is as bad as too little. Those walls should be tinted.”

-

-“Yet it says here,” said Mr. Clyde, referring to his circular, “that

-the ‘Misses Sarsfield will conduct their institution on the most

-improved Froebelian principles.”

-

-“Froebel was a great man and a wise one,” said Dr. Strong. “His

-kindergarten system has revolutionized all teaching. But he lived

-before the age of hygienic knowledge. I suppose that no other man has

-wrought so much disaster to the human eye as he.”

-

-“That’s a pretty broad statement, Strong,” objected Air. Clyde.

-

-“Is it? Look at the evidence. North Germany is the place where Froebel

-first developed his system. Seventy-five per cent of the population are

-defective of vision. Even the American children of North German

-immigrants show a distinct excess of eye defects. You’ve seen the comic

-pictures representing Boston children as wearing huge goggles?”

-

-“Are you making an argument out of a funny-paper joke?” queried Grandma

-Sharpless.

-

-“Why not? It wouldn’t be a joke if it hadn’t some foundation in fact.

-The kindergarten system got its start in America in Boston. Boston has

-the worst eyesight of any American city; impaired vision has even

-become hereditary there. To return to Germany: if you want a shock,

-look up the records of suicides among school-children there.”

-

-“But surely that has no connection with the eyes.”

-

-“Surely it has,” controverted Dr. Strong. “The eye is the most nervous

-of all the organs; and nothing will break down the nervous system in

-general more swiftly and surely than eye-strain. Even in this country

-we are raising up a generation of neurasthenic youngsters, largely from

-neglect of their eyes.”

-

-“Still, we’ve got to educate our children,” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“And we’ve got to take the utmost precautions lest the education cost

-more than it is worth, in acquired defects.”

-

-“For my part,” announced Grandma Sharpless, “I believe in early

-schooling and in children learning to be useful. At the Sarsfield

-school there were little girls no older that Bettina, who were doing

-needlework beautifully; fine needlework at that.”

-

-“Fine needlework!” exploded Dr. Strong in a tone which Grandma

-Sharpless afterwards described as “damnless swearing.”

-

-“That’s enough! See here, Clyde. Betty goes to that kindergarten only

-over my dead job.”

-

-“Oh, well,” said Mr. Clyde, amazed at the quite unwonted excitement

-which the other exhibited, “if you’re dealing in ultimatums, I’ll drop

-out and leave the stricken field to Mrs. Clyde. This kindergarten

-scheme is hers. Wait. I’ll bring her. I think she just came in.”

-

-“What am I to fight with you about, Dr. Strong?” asked Mrs. Clyde,

-appearing at the door, a vision of trim prettiness in her furs and

-veil. “Tom didn’t tell me the _casus belli_.”

-

-“Nobody in this house,” said Dr. Strong appealing to her, “seems to

-deem the human eye entitled to the slightest consideration. You’ve

-never worn glasses; therefore you must have respected your own eyesight

-enough to—”

-

-He stopped abruptly and scowled into Mrs. Clyde’s smiling face.

-

-“Well! what’s the matter?” she demanded. “You look as if you were going

-to bite.”

-

-“What are you looking cross-eyed for?” the Health Master shot at her.

-

-“I’m not! Oh, it’s this veil, I suppose.” She lifted the heavy

-polka-dotted screen and tucked it over her hat. “There, that’s more

-comfortable!”

-

-“Is it!” said the physician with an emphasis of sardonicism. “You

-surprise me by admitting that much. How long have you been wearing that

-instrument of torture?”

-

-“Oh, two hours. Perhaps three. But, Dr. Strong, it doesn’t hurt my eyes

-at all.”

-

-“Nor your head?”

-

-“I _have_ got a little headache,” she confessed. “To think that a

-supposedly intelligent woman who has reached the age of—of—”

-

-“Thirty-eight,” said she, laughing. “I’m not ashamed of it.”

-

-“—Thirty-eight, without having to wear glasses, should deliberately

-abuse her hard-working vision by distorting it! See here,” he

-interrupted himself, “it’s quite evident that I haven’t been living up

-to the terms of my employment. One of these evenings we’re going to

-have in this household a short but sharp lecture and symposium on eyes.

-I’ll give the lecture; and I suspect that this family will furnish the

-symposium—of horrible examples. Where’s Julia? As she’s the family

-Committee on School Conditions, I expect to get some material from her,

-too. Meantime, Mrs. Clyde, no kindergarten for Betty kin, if you

-please. Or, in any case, not that kindergarten.”

-

-No further ocular demonstrations were made by Dr. Strong for several

-days. Then, one evening, he came into the library where the whole

-family was sitting. Grandma Sharpless, in the old-fashioned rocker,

-next a stand from which an old-fashioned student-lamp dispensed its

-benign rays, was holding up, with some degree of effort, a rather heavy

-book to the line of her vision. Opposite her a soft easychair contained

-Robin, other-wise Bobs, involuted like a currant-worm after a dose of

-Paris green, and imaginatively treading, with the feet of enchantment,

-virgin expanses of forest in the wake of Mr. Stewart White.

-

-Julia, alias “Junkum,” his twin, was struggling against the demon of

-ill chance as embodied in a game of solitaire, far over in a dim

-corner. Geography enchained the mind of eight-year-old Charles, also

-his eyes, and apparently his nose, which was stuck far down into the

-mapped page. Near him his father, with chin doubled down over a stiff

-collar, was internally begging leave to differ with the editorial

-opinions of his favorite paper; while Mrs. Clyde, under the direct

-glare of a side-wall electric cluster, unshaded, was perusing a

-glazed-paper magazine, which threw upon her face a strong reflected

-light. Before the fire Bettykin was retailing to her most intelligent

-doll the allegory of the Magic Lens.

-

-Enter, upon this scene of domestic peace, the spirit of devastation in

-the person of the Health Master.

-

-“The horrible examples being now on exhibit,” he remarked from the

-doorway, “our symposium on eyes will begin.”

-

-“He says we’re a hor’ble example, Susan Nipper,” said Bettina

-confidentially, to her doll.

-

-“No, I apologize, Bettykin,” returned the doctor. “You’re the only two

-sensible people in the room.”

-

-Julia promptly rose, lifted the stand with her cards on it, carried it

-to the center of the library, and planted it so that the central light

-fell across it from a little behind her.

-

-“One recruit to the side of common sense,” observed the physician.

-“Next!”

-

-“What’s wrong with me?” demanded Mr. Clyde, looking up. “Newspaper

-print?”

-

-“Newspaper print is an unavoidable evil, and by no means the worst

-example of Gutenberg’s art. No; the trouble with you is that your neck

-is so scrunched down into a tight collar as to shut off a proper blood

-supply from your head. Don’t your eyes feel bungy?”

-

-“A little. What am I going to do? I can’t sit around after dinner with

-no collar on.”

-

-“Sit up straight, then; stick your neck up out of your collar and give

-it play. Emulate the attentive turtle! And you, Bobs, stop imitating an

-anchovy. Uncurl! _Uncurl!!_”

-

-With a sigh, Robin straightened himself out. “I was so comfortable,” he

-complained.

-

-“No, you weren’t. You were only absorbed. The veins on your temples are

-fairly bulging. You might as well try to read standing on your head.

-Get a straight-backed chair, and you’re all right. I’m glad to see that

-you follow Grandma Sharpless’s good example in reading by a

-student-lamp.”

-

-“That’s my own lamp,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “Seventy years has at least

-taught me how to read.”

-

-“How, but not what,” answered the Health Master. “That’s a bad book

-you’re reading.”

-

-Grandma Sharpless achieved the proud athletic feat of bounding from her

-chair without the perceptible movement of a muscle.

-

-“Young man!” she exclaimed in a shaking voice, “do you know what book

-that is?”

-

-“I don’t care what book—”

-

-“It is the Bible.”

-

-“Is it? Well, Heaven inspired the writer, but not the printer. Text

-such as that ought to be prohibited by law. Isn’t there a passage in

-that Bible, ‘Having eyes, ye see not’?”

-

-“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[1] 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.’”

-

- [1] 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.

-

-“Not for a number of years.”

-

-“Presumably you would find it awkward. Yet if, through some pressure of

-necessity, the human race should have to return to the quadrupedal

-method, the alteration in life would be less radical than we have

-imposed upon our vision in the last few generations.”

-

-“Sounds like flat nonsense to me,” said the downright Clyde. “We see

-just as all our ancestors saw.”

-

-“Think again. Our ancestors, back a very few generations, were an

-outdoor race living in a world of wide horizons. Their eyes could range

-over far distances, unchecked, instead of being hemmed in most of the

-time by four walls. They were farsighted. Indeed, their survival

-depended upon their being far-sighted; like the animals which they

-killed or which killed them, according as the human or the beast had

-the best eyes. Nowadays, in order to live we must read and write. That

-is, the primal demand upon the eye is that it shall see keenly near at

-hand instead of far off. The whole hereditary training of the organ has

-been inverted, as if a mountaineer should be set to diving for pearls;

-and the poor thing hasn’t had time to adjust itself yet. We employ our

-vision for close work ten times as much as we did a hundred years ago

-and ten thousand times as much as we did ten thousand years ago. But

-the influence of those ten thousand years is still strong upon us, and

-the human child is born with the eye of a savage or an animal.”

-

-“What kind of an animal’s eyes have I got?” demanded Bettina. “A

-antelope’s?”

-

-“Almost as far-sighted,” returned the Health Master, wriggling out from

-under her and catching her expertly as she fell. “And how do you think

-an antelope would be doing fine needlework in a kindergarten?”

-

-“But, Strong, few of us go blind,” said Mr. Clyde. “And of those who

-do, nearly half are needlessly so. That we aren’t all groping,

-sightless, about the earth is due to the marvelous adaptability of our

-eyes. And it is exactly upon that adaptability that we are so prone to

-impose; working a willing horse to death. In the young the muscles of

-accommodation, whereby the vision is focused, are almost incredibly

-powerful; far more so than in the adult. The Cherub, here, could force

-her vision to almost any kind of work and the eye would not complain

-much—at this time. But later on the effects would be manifest.

-Therefore we have to watch the eye very closely until it begins to grow

-old, which is at about twelve years or so. In the adult the eye very

-readily lets its owner know if anything is wrong. Only fools disregard

-that warning. But in the developing years we must see to it that those

-muscles, set to the task of overcoming generations of custom, do not

-overwork and upset the whole nervous organization. Sometimes glasses

-are necessary; usually, only care.”

-

-“In a few generations we’ll all have four eyes, won’t we?” asked Bobs,

-making a pair of mock spectacles with his circled fingers and thumbs.

-

-“Oh, let’s hope not. The cartoonists of prophecy always give the future

-man spectacles. But I believe that the tendency will be the other way,

-and that, by evolution to meet new conditions, the eye will fit itself

-for its work, unaided, in time. Meantime, we have to pay the penalty of

-the change. That’s a small price for living in this wonderful century.”

-

-“You say that half the blind are needlessly so,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Is

-that from preventable disease?”

-

-“About forty per cent, of the wholly blind. But the half-blind and the

-nervously wrecked victims of eye-strain owe their woes generally to

-sheer carelessness and neglect. By the way, eye-strain itself may cause

-very serious forms of disease, such as obstinate and dangerous forms of

-indigestion, insomnia, or even St. Vitus’s dance and epilepsy.”

-

-“But you’re not telling us anything about eye diseases, Dr. Strong,”

-said Julia.

-

-“There speaks our Committee on School Conditions, filled full of

-information,” said the Health Master with a smile. “Junkum has made an

-important discovery, and made it in time. She has found that two

-children recently transferred from Number 14 have red eyes.”

-

-“Maybe they’ve been crying,” suggested Bettykin.

-

-“They were when I saw them, acute Miss Twinkles, although they didn’t

-mean it at all. One was crying out of one eye, and one out of the

-other, which gave them a very curious, absurd, and interesting

-appearance. They had each a developing case of pink-eye.”

-

-“Horses have pink-eye, not people,” remarked Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“To be more accurate, then, conjunctivitis. People have that; a great

-many people, once it gets started. It looks very bad and dangerous; but

-it isn’t if properly cared for. Only, it’s quite contagious. Therefore

-the Committee on Schools, with myself as acting executive, accomplished

-the temporary removal of those children from school.”

-

-“And then,” the Committee joyously took up the tale, “we went out and

-trailed the pink-eye.”

-

-“We did. We trailed it to its lair in School Number 14, and there we

-found one of the most dangerous creatures which civilization still

-allows to exist.”

-

-“In the school?” said Bettykin. “Oo-oo! What was it?”

-

-“It was a Rollertowl,” replied the doctor impressively and in a

-sonorous voice.

-

-“I never heard of it,” said the Cherub, awestruck. “What is it like?”

-

-“He means a roller-towel, goosie,” explained Julia. “A towel on a

-roller, that everybody wipes their hands and faces on.”

-

-“Exactly. And because everybody uses it, any contagious disease that

-anybody has, everybody is liable to catch. I’d as soon put a

-rattlesnake in a school as a roller-towel. In this case, half the grade

-where it was had conjunctivitis. But that isn’t the worst. There was

-one case of trachoma in the grade; a poor little Italian whose parents

-ignorantly sent her to an optician instead of an oculist. The optician

-treated her for an ordinary inflammation, and now she will lose the

-sight of one eye. Meantime, if any of the others have been infected by

-her, through that roller-towel, there will be trouble, for trachoma is

-a serious disease.”

-

-“Did you throw out the roller-towel?” asked Charley with a hopeful eye

-to a fray.

-

-“No. We got thrown out ourselves, didn’t we, Junkum?”

-

-“Pretty near,” corroborated Julia. “The principal told Dr. Strong that

-he guessed he could run his school himself and he didn’t need any

-interference by—by—what did he call us, Dr. Strong?”

-

-“Interlopers. No, Cherub, an interloper is no relation to an antelope.

-It was four days ago that we left that principal and went out and

-whistled for the Fool-killer. Yesterday, the principal came down with a

-rose-pink eye of his own; the Health Officer met him and ordered him

-into quarantine, and the terrible and ferocious Rollertowl is now

-writhing in its death-agonies on the ash-heap.”

-

-“What about other diseases?” asked Mrs. Clyde after a pause.

-

-“Nothing from me. The eye will report them itself quick enough. And as

-soon as your eye tells you that anything is the matter with it, you

-tell the oculist, and you’ll probably get along all right, as far as

-diseases go. It is not diseases that I have to worry about, as your

-Chinese-plan physician, so much as it is to see that you give your

-vision a fair chance. Let’s see. Charley, you’re the Committee on Air,

-aren’t you? Could you take on a little more work?”

-

-“Try me,” said the boy promptly.

-

-“All right; we’ll make you the Committee on Air and Light, hereafter,

-with power of protest and report whenever you see your mother going out

-in a polka-dotted, cross-eyed veil, or your grandmother reading a Bible

-that needs burning worse than any heretic ever did, or any of the

-others working or playing without sufficient illumination. Here endeth

-this lecture, with a final word. This is it:—

-

-“The eye is the most nervous of all the body’s organs. Except in early

-childhood, when it has the recklessness and overconfidence of unbounded

-strength, it complains promptly and sharply of ill-usage. Now, there

-are a few hundred rules about when and how to use the eyes and when and

-how not to use them. I’m not going to burden you with those. All I’m

-going to advise you is that when your eyes burn, smart, itch, or feel

-strained, there’s some reason for it, and you should obey the warning

-and stop urging them to work against their protest. In fact, I might

-sum it all up in a motto which I think I’ll hang here in the library—a

-terse old English slang phrase.”

-

-“What is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“‘Mind your eye,’” replied the Health Master.

-

-

-

-

-VI.

-THE RE-MADE LADY

-

-

-“Of all unfortunate times!” lamented Mrs. Clyde, her piquant face

-twisted to an expression of comic despair. “Why couldn’t he have given

-us a little more notice?”

-

-Impatiently she tossed aside the telegram which announced that her

-husband’s old friend, Oren Taylor, the artist, would arrive at seven

-o’clock that evening.

-

-“Don’t let it bother you, dear,” said Clyde. “I’ll take him to the club

-for dinner.”

-

-“You can’t. Have you forgotten that I’ve invited Louise Ennis for her

-quarterly—well—visitation?”

-

-Clyde whistled. “That’s rather a poser. What business have I got to

-have a cousin like Louise, anyway!”

-

-Upon this disloyal observation Dr. Strong walked into the library. He

-was a very different Dr. Strong from the nerve-shaken wanderer who had

-dropped from nowhere into the Clyde household a year previous as its

-physician on the Chinese plan of being employed to keep the family

-well. The painful lines of the face were smoothed out. There was a deep

-light of content, the content of the man who has found his place and

-filled it, in the level eyes; and about the grave and controlled set of

-the mouth a sort of sensitive buoyancy of expression. The flesh had

-hardened and the spirit softened in him.

-

-“Did you hear that, Strong?” inquired Mr. Clyde, turning to him.

-

-“I have trained ears,” answered Dr. Strong solemnly. “They’re

-absolutely impervious to any speech not intended for them.”

-

-“Open them to this: Louise Ennis is invited for dinner to-night. So is

-my old friend Oren Taylor, who wires to say that he’s passing through

-town.”

-

-“Is that Taylor, the artist of ‘The First Parting’? I shall enjoy

-meeting him.”

-

-“Well, you won’t enjoy meeting Cousin Louise,” declared Mr. Clyde. “We

-ask her about four times a year, out of family piety. You’ve been lucky

-to escape her thus far.”

-

-“Rather a painful old party, your cousin?” inquired the physician,

-smilingly, of Clyde.

-

-“Old? Twenty-two,” said Mrs. Clyde. “But she looks fifty and feels a

-hundred.”

-

-“Allowing for feminine exaggeration,” amended Clyde.

-

-“But what’s so wrong with her?” demanded the physician.

-

-“Nerves,” said Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Stomach,” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Headaches,” said Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Toe-aches,” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Too much money,” said Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Too much ego,” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Dyspepsia.”

-

-“Hypochondria.”

-

-“Chronic inertia.”

-

-“Set it to music,” suggested Dr. Strong, “and sing it as a duet of

-disease, from ablepsy to zymosis, inclusively. I shall be immensely

-interested to observe this prodigy of ills.”

-

-“You’ll have plenty of opportunity,” said Mrs. Clyde rather

-maliciously. “You’re to sit next to her at dinner to-night.”

-

-“Then put Bettykin on the other side of me,” he returned. “With that

-combination of elf, tyrant, and angel close at hand, I can turn for

-relief from the grave to the cradle.”

-

-“Indeed you cannot. Louise can’t endure children. She says they get on

-her nerves. _My_ children!”

-

-“Now you _have_ put the finishing touch to your character sketch,”

-observed Dr. Strong. “A woman of child-bearing age who can’t endure

-children—well, she is pretty far awry.”

-

-“Yet I can remember Louise when she was a sweet, attractive young

-girl,” sighed Mrs. Clyde. “That was before her mother died, and left

-her to the care of a father too busy making money to do anything for

-his only child but spend it on her.”

-

-“You’re talking about Lou Ennis, I know,” said Grandma Sharpless, who

-had entered in time to hear the closing words.

-

-“Yes,” said. Dr. Strong. “What is our expert diagnostician’s opinion of

-the case? You know I always defer to you, ma’am, on any problem that’s

-under the surface of things.”

-

-“None of your soft sawder, young man!” said the old lady, her shrewd,

-gray eyes twinkling from her shrewd, pink face. “My opinion of Louise

-Ennis? I’ll give it to you in two words. Just spoiled.”

-

-“Taking my warning as I find it,” remarked the physician, rising, “I

-shall now retire to put on some chain armor under my evening coat, in

-case the Terrible Cousin attempts to stab me with an oyster-fork.”

-

-The dinner was not, as Mrs. Clyde was forced to admit afterward, by any

-means the dismal function which she had anticipated. Oren Taylor, an

-easy, discursive, humorous talker, set the pace and was ably seconded

-by Grandma Sharpless, whose knack of incisive and pointed comment

-served to spur him to his best. Dr. Strong, who said little, attempted

-to draw Miss Ennis into the current of talk, and was rewarded with an

-occasional flash of rather acid wit, which caused the artist to look

-across the table curiously at the girl. So far as he could do so

-without rudeness, the physician studied his neighbor.

-

-He saw a tall, amply-built girl, with a slackened frame whose muscles

-had forgotten how to play their part properly in holding the structure

-firm. Her face was flaccid. Under the large but dull eyes, there was a

-bloodless puffiness. Discontent sat enthroned at the corners of the

-sensitive mouth. A faint, reddish eruption disfigured her chin. Her two

-strong assets, beautifully even teeth and a wealth of soft, fine hair,

-failed wholly to save her from being a flatly repellent woman. Dr.

-Strong noted further that her hands were incessantly uneasy, and that

-she ate little and without interest. Also she seemed, in a sullen way,

-shy. Yet, despite all of these drawbacks, there was a pathetic

-suggestion of inherent fineness about her; of qualities become decadent

-through disuse; a charm that should have been, thwarted and perverted

-by a slovenly habit of life. Dr. Strong set her down as a woman at war

-with herself, and therefore with her world.

-

-After dinner Mr. and Mrs. Clyde slipped away to see the children. The

-artist followed Dr. Strong, to whom he had taken a liking, as most men

-did, into the small lounging-room, where he lighted a cigar.

-

-“Too bad about that Miss Ennis, isn’t it?” said Taylor abruptly.

-

-His companion looked at him interrogatively.

-

-“Such a mess,” he continued. “Such a ruin. Yet so much left that isn’t

-ruined. That face would be worth a lot to me for the ‘Poet’s Cycle of

-the Months’ that I’m painting now. What a _November_ she’d make;

-‘November, the withered mourner of glories dead and gone.’ Only I

-suppose she’d resent being asked to sit.”

-

-“Illusions are the last assets that a woman loses,” agreed Dr. Strong.

-

-“To think,” pursued the painter, “of what her Maker meant her to be,

-and of how she has belied it! She’s essentially and fundamentally a

-beautiful woman; that is why I want her for a model.”

-

-‘“In the structure of her face, perhaps—”

-

-“Yes; and all through. Look at the set of her shoulders, and the lines

-of her when she walks. Nothing jerry-built about her! She’s got the

-contours of a goddess and the finish of a mud-pie. It’s maddening.”

-

-“More maddening from the physician’s point of view than from the

-artist’s. For the physician knows how needless it all is.”

-

-“Is she your patient?”

-

-“If she were I’d be ashamed to admit it. Give me military authority and

-a year’s time and if I couldn’t fix her so that she’d be proud to pose

-for your picture—Good Heavens!”

-

-From behind the drapery of the passageway appeared Louise Ennis. She

-took two steps toward the two men and threw out her hands in an appeal

-which was almost grotesque.

-

-“Is it true?” she cried, turning from one to the other. “Tell me, is it

-really true?”

-

-“My dear young lady,” groaned Taylor, “what can I say to palliate my

-unpard—”

-

-“Nevermind that! I don’t care. I don’t care anything about it. It’s my

-own fault. I stopped and listened. I couldn’t help it. It means so much

-to me. You can’t know. No man can understand. Is it true that I—that my

-face—”

-

-Oren Taylor was an artist in more than his art: he possessed the rare

-sense of the fit thing to do and say.

-

-“It is true,” he answered quietly, “that I have seen few faces more

-justly and beautifully modeled than yours.”

-

-“And you,” she said, whirling upon Dr. Strong. “Can you do what you

-said? Can you make me good-looking?”

-

-“Not I. But you yourself can.”

-

-“Oh, how? What must I do? D—d—don’t think me a fool!” She was

-half-sobbing now. “It may be silly to long so bitterly to be beautiful.

-But I’d give anything short of life for it.”

-

-“Not silly at all,” returned Dr. Strong emphatically. “On the contrary,

-that desire is rooted in the profoundest depths of sex.”

-

-“And is the best excuse for art as a profession,” said the painter,

-smiling.

-

-“Only tell me what to do,” she besought. “Gently,” said Dr. Strong. “It

-can’t be done in a day. And it will be a costly process.”

-

-“That doesn’t matter. If money is all—”

-

-“It isn’t all. It’s only a drop in the bucket. It will cost you dear in

-comfort, in indulgence, in ease, in enjoyment, in habit—”

-

-“I’ll obey like a child.” Again her hands went tremulously out to him;

-then she covered her face with them and burst into the tears of nervous

-exhaustion.

-

-“This is no place for me,” said the artist, and was about to escape by

-the door, when Mrs. Clyde blocked his departure.

-

-“Ah, you are in here,” she said gayly. “I’d been wondering—Why, what’s

-the matter? What is it?”

-

-“There has been an unfortunate blunder,” said Dr. Strong quickly. “I

-said some foolish things which Miss Ennis overheard—”

-

-“No,” interrupted the painter. “The fault was mine—” And in the same

-breath Louise Ennis cried:—

-

-“I didn’t overhear! I listened. I eavesdropped.”

-

-“Are you quite mad, all of you?” demanded the hostess. “Won’t somebody

-tell me what has happened?”

-

-“It’s true,” said the girl wildly; “every word they said. I _am_ a

-mess.”

-

-Mrs. Clyde’s arms went around the girl. Sex-loyalty raised its war

-signal flaring in her cheeks.

-

-“_Who_ said that?” she demanded, in a tone of which Dr. Strong observed

-afterward, “I never before heard a woman roar under her breath.”

-

-“Never mind who said it,” retorted the girl. “It’s true anyway. It

-wasn’t meant to hurt me. It didn’t hurt me. He is going to cure me; Dr.

-Strong is.”

-

-“Cure you, Louise? Of what?”

-

-“Of ugliness. Of hideousness. Of being a mess.”

-

-“But, my dear,” said the older woman softly, “you mustn’t take it to

-heart so, the idle word of some one who doesn’t know you at all.”

-

-“You can’t understand,” retorted the other passionately. “You’ve always

-been pretty!”

-

-“A compliment straight from the heart,” murmured the painter.

-

-The color came into Mrs. Clyde’s smooth cheek again. “What have you

-promised her, Dr. Strong?” she asked.

-

-“Nothing. I have simply followed Mr. Taylor’s lead. His is the artist

-eye that can see beauty beneath disguises. He has told Miss Ennis that

-she was meant to be a beautiful woman. I have told her that she can be

-what she was meant to be if she wills, and wills hard enough.”

-

-“And you will take charge of her case?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“That, of course, depends upon you and Mr. Clyde. If you will include

-Miss Ennis in the family, my responsibilities will automatically extend

-to her.”

-

-“Most certainly,” said Mrs. Clyde. “And now, Mr. Taylor,” she added,

-answering a look of appeal from that uncomfortable gentleman, “come and

-see the sketches. I really believe they are Whistler’s.”

-

-As they left, Dr. Strong looked down at Louise Ennis with a smile.

-

-“At present I prescribe a little cold water for those eyes,” said he.

-“And then some general conversation in the drawing-room. Come here

-tomorrow at four.”

-

-“No,” said she. “I want to begin at once.”

-

-“So as to profit by the impetus of the first enthusiasm? Very well. How

-did you come here this evening?”

-

-“In my limousine.”

-

-“Sell it.”

-

-“Sell my new car? At this time of year?”

-

-“Store it, then.”

-

-“And go about on street-cars, I suppose?”

-

-“Not at all. Walk.”

-

-“But when it rains?”

-

-“Run.”

-

-Eagerness died out of Louise Ennis’s face. “Oh, I know,” she said

-pettishly. “It’s that old, old exercise treatment. Well, I’ve tried

-that, and if you think—”

-

-She stopped in surprise, for Dr. Strong, walking over to the door, held

-the portière aside.

-

-“After you,” he said courteously.

-

-“Is that all the advice you have for me?” she persisted.

-

-“After you,” he repeated.

-

-“Well, I’m sorry,” she said sulkily. “What is it you want me—”

-

-“Pardon me,” he interrupted in uncompromising tones. “I am sure they

-are waiting for us in the other room.”

-

-“You are treating me like a spoiled child,” declared Miss Ennis,

-stamping a period to the charge with her high French heel.

-

-“Precisely.”

-

-She marched out of the room, and, with the physician, joined the rest

-of the company. For the remainder of the evening she spoke little to

-any one and not at all to Dr. Strong. But when she came to say

-good-night he was standing apart. He held out his hand, which she could

-not well avoid seeing.

-

-“When you get up to-morrow,” he said, “look in the mirror, [she winced]

-and say, ‘I can be beautiful if I want to hard enough.’ Good-bye.”

-

-Luncheon at the Clydes’ next day was given up to a family discussion of

-Miss Louise Ennis, precipitated by Mr. Clyde, who rallied Dr. Strong on

-his newest departure.

-

-“Turned beauty doctor, have you?” he taunted good-humoredly.

-

-“Trainer, rather,” answered Dr. Strong.

-

-“You might be in better business,” declared Mrs. Sharpless, with her

-customary frankness. “Beauty is only skin-deep.”

-

-“Grandma Sharpless’s quotations,” remarked Dr. Strong to the

-saltcellar, “are almost as sure to be wrong as her observations are to

-be right.”

-

-“It was a wiser man than you or I who spoke that truth about beauty.”

-

-“Nonsense! Beauty only skin-deep, indeed! It’s liver-deep anyway. Often

-it’s soul-deep. Do you think you’ve kept your good looks, Grandma

-Sharpless, just by washing your skin?”

-

-“Don’t you try to dodge the issue by flattery, young man,” said the old

-lady, the more brusquely in that she could see her son-in-law grinning

-boyishly at the mounting color in her face. “I’m as the Lord made me.”

-

-“And as you’ve kept yourself, by clean, sound living. Miss Ennis isn’t

-as the Lord made her or meant her. She’s a mere parody of it. Her basic

-trouble is an ailment much more prevalent among intelligent people than

-they are willing to admit. In the books it is listed under various

-kinds of hyphenated neurosis; but it’s real name is fool-in-the-head.”

-

-“Curable?” inquired Mr. Clyde solicitously.

-

-“There’s no known specific except removing the seat of the trouble with

-an axe,” announced Dr. Strong. “But cases sometimes respond to less

-heroic treatment.”

-

-“Not this case, I fear,” put in Mrs. Clyde. “Louise will coddle herself

-into the idea that you have grossly insulted her. She won’t come back.”

-

-“Won’t she!” exclaimed Mrs. Sharpless. “Insult or no insult, she would

-come to the bait that Dr. Strong has thrown her if she had to crawl on

-her knees.”

-

-Come she did, prompt to the hour. From out the blustery February day

-she lopped into the physician’s pleasant study, slumped into a chair,

-and held out to him a limp left hand, palm up and fingers curled.

-Ordinarily the most punctilious of men, Dr. Strong did not move from

-his stance before the fire. He looked at the hand.

-

-“What’s that for?” he inquired.

-

-“Aren’t you going to feel my pulse?”

-

-“No.”

-

-“Nor take my temperature?”

-

-“No.”

-

-“Nor look at my tongue?”

-

-“Certainly not. I have a quite sufficient idea of what it looks like.”

-

-The tone was almost brutal. Miss Ennis began to whimper.

-

-“I’m a m—m—mess, I know,” she blubbered. “But you needn’t keep telling

-me so.”

-

-“A mess can be cleared up,” said he more kindly, “under orders.”

-

-“I’ll do whatever you tell me, if only—”

-

-“Stop! There will be no ‘if’ about it. You will do as you are bid, or

-we will drop the case right here.”

-

-“No, no! Don’t drop me. I will. I promise. Only, please tell me what is

-the matter with me.”

-

-Dr. Strong, smiling inwardly, recalled the diagnosis he had announced

-to the Clydes, but did not repeat it.

-

-“Nothing,” he said.

-

-“But I know there must be. I have such strange symptoms. You can’t

-imagine.”

-

-Fumbling in her hand-bag she produced a very elegant little notebook

-with a gold pencil attached. Dr. Strong looked at it with fascinated

-but ominous eyes.

-

-“I’ve jotted down some of the symptoms here,” she continued, “just as

-they occurred. You see, here’s Thursday. That was a heart attack—”

-

-“Let me see that book.”

-

-She handed it to him. He carefully took the gold pencil from its socket

-and returned it to her.

-

-“Now, is there anything in this but symptoms? Any addresses that you

-want to keep?”

-

-“Only one: the address of a freckle and blemish remover.”

-

-“We’ll come to that later. Meantime—” He tossed the book into the heart

-of the coal fire where it promptly curled up and perished.

-

-“Why—why—why—” gasped the visitor,—“how dare you? What do you mean?

-That is an ivory-bound, gold-mounted book. It’s valuable.”

-

-“I told you, I believe, that the treatment would be expensive. This is

-only the beginning. Of all outrageous, unforgivable kinds of

-self-coddling, the hypochondria that keeps its own autobiography is the

-worst.”

-

-Regrettable though it is to chronicle, Miss Ennis hereupon emitted a

-semi-yelp of rage and beat the floor with her high French heels.

-Instantly the doctor’s gaze shifted to her feet. Just how it happened

-she could not remember, but her right foot, unprotected, presently hit

-the floor with a painful thump, while the physician contemplated the

-shoe which he had deftly removed therefrom.

-

-“Two inches and a half at least, that heel,” he observed. “Talk about

-the Chinese women torturing their feet!” He laid the offending article

-upon the hearth, set his own soundly shod foot upon it, and tweaked off

-two inches of heel with the fire-tongs. “Not so pretty,” he remarked,

-“but at least you can walk, and not tittup in that. Give me the other.”

-

-Shocked and astounded into helplessness, she mechanically obeyed. He

-performed his rough-and-ready repairs, and handed it back to her.

-

-“Speaking of walking,” he said calmly, “have you stored your automobile

-yet?”

-

-“No! I—I—I—”

-

-“After to-morrow I don’t want you to set foot in it. Now, then, we’re

-going to put you through a course of questioning. Ready?”

-

-Miss Ennis settled back in her chair, with the anticipatory expression

-of one to whom the recital of her own woe is a lingering pleasure.

-“Perhaps if I told you,” she began, “just how I feel—”

-

-“Never mind that. Do you drink?”

-

-“No!” The answer came back on the rebound. “Humph!” Dr. Strong leaned

-over her. She turned her head away.

-

-“You asked me as if you meant I was a drunkard,” she complained. “Once

-in a while, when I have some severe nervous strain to undergo, I need a

-stimulant.”

-

-“Oh. Cocktail?”

-

-“Yes. A mild one.”

-

-“A mild cocktail! That’s a paradox I’ve never encountered. How often do

-you take these mild cocktails?”

-

-“Oh, just occasionally.”

-

-“Well, a meal is an occasion. Before meals?”

-

-“Sometimes,” she admitted reluctantly.

-

-“You didn’t have one here last night.”

-

-“No.”

-

-“And you ate almost nothing.”

-

-“That is just it, you see. I need something: otherwise I have no

-appetite.”

-

-“In other words, you have formed a drink habit.”

-

-“Oh, Dr. Strong!” It was half reproach, half insulted innocence, that

-wail.

-

-“After a cocktail—or two—or three,” he looked at her closely, but she

-would not meet his eyes, “you eat pretty well?”

-

-“Yes, I suppose so.”

-

-“And then go to bed with a headache because you’ve stimulated your

-appetite to more food than your run-down mechanism can rightly handle.”

-

-“I do have a good many headaches.”

-

-“Do anything for them?”

-

-“Yes. I take some harmless powders, sometimes.”

-

-“Harmless, eh? A harmless headache powder is like a mild cocktail. It

-doesn’t exist. So you’re adding drug habit to drink habit. Fortunately,

-it isn’t hard to stop. It has begun to show on you already, in that

-puffy grayness under the eyes. All the coal-tar powders vitiate the

-blood as well as affect the heart. Sleep badly?”

-

-“Very often.”

-

-“Take anything for that?”

-

-“You mean opiates? I’m not a fool, Doctor.”

-

-“You mean you haven’t gone quite that far,” said the other grimly.

-“You’ve started in on two habits; but not the worst. Well, that’s all.

-Come back when you need to.”

-

-Miss Ennis’s big, dull eyes opened wide. “Aren’t you going to give me

-anything? Any medicine?”

-

-“You don’t need it.”

-

-“Or any advice?”

-

-Dr. Strong permitted himself a little smile at the success of his

-strategy. “Give it to yourself,” he suggested. “You showed, in flashes,

-during the dinner talk last night, that you have both wit and sense,

-when you choose to use them. Do it now.”

-

-The girl squirmed uncomfortably. “I suppose you want me to give up

-cocktails,” she murmured in a die-away voice.

-

-“Absolutely.”

-

-“And try to get along with no stimulants at all?”

-

-“By no means. Fresh air and exercise ad lib.”

-

-“And to stop the headache powders?”

-

-“Right; go on.”

-

-“And to stop thinking about my symptoms?”

-

-“Good! I didn’t reckon on your inherent sense in vain.”

-

-“And to walk where I have been riding?”

-

-“Rain or shine.”

-

-“What about diet?”

-

-“All the plain food you want, at any time you really want it, provided

-you eat slowly and chew thoroughly.”

-

-“A la Fletcher?”

-

-“Horace Fletcher is one of those fine fanatics whose extravagances

-correct the average man’s stolid stupidities. I’ve seen his fad made

-ridiculous, but never harmful. Try it out.”

-

-“And you won’t tell me when to come back?”

-

-“When you need to, I said. The moment the temptation to break over the

-rules becomes too strong, come. And—eh—by the way—eh—don’t worry about

-your mirror for a while.” Temporarily content with this, the new

-patient went away with new hope. Wiping his brow, the doctor strolled

-into the sitting-room where he found the family awaiting him with

-obvious but repressed curiosity.

-

-“It isn’t ethical, I suppose,” said Mr. Clyde, “to discuss a patient’s

-case with outsiders?”

-

-“You’re not outsiders. And she’s not my patient, in the ordinary sense,

-since I’m giving my services free. Moreover, I need all the help I can

-get.”

-

-“What can _I_ do?” asked Mrs. Clyde promptly. “Drop in at her house

-from time to time, and cheer her up. I don’t want her to depend upon me

-exclusively. She has depended altogether too much on doctors in the

-past.”

-

-Mr. Clyde chuckled. “Did she tell you that the European medical faculty

-had chased her around to every spa on the Continent? Neurasthenic

-dyspepsia, they called it.”

-

-“Pretty name! Seventy per cent of all dyspeptics have the seat of the

-imagination in the stomach. The difficulty is to divert it.”

-

-“What’s your plan?”

-

-“Oh, I’ve several, when the time comes. For the present I’ve got to get

-her around into condition.”

-

-“Spoiled mind, spoiled body,” remarked Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“Exactly. And I’m going to begin on the body, because that is the

-easiest to set right. Look out for an ill-tempered cousin during the

-next fortnight.”

-

-His prophecy was amply confirmed by Mrs. Clyde, who made it her

-business, amid multifarious activities, to drop in upon Miss Ennis with

-patient frequency. On the tenth day of the “cure,” Mrs. Clyde reported

-to the household physician:—

-

-“If I go there again I shall probably _slap_ her. She’s become simply

-unbearable.”

-

-“Good!” said Dr. Strong. “Fine! She has had the nerve to stick to the

-rules. We needn’t overstrain her, though. I’ll have her come here

-tomorrow.”

-

-Accordingly, at six o’clock in the evening of the eleventh day, the

-patient stamped into the office, wet, bedraggled, and angry.

-

-“Now look!” she cried. “You made me store my motor-car. All the

-street-cars were crowded. My umbrella turned inside out. I’m a perfect

-drench. And I know I’ll catch my death of cold.” Whereupon she laid a

-pathetic hand on her chest and coughed hollowly.

-

-“Stick out your foot,” ordered Dr. Strong. And, as she obeyed: “That’s

-well. Good, sensible storm shoes. I’ll risk your taking cold. How do

-you feel? Better?”

-

-“No. Worse!” she snapped.

-

-“I suppose so,” he retorted with a chuckle.

-

-“What is more,” she declared savagely, “I look worse!”

-

-“So your mirror has been failing in its mission of flattery. Too bad.

-Now take off your coat, sit right there by the fire, and in an hour

-you’ll be dry as toast.”

-

-“An hour? I can’t stay an hour!”

-

-“Why not?”

-

-“It’s six o’clock. I must go home. Besides,” she added unguardedly,

-“I’m half starved.”

-

-“_Indeed!_ Had a cocktail to-day?”

-

-“No. Certainly not.”

-

-“Yet you have an appetite. A bad sign. Oh, a very bad sign—for the

-cocktail market.”

-

-“I’m so tired all the time. And I wake up in the morning with hardly

-any strength to get out of bed—”

-

-“Or the inclination? Which?” broke in the doctor.

-

-“And my heart gives the queerest jumps and—”

-

-“Thought we’d thrown that symptom-book into the fire. Stand up,

-please.”

-

-She stood. Dr. Strong noted with satisfaction how, already, the lithe

-and well-set figure had begun to revert to its natural pose, showing

-that the muscles were beginning to do their work. He also noted that

-the hands, hitherto a mere _mélange_ of nervously writhing fingers,

-hung easily slack.

-

-“Your troubles,” he said pleasantly, “have only just begun. I think

-you’re strong enough now to begin work.”

-

-“I’m not,” she protested, half weeping. “I feel faint this minute.”

-

-“Good, healthy hunger. Of course, if a glance in your mirror convinces

-you that you’ve had enough of the treatment—”

-

-Miss Ennis said something under her breath which sounded very much like

-“Brute!”

-

-“Have you ever had a good sweat?” he asked abruptly.

-

-Her lips curled superciliously. “I’m not given to perspiration, I’m

-thankful to—”

-

-“Did I say ‘perspire’?” inquired he. “I understood myself to say

-‘sweat.’ Have you ever—”

-

-“No.”

-

-“High time you began. Buy yourself the heaviest sweater you can

-find—you may call it a ‘perspirationer’ if you think the salesman will

-appreciate your delicacy—and I’ll be around to-morrow and set up a

-punching-bag for you.”

-

-“What is that?”

-

-“A device which you strike at. The blow forces it against a board and

-it returns and, unless you dodge nimbly, impinges upon your

-countenance. In other words, whacks you on the nose. Prizefighters use

-it.”

-

-“I suppose you want me to be like a prizefighter.”

-

-“The most beautiful pink-and-white skin and the clearest eye I’ve ever

-seen belonged to a middleweight champion. Yes, I’d like to see you

-exactly like him in that respect. One hour every day—”

-

-“I simply can’t. I shan’t have time. With the walking I do now I’m busy

-all the morning and dead tired all the afternoon; and in the evening

-there is my bridge club—”

-

-“Ah, you play bridge. For money?”

-

-“Naturally we don’t play for counters.”

-

-“Well, I’d give it up.”

-

-“You are not employed as a censor of my morals, Dr. Strong.”

-

-“No; but I’ve undertaken to censor your nerves. And gambling, for a

-woman in your condition, is altogether too much of a strain.”

-

-The corners of Miss Ennis’s mouth quivered babyishly. “I’m sure, then,

-that working like a prizefighter will be too much strain. You’re

-wearing me out.”

-

-“I’m a cruel tyrant,” mocked Dr. Strong; “and worse is to come. We’ll

-clear out a room in your house and put in not only the punching-bag,

-but also pulleys and a rowing-machine. And I’ll send up an athletic

-instructor to see that you use them.”

-

-“I won’t have him. I’ll send him away!”

-

-“By advice of your mirror?”

-

-Miss Ennis frankly and angrily wept.

-

-“Now I’ll tell you a secret about yourself.” Miss Ennis stopped

-weeping.

-

-“Ninety-nine cases out of a hundred I couldn’t handle as I am handling

-your case. They would need a month’s rest and building up before they’d

-be fit for real work. But you are naturally a powerful, muscular woman

-with great physical endurance and resiliency. What I am trying to do is

-to take advantage of your splendid equipment to pull you out.”

-

-“What would you do with the ordinary case?” asked the girl, interested.

-

-“Oh, put her to bed, perhaps. Perhaps send her away to the woods. Maybe

-set a nurse over her to see that she didn’t take to writing her

-symptoms down in a book. Keep her on a rigid diet, and build her up by

-slow and dull processes. You may thank your stars that—”

-

-“I don’t thank my stars at all!” broke in the patient, as her besetting

-vice of self-pity asserted itself. “I’d much rather do that than be

-driven like a galley-slave. I’m too tired to get any pleasure out of

-anything—”

-

-“Even bridge?” interposed the tormentor softly.

-

-“—and when night comes I fall into bed like a helpless log.”

-

-“That’s the best news I’ve heard yet. You’re progressing. Now take that

-new appetite of yours home to dinner. And don’t spoil it by eating too

-fast. Good-night.”

-

-Fully a fortnight later Grandma Sharpless met Dr. Strong in the hallway

-as he came in from a walk.

-

-“What have you been doing to Louise Ennis?” she demanded.

-

-“Lots of things. What’s wrong now? Another fit of the sulks?”

-

-“Worse,” said the old lady in a stage whisper. “She’s got _paint_ on

-her face.”

-

-Dr. Strong laughed. “Really? It might be worse. In fact, as a symptom,

-it couldn’t be better.”

-

-“Young man, do you mean to tell me that face-paint is a good thing for

-a young woman?”

-

-“Oh, no. It’s vulgar and tawdry, as a practice. But I’m glad to know

-that Miss Ennis has turned to it, because it shows that she recognizes

-her own improvement and is trying to add to it.”

-

-“But the stuff will ruin her skin,” cried the scandalized old lady.

-“See what dreadful faces women have who use it. Look at the actresses—”

-

-“Well, look at them!” broke in the physician. “There is no class of

-women in the world with such beautiful skin as the women of the stage.

-And that in spite of hard work, doubtful habits of eating, and

-irregular hours. Do you know why?”

-

-“I suppose you’ll tell me that paint does it,” said Mrs. Sharpless with

-a sniff.

-

-“Not the paint itself. But the fact that in putting it on and taking it

-off, they maintain a profound cleanliness of skin which the average

-woman doesn’t even understand. The real value of the successful

-skin-lotions and creams so widely exploited lies in the massage which

-their use compels.”

-

-“Aside from the stuff on her face,” remarked Mrs. Sharpless, “Louise

-looks like another woman, and acts like one. She came breezing in here

-like a young cyclone.”

-

-“Which means trouble,” sighed Dr. Strong. “Now that her vitality is

-returning, it will demand something to feed on. Well, we shall see.”

-

-He found his patient standing—not sitting, this time—before the

-fireplace, with a face of gloom. Before he could greet her, she burst

-out:—

-

-“How long am I to be kept on the grind? I see nobody. I have nothing to

-amuse me. I’ve had a row with father.” Dr. Strong smiled. “The servants

-are impertinent.” The smile broadened. “The whole world is hateful!”

-The doctor’s face was now expanded into a positive grin. “I despise

-everything and everybody! I’m bored.”

-

-“Passing that over for the moment for something less important,” said

-Dr. Strong smoothly, “where do you buy your paint?”

-

-“I don’t paint!” retorted the girl hotly.

-

-“Well, your rouge. Your skin-rejuvenator. Your essence of bloom of

-youth or whatever poetic name you call it by. Let me see the box.”

-Mutiny shone from the scowling face, but her hand went to her reticule

-and emerged with a small box. It passed to the physician’s hand and

-thence to the fire. “I’ll use paint if I want to,” declared the girl.

-“Undoubtedly. But you’ll use good paint if you use any. Get a

-theatrical paper, read the ads, and send for the highest grade of

-grease-paint. I won’t say anything about the vulgarity of the practice

-because I’m not censoring your manners. I’ll only state that three

-months from now you won’t want or need paint. Did you get this stuff,”

-he nodded toward the fireplace whence issued a highly perfumed smoke,

-“from that address in your deceased symptom-book?”

-

-“Yes.”

-

-“That was the firm which advertised to remove pimples, wasn’t it?”

-

-Miss Ennis shrank. “Pimple is an inexcusable word,” she protested.

-

-“Word? We’re dealing in realities now. And pimples were an inexcusable

-reality in your case, because they were the blossoms of gluttony,

-torpor, and self-indulgence.”

-

-He leaned forward and looked closely at her chin. The surface, once

-blotched and roughened, was now of a smooth and soft translucency. “You

-once objected to the word ‘sweat,’” he continued. “Well, it has

-eliminated the more objectionable word ‘pimple’ from your reckoning.

-And it has done the job better than your blemish-remover—-which leaves

-scars.”

-

-Her hand went to her temple, where there was a little group of

-silvery-white patches on the skin. “Can’t you fix that?” she asked

-anxiously.

-

-“No. Your ‘remover’ was corrosive sublimate. It certainly removed the

-blemish. It would also have removed your entire face if you had used

-enough of it. Nothing can restore what the liquid fire has burned away.

-That’s the penalty you pay for foolish credulousness. Fortunately, it

-is where it won’t show much.”

-

-Gloom surged back into her face. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she

-fretted. “I’m still a mess in looks even if I don’t feel so much like

-one.”

-

-“One half of looks is expression,” stated the doctor didactically. “I

-don’t like yours. What’s your religion?”

-

-His patient stared. “Why, I’m a Presbyterian, I suppose.”

-

-“Humph! You suppose! It doesn’t seem to have struck in very hard. Any

-objection to going to a Christian Science church?”

-

-“Christian Science! I thought the regular doctors considered it the

-worst kind of quackery.”

-

-“The regular doctors,” returned Dr. Strong quickly, “once considered

-anaesthesia, vaccination, and the germ theory as quackery. We live and

-learn, like others. There’s plenty of quackery in Christian Science,

-and also quite a little good. And nowadays we’re learning to accept the

-good in new dogmas, and discard the bad.”

-

-“And you really wish me to go to the Christian Science church?”

-

-“Why not? You’ll encounter there a few wild fanatics. I’ll trust your

-hard common sense to guard you against their proselytizing. You’ll also

-meet a much larger number of sweet, gentle, and cheerful people, with a

-sweet, helpful, and cheerful philosophy of life. That’ll help to cure

-you.”

-

-“And what will they cure me of, since you say I have no disease?”

-

-“They’ll cure you of turning your mouth down at the corners instead of

-up.”

-

-At this, the mouth referred to did, indeed, turn up at the corners, but

-in no very pleasant wise.

-

-“You think they’ll amuse me?” she inquired contemptuously.

-

-“Oh, as for amusement, I’ve arranged for that. You’re bored. Very well,

-I expected it. It’s a symptom, and a good one, in its place. I’ll get

-you a job.”

-

-“Indeed! And if I don’t want a job?”

-

-“No matter what you want. You need it.”

-

-“Settlement work, I suppose.”

-

-“Nothing so mild. Garbage inspection.”

-

-“What!” Louise Ennis closed her eyes in expectation of a qualm of

-disgust. The qualm didn’t materialize. “What’s the matter with me?” she

-asked in naïve and suppressed chagrin. “I ought to feel—well,

-nauseated.”

-

-“Nonsense! Your nerves and stomach have found their poise. That’s all.”

-

-“But what do I know about garbage?”

-

-“You know it when you see it, don’t you? Now, listen. There has been a

-strike of the city teamsters. Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer, wants

-volunteers to inspect the city and report on where conditions are bad

-from day to day. You’ve got intelligence. You can outwalk nine men out

-of ten. And you can be of real service to the city. Besides, it’s

-doctor’s orders.”

-

-The story of Louise Ennis’s part in the great garbage strike, and of

-her subsequent door-to-door canvass of housing conditions, has no place

-in this account. After the start, Dr. Strong saw little of her; but he

-heard much from Mrs. Clyde, who continued her frequent visits to the

-Ennis household; not so much, as she frankly admitted, for the purpose

-of furnishing bulletins to Dr. Strong, as because of her own growing

-interest in and affection for the girl. And, as time went on, Strong

-noticed that, on the occasions when he chanced to meet his patient on

-the street, she was usually accompanied by one or another of the

-presentable young men of the community, a fact which the physician

-observed with professional approval rather than personal gratification.

-

-“It isn’t her health alone,” said Mrs. Clyde, when they were discussing

-her, one warm day in the ensuing summer. “These six months seem to have

-made a new person of her. Trust the children to find out character.

-Bettykins wants to spend half her time with Cousin Lou.”

-

-“You’ve surely worked a transformation, Strong,” said Clyde. “But, of

-course, the raw material was there. You couldn’t do much for the

-average homely woman.”

-

-“The average woman isn’t homely,” said Mrs. Clyde. “She’s got good

-looks either spoiled or undeveloped.”

-

-“Perfectly true,” confirmed Dr. Strong. “Any young woman whose face

-isn’t actually malformed can find her place in the eternal scheme of

-beauty if she tries. Nature works toward beauty in all matters of sex.

-Where beauty doesn’t exist it is merely an error in Nature’s game.”

-

-“Then the world is pretty full of errors,” said Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“Most of them aren’t Nature’s errors. They are the mistakes of the

-foolish human. Take almost any woman, not past the age of development,

-build up her figure to be supple and self-sustaining; give her a clear

-eye, quick-moving blood, fresh skin, and some interest in the game of

-life that shall keep mind and body alert—why, the radiant force of her

-abounding health would make itself felt in a blind asylum. And all this

-she can do for herself, with a little knowledge and a good deal of

-will.”

-

-“But that isn’t exactly beauty, is it?” asked Clyde, puzzled.

-

-“Isn’t it? In the soundest sense, I think it is. Anyway, put it this

-way: No woman who is wholly healthy, inside and out, can fail to be

-attractive.”

-

-“I wish that painter-man could see Louise now, as an example,” said

-Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“Oren Taylor?” said Mr. Clyde. “Why, he can. He goes East next week,

-and I’ll wire him to stop over.”

-

-Oren Taylor arrived late on a warm afternoon. As he crossed the lawn,

-Louise Ennis was playing “catch” with Manny Clyde. Her figure swung and

-straightened with the lithe muscularity of a young animal. Her cheek

-was clear pink, deepening to the warmer color of the curved lips. The

-blue veins stood out a little against the warm, moist temples from

-which she brushed a vagrant lock of hair. Her eyes were wide and

-lustrous with the eager effort of the play, for the boy was throwing

-wide in purposeful delight over her swift gracefulness.

-

-“Great Heavens!” exclaimed the artist, staring at her. “Who did that?”

-

-“Strong did that,” explained Clyde; “as per specifications.”

-

-“A triumph!” declared Taylor. “A work of art.”

-

-“Oh, no,” said Dr. Strong; “a renewal of Nature.”

-

-“In any case, a lady remade and better than new. My profound

-felicitations, Dr. Strong.” He walked over to the flushed and lovely

-athlete. “Miss Ennis,” he said abruptly, “I want your permission to

-stay over to-morrow and sketch you. I need you in my ‘Poet’s Cycle of

-the Months.’”

-

-“How do you do, Mr. Taylor?” she returned demurely. “Of course you can

-sketch me, if it doesn’t interfere with my working hours.” A quick

-smile rippled across her face like sunlight across water. “The same

-subject?” she asked with mischievous nonchalance.

-

-“No. Not even the same season,” he replied emphatically, coloring, as

-he bethought him of his “November, the withered mourner of glories dead

-and gone.”

-

-“What part am I to play now?”

-

-“Let Dr. Strong name it,” said Taylor with quick tact. “He has prepared

-the model.”

-

-The girl turned to the physician, a little deeper tinge of color in her

-face.

-

-“Referred to Swinburne,” said Strong lightly, and quoted:—

-

-“When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces,

-The mother of months in valley and plain

-Fills the shadows and windy places

-With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.”

-

-

-“Atalanta,” said Oren Taylor, bowing low to her; “the maiden spirit of

-the spring.”

-

-

-

-

-VII.

-THE RED PLACARD

-

-

-“Well?” questioned Mrs. Clyde, facing the Health Master haggardly, as

-he entered the library.

-

-“Oh, come!” he protested with his reassuring smile. “Don’t take it so

-tragically. You’ve got a pretty sick-looking boy there. But any

-thoroughgoing fever makes a boy of nine pretty sick.”

-

-“What fever?” demanded the mother. “What is it?”

-

-“Let’s start with what it isn’t—and thank Heaven. It isn’t typhoid. And

-it isn’t diphtheria.”

-

-“Then it’s—it’s—;”

-

-“It’s scarlet fever,” broke in her mother, Mrs. Sharpless, who had

-followed the doctor into the room. “That’s what it is.”

-

-Mrs. Clyde shuddered at the name. “Has he got the rash?”

-

-“No. But he will have to-morrow,” stated the old lady positively.

-

-“Do you think so, too, Dr. Strong?” Mrs. Clyde appealed.

-

-“I’ll accept Grandma Sharpless’s judgment,” answered the physician.

-“She has seen more scarlet fever in her time than I, or most

-physicians. And experience is the true teacher of diagnosis.”

-

-“But you can’t be sure!” persisted Mrs. Clyde. “How can you tell

-without the rash?”

-

-“Not in any way that I could put into words,” said her mother. “But

-there’s something in the look of the throat and something about the

-eyes and skin—Well, I can’t describe it, but I know it as I know my own

-name.”

-

-“There speaks the born diagnostician,” observed the Health Master. “I’m

-afraid the verdict must stand.”

-

-“Then—then,” faltered Mrs. Clyde, “we must act at once. I’ll call up my

-husband at the factory.”

-

-“What for?” inquired Dr. Strong innocently. “Why, to let him know, of

-course.”

-

-“Don’t. When I undertook to act as Chinese-plan physician to the Clyde

-household, I was not only to guard the family against illness as well

-as I could, but also to save them worry. This is Saturday. Mr. Clyde

-has had a hard, trying week in the factory. Why break up his day?”

-

-Mrs. Clyde drew a long breath and her face lightened. “Then it isn’t a

-serious case?”

-

-“Scarlet fever is always serious. Any disease which thoroughly poisons

-the system is. But there’s no immediate danger; and there shouldn’t be

-much danger at any time to a sturdy youngster like Charley, if he’s

-well looked after.”

-

-“But the other children!” Mrs. Clyde turned to Mrs. Sharpless. “Where

-can we send them, mother?”

-

-“Nowhere.” It was the doctor who answered.

-

-“Surely we can’t keep them in the house!” cried Mrs. Clyde. “They would

-be certain to catch it from Charley.”

-

-“By no means certain. Even if they did, that would not be the worst

-thing that could happen.”

-

-“No? What would, then?” challenged Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“That they should go out of this house, possibly carrying the poison

-with them into some other and defenseless community.” Dr. Strong spoke

-a little sternly.

-

-Neither woman replied for a moment. When Mrs. Clyde spoke, it was with

-a changed voice. “Yes. You are right. I didn’t think. At least I

-thought only of my own children. It’s hard to learn to think like a

-mother of all children.”

-

-“It’s as near to the divine as any human can come,” returned the Health

-Master gently. “However, I think I can promise you that, if the twins

-and Bettykin haven’t been touched with the poison already, they shan’t

-get it from Charley. We’ll organize a defense—provided only the enemy

-hasn’t established itself already. Now the question is, where did the

-poison come from? We’ll have Junkum in and see if she can help us find

-out.” Julia, the more efficient of the eleven-year-old twins, a shrewd

-and observing youngster, resembling, in many respects, her grandmother,

-came at the doctor’s summons and was told what had befallen Charley.

-

-“Oh!” said Junkum. Then, “Can I nurse him?”

-

-“I should think not!” burst out her mother and grandmother in a breath.

-

-“Later on you can help,” said Dr. Strong. “In fact, I shall probably

-need your help. Now, Junkum, you remember I told you children a month

-ago that there was scarlet fever about and warned you to guard your

-mouths and noses with special care. Can you recall whether Charley has

-been careless?”

-

-Miss Julia took the matter under consideration. “We’ve all been, I

-guess,” she said. “Clara Wingate gave a party last week and there was

-bobbing for apples, and everybody had their faces in the same tub of

-water.”

-

-“Yes; and Irving Wingate has since come down with scarlet fever,” added

-Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Enough said!” asserted the Health Master. “I can’t think of any better

-way to disseminate germs than an apple-bobbing contest. It beats even

-kissing games. Well, the mischief is done.”

-

-“Then they’ll all have it,” said Mrs. Clyde miserably.

-

-“Oh, let’s hope not. Nothing is more mysterious than the way contagion

-hits one and misses others. I should say there was at least an even

-chance of the rest escaping. But we must regard them as suspects, and

-report the house for quarantine.”

-

-“Ugh!” shuddered Mrs. Clyde. “I hate that word. And think of my husband

-coming home to find a flaming red placard on the house!”

-

-“We’ll give him warning before he leaves the factory. And now for our

-campaign. Item 1: a trained nurse. Item 2: a gas-range.”

-

-“The trained nurse, certainly,” agreed Mrs. Clyde. “But why the

-gas-range? Isn’t Charley’s room warm enough?”

-

-“Quite. The stove isn’t for warmth; it’s for safety. I’m going to

-establish a line of fire beyond which no contagion can pass. We’ll put

-the stove in the hall, and keep on it a tin boiler full of water just

-at the simmering point. Everything which Charley has used or touched

-must go into that or other boiling water as soon as it leaves the room:

-the plates he eats from, the utensils he uses; his handkerchiefs,

-night-clothes, towels—everything.”

-

-“That will be a hard regimen to keep up,” Mrs. Clyde objected.

-

-“Martial law,” said the Health Master positively. “From the moment the

-red placard goes up, we’re in a state of siege, and I’m in command. The

-rules of the camp will be simple but strict. Whoever violates any of

-them will be liable to imprisonment in the strictest quarantine. We’ll

-have a household conference to-night and go over the whole matter. Now

-I’m going to telephone the Health Department and ask Dr. Merritt to

-come up and quarantine us officially.”

-

-“But what of Charley?” exclaimed Mrs. Clyde. “You’re not going to keep

-me away from my boy?”

-

-“Not when you put it in that way and use that tone,” smiled Dr. Strong.

-“I probably couldn’t if I tried. Under official quarantine rules you’ll

-have to give up going anywhere outside the house. Under our local

-martial law you’re not to touch Charley or anything that he handles,

-nor to kiss the other children. And you’re to wash your hands every

-time you come out of the sick-room, though it’s only to step beyond the

-door.”

-

-“It is an order,” said the mother gravely. “Will he be very ill, do you

-think?”

-

-“So far the cases have been mild. His is likely to be, too. But it’s

-the most difficult kind of case to handle.”

-

-“I don’t see that at all,” said Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“You will, when he becomes convalescent. Then is when my troubles will

-begin. For the present the bulk of the work inside the sick-room will

-be upon the trained nurse and Mrs. Clyde. I’ll have my troubles

-outside, watching the rest of the family.”

-

-Not since Dr. Strong came to the Clydes’ as guardian of their health

-had there been an emergency meeting called of the Household Protective

-Association, as the Health Master termed the organization which he had

-formed (mainly for educative purposes) within the family. That evening

-he addressed a full session, including the servants, holding up before

-them the red placard which the Health Department had sent, and

-informing them of the quarantine.

-

-“No school?” inquired the practical-minded Bobs, “Hooray!”

-

-“No school for you children, until further notice,” confirmed the

-physician.

-

-“And no business for me, I suppose,” said Mr. Clyde, frowning.

-

-“Oh, yes. You can come and go as you please, so long as you keep away

-from Charley’s room. Every one is barred from Charley’s room until

-further instructions, except Mrs. Clyde; and she is confined within

-military bounds, consisting of the house and yard. And now for the most

-important thing—Rosie and Katie,”—the cook and the maid—“pay particular

-heed to this—nothing of any kind which comes from the sick-room is to

-be touched until it is disinfected, except under my supervision. When

-I’m not in the house, the nurse’s authority will be absolute. Now for

-the clinic; we’ll look over the throats of the whole crowd.”

-

-Throat inspection appeared to be the Health Master’s favorite pursuit

-for the next few days.

-

-“I don’t dare open my mouth,” protested Bobs, “for fear he’ll peek into

-it and find a spot.”

-

-“Dr. Strong spends a lot more time watching us than he does watching

-Charley,” remarked Junkum. “Who’s the sick one, anyway—us or him?” she

-concluded, her resentment getting the better of her grammar.

-

-“Ho!” jeered Bobs, and intoned the ancient couplet, made and provided

-for the correction of such slips:—

-

-“Her ain’t a-callin’ we,

-Us don’t belong to she.”

-

-

-“Anyhow, I ain’t sick,” asseverated Bettina; “but he shut me up in my

-room for a day jus’ because my swallow worked kinda hard.”

-

-“If I’m going to have scarlet fever I want to have scarlet fever and

-get done with it!” declared.

-

-Bobs. “I’m getting tired of staying out of school. Charley’s having all

-the fun there is out of this, getting read to all the time by that

-nurse and Mother.”

-

-Meantime nothing of interest was happening in the sick-room.

-Interesting phases seldom appear in scarlet fever, which is well,

-since, when they do appear, the patient usually dies. Not at any time

-did Charley evince the slightest tendency to forsake a world which he

-had found, on the whole, to be a highly satisfactory place of

-residence. In fact, he was going comfortably along through a typically

-light onset of the disease; and was rather less ill than he would have

-been with a sound case of measles. Already the furrows in Mrs. Clyde’s

-forehead had smoothed out, and Grandma Sharpless had ceased waking, in

-the dead of night, with a catch at her heart and the totally unfounded

-fear that she had “heard something,” when one morning Charley awoke,

-scratched a tiny flake of skin off his nose, yawned, and emitted a

-hollow groan.

-

-“What is it, Charley boy?” asked his mother.

-

-“I’m tired of staying in bed,” announced the young man.

-

-“How do you feel?”

-

-The patient sat up, the better to consider the matter. “I feel,” he

-stated in positive accents, “like a bucket of oyster stew, a steak as

-big as my head, with onions all over it, a whole apple pie, a platter

-of ice-cream, and a game of baseball.”

-

-Mrs. Clyde laughed happily. “I’ll tell the Health Master,” she said.

-She did, and Dr. Strong came up and looked the patient over carefully.

-

-“You lie back there, young fellow,” he ordered, “and play sick, no

-matter how well you feel, until I tell you different.”

-

-“How about that beefsteak and pie, Doctor?” inquired the boy wistfully.

-

-“Mere prospects,” retorted the hard-hearted physician. “But you can

-have some ice-cream.” Conclave of the elders that evening to consider

-the situation was opened by Dr. Strong.

-

-“We’ve now reached the critical point,” he began.

-

-“Critical?” gasped Mrs. Clyde, whose nerves had been considerably

-stretched in the ten days of sick-room work. “Isn’t he getting well?”

-

-“He’s getting well quite as quickly as I want him to. Perhaps a little

-more quickly. The fever is broken and he is beginning to peel.”

-

-“Then what’s the difficulty?” inquired Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Just this. Charley is a sturdy boy. The light attack he’s had hasn’t

-begun to exhaust his vitality. From now on, he is going to be a bundle

-of energy, without outlet.”

-

-“From now on till when?” It was Grandma Sharpless who wanted to know.

-

-“Two weeks anyway. Perhaps more.”

-

-“Are you going to keep that poor child in bed for two weeks after he’s

-practically well?” said the mother.

-

-“For three weeks if the whole family will help me. It’s not going to be

-easy.”

-

-“Isn’t that a little extreme, Strong?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Only the precaution of experience. The danger-point in scarlet fever

-isn’t the illness; it’s the convalescence. People think that when a

-child is cured of a disease, he is cured of the effects of the disease

-also. That mistake costs lives.”

-

-“Because the poison is still in the system?”

-

-“Rather, the effects of the poison. Though the patient may feel quite

-well, the whole machinery of the body is out of gear. What do you do

-when your machinery goes wrong, Clyde?”

-

-“Stop it, of course.”

-

-“Of course,” repeated the Health Master. “Obviously we can’t stop the

-machinery of life, but we can ease it down to its lowest possible

-strain, until it has had a chance to readjust itself. That is what I

-want to do in Charley’s case.”

-

-“How does this poison affect the system?”

-

-“If I could discover that, I’d be sure of a place in history. All we

-know is that no organ seems to be exempt from its sudden return attack

-long after the disease has passed. If we ever get any complete records,

-I venture to say that we’ll find more children dying in after years

-from the results of scarlet fever than die from the immediate disease

-itself, not to mention such after-effects as deafness and blindness.”

-

-“I’ve noticed that,” said Grandma Sharpless, “when we lived in the

-country. And I remember a verse on the scarlet-fever page of an old

-almanac:—

-

-If they run from nose or ear,

-Watch your children for a year.

-

-

-But I always set down those cases to catching cold.”

-

-“Most people do. It isn’t that. It’s overstrain put on a poisoned

-system. And it’s true not of scarlet fever alone, but of measles, and

-diphtheria, and grippe; and, in a lesser degree, of whooping-cough and

-chicken pox.”

-

-“You’ve seen such cases in your own practice?” asked Mr. Clyde, and

-regretted the question as soon as he had put it, for there passed over

-Dr. Strong’s face the quick spasm of pain which anything referring back

-to the hidden past before he had come to the Clyde house always

-brought.

-

-“Yes,” he replied with an effort. “I have had such cases, and lost

-them. I might even say, killed them in my ignorance.”

-

-“Oh, no, Dr. Strong!” said Mrs. Clyde in quick sympathy. “Don’t say

-that. Being mistaken isn’t killing.”

-

-“It is, sometimes, for a doctor. I remember one little patient who had

-a very light case of scarlet fever. I let her get up as soon as the

-fever broke. Three months later she developed a dropsical tendency. And

-one day she fell dead across the doll she was playing with. The

-official cause of death said heart disease. But I knew what it was. The

-next case was not so wholly my fault. The boy was a spoiled child, who

-held his parents in enslavement. They hadn’t the strength of character

-to keep him under control. He insisted on riding his bicycle around the

-yard, three days after he was out of bed. Against his willfulness my

-protests were of no account. What I should have done is to have thrown

-up the case; but I was young and the people were my friends. Well; that

-boy made, apparently, a complete recovery. A few weeks later I was sent

-for again. There was some kidney trouble. I knew, before the analysis

-was made, what it would show: nephritis. The poison had struck to the

-kidneys like a dagger. The poor little chap dragged along for some

-months before he died; and his mother—God forgive me if I did wrong in

-telling her the truth, as I did for the protection of their other

-child—almost lost her reason.”

-

-“And such cases are common?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Common enough to be fairly typical. Afterward, I cited the two

-instances in a talk before our medical society. My frankness encouraged

-some of the other men to be frank; and the list of fatalities and

-permanent disabilities, following scarlet fever and measles, which was

-brought out at that meeting, nearly every case being one of rushing the

-convalescence—well, it reformed one phase of medical procedure in—in

-that city and county.”

-

-“That settles it for Charley,” decided Mr. Clyde. “He stays in bed

-until you certify him cured, if I have to hire a vaudeville show to

-keep him amused.”

-

-“My boy is not a spoiled child!” said Mrs. Clyde proudly. “I can handle

-him.”

-

-“Maybe he wasn’t before,” remarked Grandma Sharpless dryly; “but I

-think you’ll have your hands full now.”

-

-“Therefore,” said Dr. Strong, “I propose to enlist the services of the

-whole family, including the children.”

-

-“What! Let the others go to see Charley when he’s peeling?” protested

-Mrs. Sharpless. “They’ll all catch it.”

-

-“How?”

-

-“Why, from the skin-flakes. That’s the way scarlet fever spreads.”

-

-“Is it?” said the Health Master mildly. “Then perhaps you’ll explain to

-me why doctors aren’t the greatest danger that civilization suffers

-from.”

-

-“I suppose they disinfect themselves,” said the old lady, in a rather

-unconvinced tone.

-

-“Let’s see how much that would amount to. The fine flakes of skin are

-likely to be pretty well disseminated in a sick-room. According to the

-old theory, every one of them is a potential disease-bearer. Now, a

-doctor could hardly be in a sickroom without getting some of them on

-his clothes or in his hair, as well as on his hands, which, of course,

-he thoroughly washes on leaving the place. But that’s the extent of his

-disinfection. Why don’t the flakes he carries with him spread the fever

-among his other patients?”

-

-“Don’t ask _me!_” said Clyde. “I’m not good at puzzles.”

-

-“Many doctors still hold to the old theory. But I’ve never met one who

-could answer that argument. Some of the best hospitals in the world

-discharge patients without reference to the peeling of the skin, and

-without evil results.”

-

-“How is scarlet fever caught, then?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“From the discharge from the inflamed nose and throat, or from the ears

-if they are affected. Anything which comes in contact with this

-poisonous mucus is dangerous. Thus, of course, the skin-flakes from the

-lips or the hands which had been in contact with the mouth or nose

-might carry the contagion, just as a fork or a tooth-brush or a

-handkerchief might. Now, I’ll risk my status in this house on the

-safety of letting the other children visit Charley under certain

-restrictions.”

-

-“That settles it for me,” said Mr. Clyde, whose faith in his friend,

-while not unquestioning, was fundamental; and the two women agreed,

-though not without misgivings. Thereupon Bobs, Julia, and Bettina were

-sent for, and the Health Master announced that Charley would hold a

-reception on the following afternoon. There were shouts of acclamation

-at the prospect.

-

-“But first,” added Dr. Strong, “there will be a rehearsal in the

-playroom, to-morrow morning.”

-

-“What do we need a rehearsal for to see Charley?” inquired Julia.

-

-“To guard yourselves, Miss Junkum,” returned the doctor. “Possibly you

-don’t know everything about scarlet fever that you should know. Do you,

-Cherubic Miss Toots,” he added, turning upon Bettina, “know what a

-contagious disease is?”

-

-“I know,” said the diminutive maiden gravely, “that if you leave

-Charley’s door open the jerrums will fly out and bite people.”

-

-“Which fairly typifies the popular opinion concerning disease bacilli,”

-observed Dr. Strong.

-

-“I saw a jerrum once,” continued the infant of the family. “It was

-under a stone in a creek. It had horns and a wiggly tail. Just like the

-Devil,” she added with an engaging smile.

-

-“Betty’s been looking at the pictures in the comic supplements,”

-explained her elder sister.

-

-“Popular education by the press!” commented Dr. Strong. “Well, I

-haven’t time for an exposition of the germ theory now. The point is

-this: Can you children stay an hour in Charley’s room without putting a

-lot of things in your mouths?”

-

-“Why, I never put anything in my mouth. You taught us better than

-that,” said Julia reproachfully.

-

-The doctor was little impressed by the reproach. “Humph!” he grunted.

-“Well, suppose you stop nibbling at your hair”—Julia’s braid flew back

-over her shoulder—“and consider that, when you put your fingers in your

-mouth, you may be putting in, also, a particle of everything that your

-fingers have touched. And in Charley’s room there might be jerrums, as

-Twinkles calls them, from his mouth which would be dangerous. Rehearsal

-at noon tomorrow.”

-

-Expectant curiosity brought the children early to the playroom whither

-they found that the Health Master had preceded them.

-

-“When’s it going to begin?” asked Bettina.

-

-“Presently,” replied the master of ceremonies. “We’re going to pretend

-that this is Charley’s room. Just at present I’m busy with some work.”

-He shook a notebook at them. “Go ahead and amuse yourselves till I get

-through.”

-

-Julia the observant noted three hues of crayon on the stand beside the

-doctor. “Are you going to make a sketch?” she inquired.

-

-“Never you mind. You attend to your affairs and I’ll attend to mine.”

-

-“Dr. Strong is a-goin’ to make a picture of a jerrum,” Bettina informed

-her favorite doll, Susan Nipper, imprinting a fervent kiss on the pet’s

-flattened face. “Come on an’ let’s read the paper.”

-

-Dr. Strong made a note in his book, with a pencil.

-

-“Want to play catch, Junkum?” suggested Bobs to his twin.

-

-“All right,” said Julia, seizing upon a glove, while Bobs, in his rôle

-of pitcher, professionally moistened the ball.

-

-Dr. Strong made another note.

-

-For half an hour they disported themselves in various ways while the

-Health Master, whose eyes were roving everywhere, made frequent entries

-in his book.

-

-“All out now,” he ordered finally. “Come back in five minutes.”

-

-Before the time was up, they were clustered at the door. Dr. Strong

-admitted them.

-

-“Does the rehearsal begin now?” asked Bobs.

-

-“It’s all over,” said the physician. “Look around you.”

-

-“Ow-w-w!” wailed Bettina. “Look at Susan Nipper’s nose!”

-

-That once inconspicuous feature had turned a vivid green.

-

-“And the baseball is red,” cried Bobs.

-

-“So’s my glove,” announced Julia.

-

-Walking over to her, the Health Master caught her left hand and smeared

-it with blue crayon. For good measure he put a dab on her chin.

-

-“My story-book is all blue, too,” exclaimed the girl. “What’s it for?”

-

-“Just by way of illustration,” explained the doctor. “The mouths of all

-of us contain germs of one kind or another. So I’ve assumed that Bob’s

-mouth has red, and Junkum’s blue, and Miss Twinkle’s green. Every chalk

-mark shows where you’ve spread your germs.”

-

-“Then the red on the ball is where I wet my fingers for that in-curve,”

-said Bobs.

-

-“And on my glove is where I caught it,” said Julia. “But what’s the

-blue doing on my left hand?”

-

-“I know,” announced Bobs triumphantly. “You got that slow drop on the

-end of your finger and jammed your finger in your mouth.”

-

-“It hurt,” defended Julia. “Look at the walls—and the Indian clubs—and

-the chair.”

-

-Crayon marks were everywhere.[2] In some places it was one color; in

-others another; in many, a crazy pattern of red, blue, and green.

-

- [2] For this ingenious example of the crayon marks I am indebted to

- Dr. Charles V. Chapin, Health Officer of Providence, Rhode Island, and

- a distinguished epidemiologist.

-

-

-“And if I carried it out,” said the doctor, “your faces would all be as

-bad.”

-

-“I don’t care!” murmured Betty to Susan Nipper; “I _will_ kiss you even

-if you do turn green.”

-

-“But you mustn’t kiss Charley,” interposed Dr. Strong. “If you’ve had

-enough rehearsal, we’ll go and make our call right after luncheon.”

-

-Entering the sick-room, the three visitors stood a little abashed and

-strange. Their hearty, rough-and-tumble brother looked strangely drawn

-and brighteyed.

-

-“Hello, kids!” said he, airily. “Make yourselves at home.”

-

-Bettykin was the first to break the ice. “Did it hurt, Charley?” she

-asked, remembering her own experience with adenoids.

-

-“Nope,” said the convalescent. “Only thing that hurts is being kept in

-bed when I want to be up and around. What’s new?”

-

-Much was new, there in the room, and the children took it in,

-wide-eyed. Although it was early May, the windows were screened. All

-the hangings and curtains had been taken out of the room, which looked

-bare and bright. On the door of the bathroom was a huge roller-towel of

-soft, cloth-like paper, perforated in lengths so as to be easily

-detachable, and below it a scrap-basket, with a sign: “Throw Paper

-Towels in Here to be Burned after Using.” Between the two windows was a

-larger sign:—

-

-Keep your Fingers Away from Your Mouth and Nose.

-Don’t Handle Utensils Lying About.

-Don’t Open an Unscreened Window.

-After Touching Anything which may have been Contaminated Wash Your

-Hands at Once.

-Use the Paper Towels; They’re the Only Safe Kind.

-One Dollar Reward to Any One Discovering a Fly in the Room.

-Wash Your Hands Immediately After Leaving the Room.

-Keep Outside the Dead-line.

-

-

-PENALTIES

-

-

-For First Violation of Rules—Offender Reads to Patient One Hour. Second

-Violation—Banishment for Balance of Day.

-

-

-“The dead-line is that thing, I suppose,” said Junkum, pointing to a

-tape stretched upon standards around the bed at a distance of a yard.

-

-“Is it a game?” questioned the hopeful Bettina. “No, Bettykin. It’s a

-germ-cage. No germs can get out of that unless they’re carried out by

-somebody or something. And, in that case, they’re boiled to death on

-the gas-stove outside.”

-

-At this moment Charley called for a drink of water. After he had

-emptied the glass, his mother took it out and dropped it into the

-disinfecting hot bath. Then she washed her hands, dried them on a strip

-of the paper towel and dropped that in the basket.

-

-“I see,” said Julia, the observant. “Nothing gets any scarlet fever on

-it except what Charley touches. And everything he touches has to be

-washed as soon as it comes out of the dead-line.”

-

-“Exactly. We’ll make a trained nurse of you, yet, Junkum,” approved the

-Health Master.

-

-“Then,” said Julia slowly, “I think Bobs ought to wash his hands now.

-Mother opened the door after handling Charley’s glass, and when he went

-to watch her wash the glass, he put his hand on the knob.”

-

-“One mark against Bobs,” announced the doctor. “The rigor of the game.”

-

-A game it proved to be, with Charley for umpire, and a very keen

-umpire, as he was the beneficiary of the penalties. For some days

-Charley quite fattened on literature dispensed orally by the

-incautious. Presently, however, they became so wary that it was hard to

-catch them.

-

-Then, indeed, was the doctor hard put to it to keep the invalid amused.

-The children invented games and charades for him. A special telephone

-wire was run to his room so that he might talk with his friends. Bobs

-won commendations by flying a kite one windy day and passing the twine

-up through Charley’s window, whereby the bedridden one spent a happy

-afternoon “feeling her pull.” And the next day Betty won the first and

-only dollar by discovering a small and early fly which, presumably, had

-crawled in by the hole bored for the kite twine. As to any

-encroachments upon the physical quiet of his patient or the protective

-guardianship surrounding him, the Health Master was adamant, until, on

-a day, after examining the prisoner’s throat and nose, and going over

-him, as Mr. Clyde put it, “like a man buying a horse that’s cheaper

-than he ought to be,” he sent for the Health Officer.

-

-“It’s a clean throat,” said Dr. Merritt. “Never mind the desquamating

-skin. We’ll call it off.”

-

-Whereupon Charley was raised from his bed, and having symbolically

-broken the tape-line about his bed, headed a solemn and slow procession

-of the entire family to the front porch where he formally took down the

-red placard and tore it in two. The halves still ornament the playroom,

-as a memento.

-

-After this memorable ceremony, Mrs. Clyde retired to the library and,

-quite contrary to her usually self-restrained nature, dissolved into

-illogical tears, in which condition she was found by the rest.

-

-“I—I—I don’t know what’s the matter,” she sobbed, in response to her

-husband’s inquiry. “It’s just because I hated the very thought of that

-abominable red sign so,—as if we were unclean—like lepers.”

-

-“Well, we’re not lepers and if we can continue in that blessed state,”

-remarked Dr. Strong cheerfully, “we can escape most of the ills that

-flesh is heir to. After all, from a scientific point of view, contagion

-is merely the Latin synonym for a much shorter and uglier word.”

-

-“Which is—” queried Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Dirt,” said the Health Master.

-

-

-

-

-VIII.

-HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS

-

-

-“Hopeless from the first,” said old Mrs. Sharpless, with a sigh, to her

-daughter.

-

-Mrs. Clyde nodded. “I suppose so. And she has so much to live for,

-too.”

-

-“What’s this that’s hopeless from the first?” asked the Health Master,

-looking up from the novel which he was enjoying in what he called his

-“lazy hour,” after luncheon.

-

-“Mrs. Westerly’s case,” said the younger woman. “Even now that she’s

-gone to the hospital, the family won’t admit that it’s cancer.”

-

-“Ah, of the liver, I suppose,” commented the physician.

-

-“Why on earth should you suppose that?” demanded Mrs. Sharpless

-suspiciously.

-

-“Why, because cancer of the liver is the only form which could possibly

-be regarded as hopeless from the first.”

-

-“All cancer, if it is really cancer, is hopeless,” declared the old

-lady with vigorous dogmatism. “Don’t tell me. I’ve seen too many cases

-die and too few get well.”

-

-“Were those ‘few’ hopeless, too?” inquired Dr. Strong with bland

-slyness.

-

-“I guess they weren’t cancer, at all,” retorted Mrs. Sharpless; “just

-doctors’ mistakes.”

-

-“Doctors do make mistakes,” admitted the representative of the

-profession, “and cancer is one of the diseases where they are most

-commonly at fault. But the error isn’t of the kind that you suggest,

-Grandma Sharpless. Where they go wrong so often is in mistaking cancer

-for some less malignant trouble; not in mistaking the less malignant

-forms for cancer. And that wastes thousands of lives every year which

-might have been saved.”

-

-“How could they have been saved?” asked the old lady combatively.

-

-“Let me do the questioning for a minute, and perhaps we’ll get at that.

-Now, these many cases that you’ve known: were most of the fatal ones

-recent?”

-

-“Not very,” she replied, after some consideration. “No; most of them

-were from ten years ago, back.”

-

-“Exactly. Now, the few that recovered: when did these occur?”

-

-“Within a few years.”

-

-“None of the old cases recovered?”

-

-“No.”

-

-“But a fair proportion of the more recent ones have?”

-

-“Yes.”

-

-“All these were operated on, weren’t they?”

-

-“Yes; I believe they were. But not all that were operated on lived.”

-

-“Did a single one of those not operated on live?”

-

-“Not so far as I can remember.”

-

-“Well, there we have the truth about cancer in a few words; or, anyway,

-a good part of the truth. Up to twenty years ago or so, cancer was

-practically incurable. It always returned after operation. That was

-because the surgeon thought he needed only to cut out the cancer. Now

-he knows better; he knows that he must cut out all the tissue and the

-glands around the obvious cancer, and thus get the root of the growth

-out of the system.”

-

-“And that cures?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“In a great majority of cases, _if it is done early enough_.” The

-Health Master dropped his book and beat time with an emphatic

-forefinger to his concluding words.

-

-“But Agnes Westerly’s is cancer of the breast,” said Mrs. Clyde, as if

-that clinched the case against the patient.

-

-“Just about the most favorable locality.”

-

-“I thought it was the worst.”

-

-“Where on earth do intelligent women collect their superstitions about

-cancer?” cried Dr. Strong. “Carcinoma of the breast is the commonest

-form among women, and the easiest to handle. Show me a case in the

-first stages and, with a good surgical hospital at hand, I’d almost

-guarantee recovery. It’s simply a question of removing the entire

-breast, and sometimes the adjacent glands. Ninety per cent of the early

-cases should get well.”

-

-“But the operation itself is so terrible,” shuddered Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Terrible? Unpleasant, I’ll admit. But if you mean terrible in the

-sense of dangerous, or even serious, you’re far wrong again. The

-percentage of mortality from the operation itself is negligible. But

-the percentage of mortality without operation is 100 out of 100. So the

-choice is an easy one.”

-

-“They seem to hold out little hope for Agnes Westerly.”

-

-“Let’s hear about the circumstances,” suggested Dr. Strong.

-

-“About two years ago—”

-

-“That’s a bad beginning,” interrupted the physician, shaking his head.

-

-“—She noticed a small lump in her right breast. It didn’t trouble her

-much—”

-

-“It seldom does at the start.”

-

-“—And she didn’t want to alarm her husband; so she said nothing about

-it. It kept getting a little larger very slowly, but there was no

-outside sore; so she thought it couldn’t be serious. If it were, she

-thought, it would pain her.”

-

-“That fatal mistake! Pain is a late symptom in cancer—usually too

-late.”

-

-“It was curious the way she finally came to find out. She read an

-advertisement in the paper, headed, ‘Any Lump in Woman’s Breast is

-Cancer.’”

-

-“Yes; I know that advertisement. It’s put out by a scoundrel named

-Chamlee. Surely, she didn’t try his torturing treatment?”

-

-“Oh, no. Agnes is too intelligent for that. But it frightened her into

-going to her doctor. He told her that a radical operation was her only

-chance. She was terribly frightened,—more afraid of the knife than of

-the disease, she told me,—and she insisted on delay until the pain grew

-intolerable. And now, they say, there’s only a slight chance. Isn’t it

-pitiful?”

-

-“Pitiful, and typical. Mrs. Westerly, if she dies, is a type of

-suicide, the suicide of fear and ignorance. Two years’ waiting! And

-every day subtracting from her chance. That’s the curse of cancer; that

-people won’t understand the vital necessity of promptness.”

-

-“But is it true that any lump in a woman’s breast is cancer?” asked

-Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“No; it’s a lie; a damnable lie, circulated by that quack to scare

-foolish women into his toils. Most of such lumps are non-malignant

-growths. This is true, though: that any lump in a woman’s breast is

-suspicious. It may be cancer; or it may develop into cancer. The only

-course is to find out.”

-

-“How?”

-

-‘“With the knife.”

-

-“Isn’t that rather a severe method for a symptom that may not mean

-anything?”

-

-“Not too severe, considering the danger. Whatever the lump may be, it

-has no business there in the breast, any more than a bullet has. If it

-is only a small benign tumor, the process of taking it out is very

-simple, and there is nothing further to do. While the patient is still

-under the anaesthetic, a microscopical examination of the tissue, which

-can be made in a few minutes in a well-equipped hospital, will

-determine whether the growth is malignant. If so, the whole breast is

-taken off, and the patient, in all probability, saved. If not, sew up

-the wound, and the subject is none the worse. Much the better, in fact,

-for the most innocent growth may develop cancer by irritation. Thirty

-per cent, or more, of breast cancers develop in this way.”

-

-“But irritation alone won’t cause cancer, will it?” asked Mrs. Clyde,

-her restlessly inquiring mind reaching back, as was typical of her

-mental processes, toward first causes.

-

-“No. There must be something else. What that something is, we don’t

-know. But we are pretty certain that it doesn’t develop unless there is

-irritation of some kind.”

-

-“Isn’t cancer a germ disease?”

-

-“Nobody knows. Some day we may—probably shall—find out. Meantime we

-have the knowledge of how to prevent it.”

-

-“How to prevent a disease you don’t know the nature of?” said Mrs.

-Sharpless incredulously. “That sounds like nonsense.”

-

-“Does it? What about smallpox? We haven’t any idea of what smallpox

-really is; but we are able to control it with practical certainty

-through vaccination.”

-

-“Doctors don’t vaccinate for cancer,” remarked the practical-minded old

-lady.

-

-“They have tried serums, but that is no use. As I said, the immediate

-occasion of cancer is irritation. There is overwhelming proof that an

-unhealing sore or irritation at any point is likely to result in the

-development of a cancer at that point, and at least a highly probable

-inference that, without such irritation, the disease would not

-develop.”

-

-“Then why not get rid of the irritation?”

-

-“Ah, there’s the point. That’s where the tremendous life-saving could

-be effected. Take a very simple instance, cancer of the lip. In a

-thousand cases recorded by one of the Johns Hopkins experts, there

-wasn’t one but had developed from a small sore, at first of innocent

-nature. It isn’t too much to say that this particular manifestation of

-cancer is absolutely preventable. If every person with a sore on the

-lip which doesn’t heal within three weeks were to go to a good surgeon,

-this hideous and defacing form of tumor would disappear from the earth.

-As for carcinoma of the tongue, one of the least hopeful of all

-varieties, no careful person need ever develop it. Good dentistry,

-which keeps the mouth free of jagged tooth-edges, is half the battle.

-The other half is caution on the part of smokers. If a white patch

-develops in the mouth, tobacco should be given up at once. Unless the

-patch heals within a few weeks, the patient should consult a physician,

-and, if necessary, have it removed by a minor operation. That’s all

-there is to that.”

-

-“But if the irritant sore is internal?” inquired Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“To the watchful it will give evidence of its presence, usually in

-time. If it is in the intestines or stomach, there is generally some

-uneasiness, vague, perhaps, but still suspicious, to announce the

-danger. Surgical records covering a long period show that eighty per

-cent of stomach cancers were preceded by definite gastric symptoms of

-more than a year’s duration. If it is in the uterus, there are definite

-signs which every woman ought to be taught to understand. And here, to

-go back to the matter of cure, even if the discovery isn’t made until

-cancer has actually developed, there is an excellent chance in the

-early stages. Cancer of the stomach used to be sure doom to a hideous

-death. Now, taking the cases as they come, the desperate chances with

-the early cases, more than a quarter are saved in the best surgical

-hospitals. Where the growth is in the womb or the intestines, with

-reasonably early discovery, a generous half should be repaired and

-returned to active life as good as new.”

-

-“That doesn’t seem possible,” said Mrs. Sharpless flatly.

-

-“Simply because you’ve been steeped in the fatalism which surrounds

-cancer. That fatalism, which is so hard to combat, is what keeps women

-from the saving hope of the knife. ‘I’ve got to die anyway,’ they say,

-‘and I’m not going to be carved up before I die.’ And so they throw

-away what chance they have. Oh, if only I had control of the newspapers

-of this city for one day a week or a month,—just for a half-column

-editorial,—what a saving of life I could effect! A little simple advice

-in straight-out terms would teach the people of this community to avoid

-poor Mrs. Westerly’s fate.”

-

-“And drive ‘em all into the hands of the doctors,” said Mrs. Sharpless

-shrewdly. “A fine fattening of fees for your trade, young man.”

-

-“Do you think so? Do you think that cancer _ever_ fails to come to the

-physician at last? And do you think the fee is less because the surgeon

-has to do twice the amount of work with a hundredth of the hope of

-success?”

-

-“No-o-o,” admitted the old lady, with some hesitancy; “I didn’t think

-of it in that light.”

-

-“Few do. Oh, for the chance to teach people to think straight about

-this! Publicity is what we need so bitterly, and the only publicity

-goes to the quacks who pay for it, because the local newspapers don’t

-want to write about ‘unpleasant topics,’ forsooth!”

-

-“Do you want a chance for some publicity in a small way?” asked Mrs.

-Clyde.

-

-“Do I! Show me the chance.”

-

-“The Mothers’ Association meets here this afternoon. We haven’t much

-business on hand. Come in and talk to us for an hour.”

-

-“Fine!” said the Health Master, with enthusiasm. “Half of that time

-will do me. How many will be there?”

-

-“About sixty.”

-

-“Very well. Just have me introduced with the statement that I’m going

-to talk informally on a subject of importance to all of you; and then

-help me out with a little object lesson. I’ll want sixty sealed

-envelopes for the members to draw.”

-

-“Are you conducting a lottery, young man?” queried Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“In a way. Rather I’m arranging an illustration for the great lottery

-which Life and Death conduct.”

-

-

-Two hours later, the business of the meeting having been concluded,

-Mrs. Clyde asked, from the assembled mothers, the privilege of the

-floor for Dr. Strong, and this being granted, aroused the curiosity of

-the meeting by requesting each member to draw an envelope from the

-basket which she carried around, while the presiding officer introduced

-the speaker.

-

-“Let me begin,” said the Health Master, “with an ungallant assumption.

-I’m going to assume that I’m talking to a gathering of middle-aged

-women. That being the case, I’m going on to a very unpleasant

-statement, to wit, that one out of every eight women here may

-reasonably expect to die of cancer in some form.”

-

-A little subdued flutter passed through the room, and the name of Agnes

-Westerly was whispered.

-

-“Yes; it is Mrs. Westerly’s case which is responsible for my being

-here,” said Dr. Strong, who had abnormally keen hearing. “I would like

-to save at least part of the eight out of your number, who are

-statistically doomed, from this probable fate. To bring the lesson home

-to you, I have had each of you draw an envelope. Eight of these

-represent death by cancer.”

-

-Every eye in the room turned, with rather ghastly surmise, to the

-little white squares. But old Mrs. Sharpless rose from her place,

-marched upon the Health Master, as one who leads a charge, and in low

-but vehement tones protested: “I won’t be a party to any such nonsense.

-The idea! Scaring some woman that’s as well as you are into nervous

-collapse with your black dot or red cross or whatever you’ve got inside

-these envelopes.”

-

-“Oh, Grandma Sharpless, Grandma Sharpless! Have you known me all this

-time not to trust me further than that?” whispered the Health Master.

-“Wait and see.”

-

-A little woman near the rear of the room spoke up with a fine bravado:

-“I’m not afraid. It can’t give me cancer.” Then a pause, and a sigh of

-relief, which brought out a ripple of nervous laughter from the rest,

-as she said, “There’s nothing in mine.”

-

-“Nor in mine,” added a young and pretty woman, in the second row, who

-had furtively and swiftly employed a hatpin to satisfy her curiosity.

-

-“Nor mine!”—“Nor mine!” added a dozen voices, in varying tones of

-alleviated suspense.

-

-“Not in any of them,” said Dr. Strong, smiling. “My little design was

-to arouse you collectively to a sense of the danger, not to frighten

-you individually into hysterics.” (At this point Mrs. Sharpless sat

-down abruptly and fanned a resentful face.) “The ugly fact remains,

-however: one out of every eight here is marked for death by the most

-dreadful of diseases, unless you do something about it.”

-

-“What can we do?” inquired the minister’s wife, in the pause that

-followed this statement.

-

-“Educate yourselves. If, in the process, you educate others, so much

-the better. Now I propose to tell you all about cancer in half an hour.

-Does that sound like a large contract? When I say ‘all,’ I mean all

-that it is necessary for you to know in order to protect yourselves.

-And, for good measure, I’ll answer any questions—if I can—within the

-limit of time.”

-

-“What _is_ cancer?” asked a voice.

-

-“Ah! There is one that I can’t answer. No one knows. If I told you that

-it was a malignant tumor, that would be true, but it wouldn’t be an

-answer, because we don’t know the real nature and underlying cause of

-the tumor. Whether it is caused by a germ, science has not yet

-determined. But though we know nothing of the fundamental cause of the

-disease, we do understand, definitely, what is the immediate causative

-influence. It practically always arises from some local sore or

-irritation. Therefore—and here is my first important point—it is

-preventable.”

-

-“That would be only theoretically, wouldn’t it, Dr. Strong?” asked the

-little woman who had first braved the venture of the sealed envelope.

-“One can’t get through life without bumps and scratches.”

-

-“True. But ordinary bumps or scratches properly looked after don’t

-cause cancer. The sore must be an unhealing one, or the irritation a

-continued condition, in order to be dangerous. Remember this: any sort

-of a sore, inflammation, or scarification, external or internal, which

-continues more than a few weeks, is an invitation to cancer. Therefore,

-get rid of it.”

-

-“But suppose the injury is in the stomach, where it can’t be got at?”

-asked a member.

-

-“Why can’t it be got at?” demanded Dr. Strong.

-

-“How can it be got at?” retorted the questioner.

-

-“By opening up the stomach and examining it.”

-

-“Well, I don’t want anybody to open up my stomach just to see what is

-inside it!” declared Mrs. Sharpless vigorously.

-

-“Very likely not. Perhaps you’d feel different if you’d had steady pain

-or indigestion for two or three years.”

-

-“Does that mean cancer?” asked a tall, sallow woman anxiously.

-

-“Not by any means necessarily. But it may well mean gastric ulcer, and

-that may develop into cancer. Three fourths of the cases of carcinoma

-of the stomach which come into the surgeon’s hands have developed from

-gastric ulcer.”

-

-“Is there no cure but the knife?” inquired Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Not for the cancer. For the gastric ulcer, yes. Careful medical care

-and diet often cure it. The trouble is that patients insist on diet and

-drugs in cases where they have proved themselves ineffectual. Those

-cases should come to the surgeon. But it will take long to educate the

-public to the significance of long-continued abdominal pain or

-indigestion. The knife is the last thing they are willing to think of.”

-

-“But stomach operations are terribly dangerous, aren’t they?” inquired

-a member.

-

-“Not any more. They were once. The operation for gastric ulcer in the

-early stage is simple. Even developed cancer of the stomach can be

-cured by the knife in from twenty-five to thirty per cent of the cases.

-Without the knife, it is sure death. I’m glad we got to the stomach

-first, because that is the most obscure and least hopeful of the common

-locations of the growth. In carcinoma of the breast, the most prevalent

-form among women, there is one simple, inclusive rule of prevention and

-cure. Any lump in the breast should be regarded, as Blood-good of Johns

-Hopkins puts it, ‘as an acute disease.’ It should come out immediately.

-If such growths come at once to the surgeon, prevention and cure

-together would save probably ninety per cent of those who now die from

-this ‘creeping death,’ as our parents called it.

-

-“Now, I’ll ask you to imagine for the moment that I am conducting a

-clinic, for I’m not going to mince words in speaking of cancer of the

-womb, the next commonest form. Any persistent irritation there is a

-peril. If there is a slight, steady, and untimely discharge, that’s a

-danger signal. The woman should at once have a microscopical

-examination made. This is simple, almost painless, and practically a

-sure determination of whether there is cancer or not. The thing to do

-is to find out.”

-

-“But if it is cancer, is there any chance?” asked the lady of the

-hatpin.

-

-“Would you regard tuberculosis as hopeless?”

-

-“Of course not.”

-

-“Your parents would have. But you have profited by popular education.

-If the public understood what to do in cancer as thoroughly as they

-know about tuberculosis, we’d save almost if not quite as many victims

-from the more terrible disease. Fatalism is as out of place in the one

-as in the other. The gist of the matter is taking the thing in time.

-Let me read you what the chairman of the Cancer Campaign Committee of

-the Congress of Surgeons of North America, Dr. Thomas S. Cullen, of

-Baltimore, says: ‘Surgeons are heartsick to see the many cancer

-patients begging for operations when the disease is so far advanced

-that nothing can be done. Cancer is in the beginning a local process

-and not a blood disease, and in its early stages can be completely

-removed. When the cancer is small the surgeon can, with one fourth the

-amount of labor, accomplish ten times the amount of good.’”

-

-“Does that always mean the knife?” asked a timid-looking woman.

-

-“Always. There is no other hope, once the malignant growth has begun.

-But the knife is not so terrible. In fact, in the early stages it is

-not terrible at all. Modern surgery has reduced pain to a minimum. The

-strongest argument against dread is a visit to a well-equipped surgical

-hospital, where one can see patients sitting up in bed and enjoying

-life a few days after a major operation. Even at the worst, the knife

-is less terrible than death, its certain alternative.”

-

-“Why do you call it the certain alternative?” asked the minister’s

-wife. “I have seen facial cancer cured by concentrated ray treatment.”

-

-“That wasn’t cancer; it was lupus,” replied Dr. Strong; “a wholly

-different thing. True cancer of the face in its commonest location, the

-lips, is the most frequently cured of any form, but only by operation.

-Now here’s an interesting and suggestive point; taking lip-cancer

-patients as they come to us, we get perhaps sixty-five per cent of

-complete cures. With cancer of the womb, we get in all not more than

-forty per cent of recoveries. Perhaps some of you will be able to

-suggest the explanation for this contrast.”

-

-“Because cancer of the lip isn’t as deadly a disease,” ventured some

-one.

-

-“Cancer is cancer, wherever it is located. Unless it is removed it is

-always and equally deadly.”

-

-“Then it is because the internal operation is so much more dangerous,”

-offered another member.

-

-“No; uterine operations are easy and simple. It is simply because the

-sore on the face is obvious, plain, unmistakable evidence of something

-wrong; and the patient ordinarily gets into the surgeon’s hands early;

-that is, before the roots of the growth have spread and involved life

-itself. The difference in mortality between carcinoma of the lip and

-carcinoma of the womb is the difference between early operation and

-delayed operation. If uterine cancer or breast cancer were discovered

-as early as lip cancer, we’d save practically as many of the internal

-as we do of the external cases. And if all the lip cancer cases were

-noticed at the first development, we’d save ninety-five per cent of

-them.”

-

-“Isn’t it the business of the physician to find out about the internal

-forms?” asked Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“Often the physician hasn’t the chance. The woman ought to do the first

-diagnosing herself. That is, she must be taught to recognize suspicious

-symptoms. In Germany there has been a campaign of education among women

-on cancer of the womb. The result is that more than twice as many

-Germans come to the operating table, in time to give a fair chance of

-permanent recovery in this class of cases, as do Americans.”

-

-“How is the American woman, who knows nothing about such matters, to

-find out?” queried the minister’s wife.

-

-“There is a campaign of education now under way here. Publications

-giving the basic facts about cancer, its prevention and cure, in simple

-and popular form, can be had from the American Society for the Control

-of Cancer,—Thomas M. Debevoise, secretary, 62 Cedar Street, New York

-City; or more detailed advice can be had from the Cancer Campaign

-Committee of the Congress of Surgeons of North America, Dr. Thomas S.

-Cullen, chairman, 3 West Preston Street, Baltimore; or from Dr. F. R.

-Green, 535 Dearborn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, secretary of the Council

-of Health and Public Instruction of the American Medical Association.”

-

-“Why not more easily and readily one’s own physician?” asked Mrs.

-Clyde.

-

-“Women don’t go to their own physicians early enough. It is necessary

-that they be trained to understand symptoms which do not at first seem

-serious enough for medical attention. Besides, I regret to confess, in

-this matter of cancer our physicians need educating, too. They are too

-prone to say, if they are not sure of the diagnosis, ‘Wait and see.’

-Waiting to see is what kills three fourths of the women who succumb to

-cancer. Let me illustrate this peril by two cases which have come under

-my observation: The wife of a lawyer in a Western city had a severe

-attack of stomach trouble. Her doctor, a young and open-minded man, had

-the courage to say, ‘I don’t know. But I’m afraid it’s cancer. You’d

-better go to such-and-such a hospital and let them see.’ The woman

-went. An exploratory incision was made and carcinoma found in the early

-stage. It was cut out and to-day she is as good as new.

-

-“Now, this same lawyer had a friend who had been treated for months by

-a stomach specialist of some reputation. Under the treatment he had

-grown steadily thinner, paler, and weaker. ‘Indigestion, gastric

-intoxication,’ the specialist repeated, parrotlike, until the man

-himself, in his misery, began to suspect. At this point the lawyer

-friend got hold of him and took him to the hospital where his wife had

-been. The surgeons refused the case and sent the man away to die.

-Indignant, the lawyer sought the superintendent of the hospital.

-

-“‘Why won’t you take my friend’s case?’

-

-“‘It is inoperable.’

-

-“‘Isn’t it cancer of the stomach, like my wife’s?’

-

-“‘Yes.’

-

-“‘You cured my wife. Why can’t you cure my friend?’

-

-“The official shook his head.

-

-“I want an answer,” insisted the lawyer.

-

-“‘Well, frankly,’ said the other, ‘your wife’s physician knew his

-business. Your friend’s physician is a fool. He has killed his patient

-by delay.’

-

-“Back home went the lawyer, and spread that story quietly. To-day the

-specialist’s practice is almost ruined; but he has learned an expensive

-lesson. The moral is this: If your doctor is doubtful whether your

-trouble is cancerous, and advises delay, get another doctor.

-

-“Then, there is the ‘conservative’ type of practitioner, who is timid

-about making a complete job of his operation. One of this kind had the

-case of an acquaintance of mine who was stricken with cancer of the

-breast. The physician, under persuasion of his patient, I presume,

-advised excising only the tumor itself, but the husband, who had been

-reading up on cancer, insisted on a radical operation. The entire

-breast was removed. A year later the woman’s unmarried sister was

-afflicted in exactly the same way; but the discovery was made earlier,

-so that the case was a distinctly favorable one. The girl, however,

-would not consent to the radical operation, and the physician (the same

-man) declared it unnecessary. The tumor alone was cut out. The cancer

-reappeared and another operation was necessary. The girl died after

-cruel suffering. The married sister is alive, and, five years after the

-operation, as sound as a bell. That physician is a wiser man; also a

-sadder one. There’s a special moral to this, too: the operator has but

-one chance; he must do his work thoroughly, or he might better not do

-it at all. When cancer returns after operation—which means that the

-roots were not eradicated—it is invariably fatal.

-

-“Here are a few things which I want every one of you to remember. Had I

-had time I’d have had them printed for each of you to take home, so

-important do I think them:—

-

-“No cancer is hopeless when discovered early.

-

-“Most cancer, discovered early, is permanently curable.

-

-“The only cure is the knife.

-

-“Medicines are worse than useless.

-

-“Delay is more than dangerous; it is deadly.

-

-“The one hope, and a strong one, is prompt and radical operation. A

-half-operation is worse than none at all.

-

-“Most, if not all, cancer is preventable by correcting the minor

-difficulty from which it develops.

-

-“With recognition of, and prompt action upon early symptoms, the death

-rate can be cut down at least a half; probably more.

-

-“The fatalism which says: ‘If it’s cancer, I might as well give up,’ is

-foolish, cowardly, and suicidal.

-

-“And, finally, here is some simple advice, intelligible to any thinking

-human being, which has been indorsed in printed form by the Congress of

-Surgeons of North America:—

-

-“‘Be careful of persistent sores or irritations, external or internal.

-

-“‘Be careful of yourself, without undue worry. At the first suspicious

-symptom go to some good physician and demand the truth. Don’t wait for

-pain to develop.

-

-“‘If the doctor suspects cancer insist that he confirm or disprove his

-suspicions.

-

-“‘Don’t be a hopeless fatalist. If it’s cancer face it bravely. With

-courage and prompt action the chances of recovery are all in your

-favor.

-

-“‘Don’t defer an advised operation even for a day; and don’t shrink

-from the merciful knife, when the alternative is the merciless anguish

-of slow death.’

-

-“For the woman who fears the knife, Dr. Charles H. Mayo, one of the

-greatest of living surgeons, has spoken the final words: ‘The risk is

-not in surgery, but in _delayed surgery_.’

-

-“I have said my say, ladies, and there are five minutes left. Has any

-one any further questions?”

-

-There was none. But as he stepped down, Mrs. Sharpless whispered to

-him: “I watched them while you talked, and half of those women are

-thinking, and thinking _hard_.”

-

-

-Six months thereafter, Mrs. Clyde came into the Health Master’s office

-one day.

-

-“I’ve just come from a sort of experience meeting of the Mothers’

-Club,” she said.

-

-“What was the topic this time?” asked Dr. Strong.

-

-“Aftermath.”

-

-“Of what?”

-

-“Your cancer talk.”

-

-“Anything definite?”

-

-“Definite, indeed! Between fifteen and twenty of the members went away

-from that meeting where you talked, suspecting themselves of cancer.”

-

-“That’s too many.”

-

-“Yes. Ten of them had their fears set at rest right away.”

-

-“I’m sorry to have frightened them; but one has to do a little harm in

-aiming at almost any good.”

-

-“This was worth it. Half a dozen others had minor operations.”

-

-“Perhaps saving major ones later.”

-

-“Very likely. And four of them actually had cancer. Three out of the

-four are going to be well women. The fourth has an even chance. Dr.

-Strong, I don’t think you’ve done so good a day’s work since you

-brought health into this house.”

-

-“I thank you,” said the doctor simply; “I think you are right. And

-you’ve given me the most profound and about the rarest satisfaction

-with which the physician is ever rewarded.”

-

-“And that is?” she asked.

-

-“The practical certainty of having definitely saved human life,” said

-the Health Master.

-

-

-

-

-IX.

-THE GOOD GRAY DOCTOR

-

-

-A twenty-dollar bill! Crisp, fresh, and golden, it rose monumentally

-from the basis of nickels, dimes, and quarters which made up the

-customary collection of the Bairdstown Memorial Church. Even the

-generosity of the Clyde family, who, whenever they spent a week-end at

-Mr. Clyde’s farm outside the little city, attended the Sunday services,

-looked meager and insignificant beside its yellow-backed splendor.

-Deacon Wilkes, passing the plate, gazed at it in fascination.

-Subsequent contributors surreptitiously touched it in depositing their

-own modest offerings, as if to make certain of its substance. It was

-even said at the Wednesday Sewing Circle that the Rev. Mr. Huddleston,

-from his eminence in the pulpit, had marked its colorful glint with an

-instant and benign eye and had changed the final hymn to one which

-specially celebrated the glory of giving.

-

-In the Clyde pew also there was one who specially noted the donor, but

-with an expression far from benign. Dr. Strong’s appraising glance

-ranged over the plump and glossy perfection of the stranger, his

-symphonic grayness, beginning at his gray-suède-shod feet, one of which

-unobtrusively protruded into the aisle, verging upward through gray

-sock and trouser to gray frock coat, generously cut, and terminating at

-the sleek gray head. Even the tall hat which the man dandled on his

-knees was gray. Against this Quakerish color-scheme the wearer’s face

-stood out, large, pink, and heavy-jowled, lighted by restless brown

-eyes. His manner was at once important and reverent, and his “amen” a

-masterpiece of unction. No such impressive outlander had visited

-Bairdstown for many a moon.

-

-After the service the visitor went forward to speak with Mr.

-Huddleston. At the same time Dr. Strong strolled up the aisle and

-contrived to pass the two so, as to obtain a face-to-face view of the

-stranger.

-

-“At nine o’clock to-morrow, then, and I shall be delighted to see you,”

-the pastor was saying as Dr. Strong passed.

-

-“Good-morning, Professor,” said Dr. Strong, with an accent on the final

-word as slight as the nod which accompanied it.

-

-“Good-morning! Good-morning!” returned the other heartily. But his

-glance, as it followed the man who had accosted him, was puzzled and

-not wholly untroubled.

-

-“Who is your munificent friend?” asked Mrs. Clyde, as the Health Master

-emerged from the church and joined her husband and herself in their

-car.

-

-“When I last ran across him he called himself Professor Graham Gray,

-the Great Gray Benefactor,” replied Dr. Strong.

-

-“Dresses the part, doesn’t he?” observed Mr. Clyde. “Where was it that

-you knew him?”

-

-“On the Pacific Coast, five years ago. He was then ‘itinerating’—the

-quack term for traveling from place to place, picking up such practice

-as may be had by flamboyant advertising. Itinerating in eyes, as he

-would probably put it.”

-

-“A wandering quack oculist?”

-

-“Optician, rather, since he carried his own stock of glasses. In fact

-that’s where his profit came in. He advertised treatment free and

-charged two or three dollars for the glasses, special rates to

-schoolchildren. The scheme is an old one and a devilish. Half of the

-children in San Luis Obispo County, where I chanced upon his trail,

-were wearing his vision-twisters by the time he was through with them.”

-

-“What kind of glasses were they?”

-

-“Sometimes magnifying lenses. Mostly just plain window glass. Few

-children escaped him, for he would tell the parents that only prompt

-action could avert blindness.”

-

-“At least the plain glass couldn’t hurt the children,” suggested Mrs.

-Clyde.

-

-“Couldn’t it! It couldn’t fail to hurt them. Modify the sight of a

-delicate instrument like a child’s eye continuously by the most

-transparent of barriers, and it is bound to go wrong soon. The

-magnifying glasses are far worse. There are hundreds of children in

-that one locality alone who will carry the stigma of his quackery

-throughout their lives.”

-

-“Do you think he is here with a view to practicing his amiable trade?”

-inquired Clyde.

-

-“Only in part, if at all. I understand that he has changed his line.”

-

-“How comes he by all that showy money, then?”

-

-“By murder.”

-

-The Clydes, accustomed to their physician’s hammerstroke turns of

-speech, took this under consideration.

-

-“But he wasn’t committing murder in the church just now, I suppose,”

-insinuated Mrs. Clyde at length.

-

-“Not directly. His immediate business there, I suspect, was bribery.”

-

-“Of whom?”

-

-“The minister.”

-

-“Oh, come, Strong!” protested Mr. Clyde. “Mr. Huddleston isn’t an

-intellectual giant, I grant you; but he’s certainly a well-meaning and

-honorable old fellow.”

-

-“Some cynical philosopher has remarked that wicked men have a talent

-for doing harm, but fools have a genius. Mr. Huddleston’s goodness and

-honesty, taken in connection with his hopeless ignorance of human

-nature, are just so much capital to hand for a scoundrel like this

-Gray.”

-

-“What does he expect to get for his twenty-dol-lar bill?”

-

-“First, a reputation for piety and generosity. Second, that reputation

-duly certified to by the leading minister of the town.”

-

-“In other words, a testimonial.”

-

-“Precisely. For home use, and cheap at twenty dollars. Preparatory to

-operating in a town, your itinerating quack bribes two people—if he

-can. First, the editor of the local paper; second, the pastor of the

-leading church. The editor usually takes the money with his eyes wide

-open; the minister with his eyes tight shut.”

-

-“How can his eyes be shut to such a business?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Because so much dust has been thrown in them by the so-called

-religious journals.”

-

-“Surely you don’t mean that religious journals exploit quackery in

-their pages!” cried Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“They are the mainstay of the quack and patent medicine business,”

-declared the Health Master. “Leaving out the Christian Science papers,

-which, of course, don’t touch this dirty money, the religious press of

-all denominations, with a few honorable individual exceptions, sells

-out to any form of medical fraud which has a dollar to spend. Is it

-strange that the judgment of some of the clergy, who implicitly trust

-in their sectarian publications, becomes distorted? It’s an even chance

-that our Great Gray faker’s advertisement is in the religious weekly

-which lies on Mr. Huddleston’s study-table at this moment.”

-

-Grandma Sharpless turned around from her seat in front, where she

-always ensconced herself so that, as she put it, she could see what was

-coming in time to jump. “I know it is,” she stated quietly. “For while

-I was waiting in the parsonage last week I picked up the ‘Church

-Pillar’ and saw it there.”

-

-“Trust Grandma Sharpless’s eyes not to miss anything that comes within

-their range,” said Dr. Strong.

-

-“Well, I missed the sense of that advertisement till just now,”

-retorted the old lady. “I’ve just remembered about this Graham Gray.”

-

-“What about him?” asked the Health Master with eagerness, for Mrs.

-Sharpless’s memory was as reliable for retaining salient facts as her

-vision was for discerning them. “Do you know him?”

-

-“Only by his works. Last year a traveling doctor of that name stopped

-over at Greenvale, twenty miles down the river, and gave some of his

-lectures to Suffering Womanhood, or some such folderol. He got hold of

-Sally Griffin, niece of our farmer here, while she was visiting there.

-Sally’s as sound as a pippin, except for an occasional spell of

-fool-in-the-head, and I guess no school of doctoring ever helps that

-common ailment much. Well, this Gray got her scared out of her wits

-with symptoms, and sold her twenty-five dollars’ worth of medicine to

-cure her of something or other she didn’t have. Cured!” sniffed the

-lively narrator. “If I hadn’t taken the stuff away from her and locked

-it up, I expect she’d be in the churchyard by now.”

-

-“The whole philosophy of quackery explicated and punctured, by one who

-knows,” chuckled Dr. Strong.

-

-“None of your palaver with me, young man!” returned the brisk old lady,

-who was devoted to the Health Master, and showed it by a policy of

-determined opposition of the letter and whole-hearted support of the

-spirit and deed, in all things. “Probably he knows as much as most of

-your regular doctors, at that!”

-

-“At least he seems to know human nature. That’s the strong point of the

-charlatan. But have you got any of his medicine left?”

-

-“Yes; I think I can lay my hands on what’s left of it. I remember that

-Sally boohooed like a baby, grown woman that she is, when I took it

-away from her.” Dr. Strong’s eyebrows went up sharply. “As soon as we

-get to the house I’ll look it up.”

-

-On their arrival at the roomy old farmstead which Mr. Clyde had

-remodeled and modernized for what he called “an occasional three days

-of grace” from his business in the city of Worthington, Grandma

-Sharpless set about the search, and presently came to the living-room

-bearing in one hand a large bottle and in the other a newspaper.

-

-“Since you’re interested in Professor Gray,” she said, “here’s what he

-says about himself in yesterday’s ‘Bairdstown Bugle.’ I do think,” she

-added, “that the Honorable Silas Harris might be in better business

-with his paper than publishing such truck as this. Listen to it.”

-

-GOSPEL HERBS WILL CURE YOUR ILLS

-

-

-Women of Bairdstown; Read your Bible! Revelation 22d chapter, 2d verse.

-God promises that “the Herbs of the field shall heal the nations.” In a

-vision from above, the holy secret has been revealed to me. Alone of

-all men, I can brew this miracle-working elixir.

-

-

-“The blasphemous old slinkum!” Grandma Sharpless interrupted herself to

-say angrily. “He doesn’t even quote the Scriptures right!”

-

-“Oh, blasphemy is a small matter for a rascal of his kind,” said the

-Health Master lightly. “Go on.”

-

-She read on:—

-

-Come to me, ye women who suffer, and I will give you relief. All those

-wasting and wearing ailments from which the tender sex suffers, vanish

-like mist before the healing, revivifying influence of Gospel Herbs.

-Supposed incurable diseases: Rheumatism, Dropsy, Diabetes and all

-kidney ills, Stomach Trouble, Scrofula, Blood Poison, even the dreaded

-scourge, Consumption, yield at once to this remedy.

-    Though my special message is to women, I will not withhold this

-    boon from any suffering human. Come one and all, rich and poor,

-    young and old, of either sex. Your money refunded if I do not cure

-    you. Public meeting Monday and Tuesday evenings, at eight o’clock

-    sharp in the Scatcherd Opera House; admission free to all. Private

-    consultation at the Mallory Hotel, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday

-    from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Remember, I cure where the doctors fail; or

-    no pay.

-

-

-Prof. Graham Gray,

-The Great Gray Benefactor.

-

-

-Mrs. Sharpless held out for the general view the advertisement, which

-occupied, in huge type, two thirds of a page of the “Bugle.” The

-remainder of the page was taken up with testimonials to the marvelous

-effects of the Gospel Herbs. Most of the letters were from far-away

-towns, but there were a few from the general vicinity of Bairdsville.

-

-Meantime Dr. Strong had been delicately tasting and smelling the

-contents of the bottle, which were thick and reddish.

-

-“What do you make out is in it?” asked Clyde.

-

-“Death—and a few worse things. Grandma Sharpless, you say that the girl

-cried for this after you took it from her?”

-

-“Not only that; she wrote to the Professor for more. And when it came I

-smashed the bottle.”

-

-“You ought to have the honorary degree of M.D. Well, it’s pretty plain,

-but to make sure I’ll send this to Worthington for an analysis.”

-

-“So our friend, the gray wolf, is going to prowl in Bairdstown for the

-next three days!” Thomas Clyde began to rub his chin softly; then not

-so softly; and presently quite hard. His wife watched him with troubled

-eyes. When his hand came down to rest upon his knee, it was doubled

-into a very competent-looking fist. His face set in the expression

-which the newspapers of his own city had dubbed, after the tenement

-campaign of the year before, “Clyde’s fighting smile.”

-

-“Oh, Tom!” broke out his wife, “what kind of trouble are you going to

-get into now?”

-

-“Trouble?” repeated the head of the family, in well-simulated surprise.

-“Why, dear, I wasn’t even thinking of trouble—for myself. But I believe

-it is time for a little action. Let’s call this a household meeting”

-(this was one of the established methods of the Clyde clan) “and find

-out. As it isn’t a family affair, we won’t call in the children this

-time. Strong, what, if anything, are we going to do about this stranger

-in our midst? Are we going to let him take us in?”

-

-“The question is,” said Dr. Strong quickly, “whether the Clyde family

-is willing to loan its subsidized physician temporarily to the city of

-Bairdstown.”

-

-“On the Chinese plan,” supplemented Clyde.

-

-“Certainly. On the Chinese plan of trying to save the community from a

-visitation instead of waiting to cure them of the incurable results of

-it.”

-

-“By visitation I suppose you mean Professor Gray?” said Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“Exactly. I should rank him rather higher than an epidemic of scarlet

-fever, as an ally of damage and death.”

-

-“I’ll vote ‘Yes,’” said Mrs. Clyde rather plaintively. “Only, I wish

-you two men didn’t have so much Irish in your temperament.”

-

-“I scorn your insinuation,” replied her husband. “I’m the original dove

-of peace, but this Gray person ruffles my plumage. What do you say,

-Grandma?”

-

-“Bairdstown is my own place, partly. I know the people and they know me

-and I won’t sit quiet and see ‘em put upon. I vote ‘Yes.’”

-

-“Make it unanimous!” said Clyde. “What’s the first move of the army of

-relief? I’m in on this somewhere, Strong.”

-

-“Contribute your car for a couple of days, then, and we’ll go out on a

-still hunt for the elusive clue and the shy and retiring evidence. In

-other words, we’ll scour the county, and look up some of these local

-testimonials which the Great Gray One gathered in last year, and now

-prints in the ‘Bugle.’”

-

-“And I’ll stop in town and see Mr. Huddleston to-morrow,” said Mrs.

-Sharpless.

-

-“You won’t get any results,” prophesied the Health Master. “But,

-anyway, get him to come to the Gray lecture on Tuesday evening. We’ll

-need him.”

-

-During the ensuing two and a half days and two nights Mrs. Clyde had

-speech of her husband but once; and that was at 2 a.m. when he woke her

-up to tell her that he was having the time of his life, and she replied

-by asking him whether he had let the cat in, and returned to her

-dreams.

-

-Bairdstown’s Suffering Womanhood—as per advertisement—turned out

-extensively and self-commiseratingly to the free lecture of Tuesday

-evening, bringing with them a considerable admixture of the male

-populace, curious, cynical, or expectant. On the platform sat a number

-of “special guests,” including the Rev. Mr. Huddleston, mild of face

-and white of hair, and the Honorable Silas Harris, owner of the

-“Bugle.”

-

-“Cured” patients, to the number of half a dozen, fidgeted in the seats

-of honor with expressions of conscious and pleasurable importance.

-

-“They appear to be enjoying poor health quite literally,” whispered

-Clyde to Dr. Strong, as the two, begrimed with the dust of a long day’s

-travel just finished, slipped quietly into side seats.

-

-At once the entertainment began. A lank, harshfaced, muscular man whom

-Professor Gray introduced as his assistant, seated himself at the

-piano, and struck a chord, whereupon the Professor, in a powerful

-voice, sang what he termed the “Hymn of Healing,” inviting the audience

-to “assist” in the chorus, which gem of poesy ran as follows:—

-

-“Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed!

-    Trust in the gospel advice.

-Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field;

-    Healed without money or price.”

-

-

-“Some poetic license in that last line,” murmured Clyde to his

-companion.

-

-“The next portion of our programme,” announced the Great Gray

-Benefactor, “will be corroborative readings from the Good Book.” And he

-proceeded to deliver in oratorical style sundry Bible quotations so

-patched together and garbled as to ascribe, inferentially, miraculous

-powers to the Gospel Herbs. Then came the lecture proper, which was

-merely an amplification of the “Bugle” advertisement, interspersed with

-almanac funny stories and old jokes.

-

-“And now, before our demonstration,” concluded Professor Graham Gray,

-“if there is any here seeking enlightenment or help, let him rise. This

-is your meeting, dear friends, as much as mine; free to your voices and

-your needs, as well as to your welcome presence here. I court inquiry

-and fair investigation. Any questions? If not, we—”

-

-“One moment!” The whole assemblage turned, as on a single pivot, to the

-side aisle where Dr. Strong had risen and now stood, tall, straight,

-and composed, waiting for silence.

-

-“Our friend on the right has the floor,” said the Professor suavely.

-

-“You state that this God-given secret remedy was imparted to you for

-the relief of human misery?” asked Dr. Strong.

-

-“Thousands of grateful patients attest it, my friend.”

-

-“Then, with human beings suffering and dying all about you, why do you

-continue to profit by keeping it secret?”

-

-Down sat the questioner. A murmur rose and ran, as the logic of the

-question struck home. But the quack had his answer pat.

-

-“Does not the Good Book say that the laborer is worthy of his hire? Do

-your regular physicians, of whom I understand you are one, treat cases

-for nothing? Ah,” he went on, outstretching his hands to the audience

-with a gesture of appeal, “the injustice which I have suffered from the

-jealousy and envy of the medical profession! Never do I enter a town

-without curing many unfortunates that the regular doctors have given up

-as hopeless. Hence the violence of their attacks upon me. But I forgive

-them their prejudice, as I pity their ignorance.”

-

-Some applause followed the enunciation of this noble sentiment.

-

-“We have with us to-night,” pursued the speaker, quick to catch the

-veering sentiment, “a number of these marvelous cures. You shall hear

-from the very mouths of the saved ones testimony beyond cavil. I will

-call first on Mrs. Amanda Gryce, wife of Mr. Stanley Gryce, the well

-and favorably known laundryman. Speak up clearly, Mrs. Gryce, and tell

-your story.”

-

-“It’s two years now that I been doctorin’,” said the lady thus adjured,

-in a fluttering voice. “I doctored with a allopathic physician here,

-an’ with a homypath over to Roxton, an’ with a osty-path down to

-Worthington, an’ with Peruny in betwixt, an’ they didn’t any of ‘em do

-me no good till I tried Professor Gray. He seen how I felt without

-askin’ me a question. He just pulled down my eyelid an’ looked at it.

-‘You’re all run down; gone!’ says he. An’ thet’s jest what I was. So he

-treated me with his herb medicine an’ I feel like a new woman. An’ I

-give Professor Graham Gray the credit an’ the thanks of a saved woman.”

-

-“Not to mention seven dollars an’ a half,” supplemented a mournful

-drawl from the audience.

-

-“You hush, Stan Gryce!” cried the healed one, shrill above the laughter

-of the ribald. “Would you begrutch a few mizzable dollars for your

-poor, sufferin’ wife’s health?”

-

-An alarmed child of ten was next led forward and recited in sing-song

-measure:—

-

-“I—had—the—fits—for—most—three— years—and—I—was—cured—by

-Gospel—Herbs—and—I—have—come—here—to—say—God—bless—my—dear

-benefactor—Professor—Graham—Gray,”—and sat down hard at the last word,

-whereupon a tenor squeak in the far gallery took up the refrain:

-

-“You’d scarcex peckwon of my yage

-To speakin public on the stage.”

-

-

-Again there was a surge of mirth, and the lecturer frowned with

-concern. But he quickly covered whatever misgivings he might have had

-by bringing forward other “testimonies”: old Miss Smithson whose

-nervousness had been quite dispelled by two doses of the herbs; Auntie

-Thomas (colored) whose “misery” had vanished before the wonder-working

-treatment; and the Widow Carlin, whose boy had been “spittin’ blood

-like as if he was churchyard doomed,” but hadn’t had a bad coughing

-spell since taking the panacea. And all this time Dr. Strong sat quiet

-in his seat, with a face of darkening sternness.

-

-“You have heard your fellow-citizens,” the lecturer took up his theme

-again, “testify to the efficacy of my methods. And you see on this

-rostrum with me that grand and good old man, the worthy pastor of so

-many of you, my dear and honored friend—I feel that I may call him

-friend, since I have his approval of my humble labors—the Reverend

-Doctor Huddleston. You see also here, lending the support of his valued

-presence, the Honorable Silas Harris, whom you have twice honored by

-sending him to the state legislature. Their presence is the proudest

-testimonial to my professional character. In Mr. Harris’s fearless and

-independent journal you have read the sworn evidence of those who have

-been cured by my Godgiven remedies; evidence which is beyond

-challenge—”

-

-“I challenge it.”

-

-Dr. Strong, who had been hopefully awaiting some such opening, was on

-his feet again.

-

-“You have had your say!” cried Professor Gray, menacing him with a

-shaking hand. “These people don’t want to hear you. They understand

-your motives. You can’t run this meeting.”

-

-The gesture was a signal. The raw-boned accompanist, whose secondary

-function was that of bouncer, made a quick advance from the rear,

-reached for the unsuspicious Health Master—and recoiled from the impact

-of Mr. Thomas Clyde’s solid shoulder so sharply that only the side wall

-checked his subsidence.

-

-“Better stay out of harm’s way, my friend,” suggested Clyde amiably.

-

-Immediately the hall was in an uproar. The more timid of the women were

-making for the exits, when a high, shrill voice, calling for order

-strenuously, quelled the racket, and a very fat man waddled down the

-middle aisle, to be greeted by cries of “Here’s the Mayor.” Several

-excited volunteers explained the situation to him from as many

-different points of view, while Professor Graham Gray bellowed his

-appeal from the platform.

-

-“All I want is fair play. They’re trying to break up my meeting.”

-

-“Not at all,” returned Dr. Strong’s calm voice. “I’m more than anxious

-to have it continue.”

-

-With a happy inspiration, Mr. Clyde jumped up on his bench.

-

-“I move Mayor Allen take the chair!” he shouted. “Professor Gray says

-that he courts fair investigation. Let’s give it to him, in order.”

-

-A shout of acclaim greeted this suggestion. Bairdstown’s Suffering

-Womanhood and Bored Manhood was getting more out of a free admission

-than it had ever had in its life before. Ponderously the obese Mayor

-hoisted his weight up the steps and shook hands with the reluctant

-lecturer. He then invited Dr. Strong to come to the platform.

-

-“This is my meeting!” protested the Great Gray Benefactor. “I hired

-this hall and paid good money for it.”

-

-“You said it was our meeting as much as yours!” roared an insurgent

-from the crowd, and a chorus of substantiation followed.

-

-“Ten minutes will be all that I want,” announced Dr. Strong as he took

-a chair next the Mayor.

-

-“That’s fair!” shrilled the Chairman. “On the Professor’s own

-invitation.” In a tone lowered to the alarmed quack’s ear, he added:

-“Of course, you can back out if you want to. But I’d advise you to do

-it quick if you’re going to do it at all. This is a queer-tempered

-town.”

-

-So significant was his tone that the other judged advance to be safer

-than retreat. Therefore, summoning all his assurance, he sought, in an

-impassioned speech, to win back his hearers. He was a natural orator,

-and, when he reached his peroration, he had a large part of his

-audience with him again. In the flush of renewed confidence he made a

-grave tactical error, just when he should have closed.

-

-“Let this hireling of the Doctors’ Trust, the trust that would strangle

-all honest competition, answer these if he can!” he shouted, shaking

-the page of testimonials before his adversary’s face. “Let him confute

-the evidence of these good and honorable women who have appeared here

-to-night; women who have no selfish aims to subserve. Let him impugn

-the motives of the reverend clergyman and of the honored statesman who

-sit here with me. Let him do this, or let him shrink from this hall in

-the shame and dishonor which he seeks to heap upon one whose sole

-ambition it is to relieve suffering and banish pain and death.”

-

-There was hearty applause as the speaker sat down and Dr. Strong arose

-to face a gathering now turned for the most part hostile. He wasted no

-time in introduction or argument. “Mr. Chairman,” said he, “Professor

-Gray rests his case on his testimonials. With Mr. Clyde I have

-investigated a number of them, and will give you my results. Here are

-half a dozen testimonials to the value of one of his nostrums, the

-Benefaction Pills, from women who have been cured, so they state, of

-diseases ranging from eczema through indigestion to consumption. All,

-please note, by the same wonderful medicine. And here,” he drew a small

-box from his pocket, “is a sample of the medicine. I have just had it

-analyzed. What do you suppose they are? Sugar! Just plain sugar and

-nothing else.” Professor Gray leaped to his feet. “You don’t deny the

-cures!” he thundered.

-

-“I don’t deny that these people are well to-day. And I don’t deny that

-the testimonials from them are genuine, as documents. But your sugar

-pills had no more to do with the cure than so much moonshine. Listen,

-you people! Here is the core and secret of quackery:

-

-“All diseases tend to cure themselves, through the natural resistance

-of the body. But for that we should all be dead. This man, or some

-other of his kind, comes along with his promises and pills, and when

-the patient recovers from the disease in the natural course of events,

-he claims the credit. Meantime, he is selling sugar at about one

-hundred dollars per pound.”

-

-“Sugar,” said the quack, quick-wittedly. “But what kind of sugar? This

-sugar, as he calls it, is crystal precipitated from the extract of

-these healing herbs. No chemist can determine its properties by any

-analysis.”

-

-“Very well turned,” said Dr. Strong, with a smile. “I can’t immediately

-disprove that, though I could with time. But, whatever the case with

-his sugar, any chemist can analyze this.” He held up a small bottle,

-half filled with a red-brown liquid. “This is the Extract of Gospel

-Herbs. Now, let us see what this does.”

-

-He referred to his copy of the “Bugle,” containing the testimonials.

-“Here is Mrs. Sarah Jenkins, of the neighboring town of Maresco, where

-Professor Gray lectured a year ago, cured of Bright’s disease and

-dropsy; Miss Allie Wheat, of Weedsport, cured of cancer of the stomach;

-and Mrs. Howard Cleary, of Roxton, wholly relieved of nervous breakdown

-and insomnia. All genuine testimonials. Mr. Clyde and I have traced

-them.”

-

-Professor Gray raised his head with a flash of triumph. “You see!” he

-cried. “He has to admit the genuineness of my testimonials!”

-

-“Of your testimonials; yes. But what about your cures? Mrs. Jenkins

-has, as she said, ceased to suffer from her ills. She died of Bright’s

-disease and dropsy three months after Professor Gray cured her of them.

-Miss Wheat, whose cancer was purely imaginary, is now a hopeless wreck,

-in a sanitarium whither the Gospel Herbs drove her. Mrs. Cleary—but let

-me read what she testified to. Here it is in the paper with a picture

-of the Cleary home:—”

-

-_Dear Professor Gray: You have indeed been a benefactor to me. Before

-our baby was born my husband and I were the happiest of couples. Then I

-became a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep. I was cross and irritable. My

-nerves seemed all on fire. Your first treatment worked wonders. I slept

-like a log. Since then I have not been without Gospel Herbs in the

-house, and I am a well woman._

-

-(Signed) Mrs. Howard Cleary.

-

-“That was a year ago,” continued Dr. Strong. “Yesterday we visited the

-Cleary home. We found a broken husband and a deserted baby. The young

-wife we traced to Worthington, where we discovered her—well, I won’t

-name to this audience the sort of place we found her in.

-

-“But so far as there can be a hell on this earth, she had descended

-into it, and this,” he held the vial high to view, “_this_ sent her

-there.” His fingers opened; there was a crisp little crash of glass,

-and the red-brown liquid crept and spread along the floor, like blood.

-

-“Morphine,” said Dr. Strong. “Morphine, which enslaves the body and

-destroys the soul. There are your Gospel Herbs!”

-

-A murmur rose, and deepened into a growl. The Great Gray Benefactor,

-his face livid, sprang forward.

-

-“Lies!” he shouted. “All lies! Where’s his proof? What’s he got to

-show? Nothing but his own say-so. If there’s a law in the land, I’ll

-make him sweat for this. Mr. Huddleston, I appeal to you for justice.”

-

-“We shall be glad to hear from the Reverend Mr. Huddleston,” mildly

-suggested the chairman, who was evincing an enjoyment of the

-proceedings quite puzzling to Dr. Strong.

-

-The old clergyman got slowly to his feet. His mild, weak face was

-troubled. “Let us bear and forbear,” he pleaded in a tremulous voice.

-“I cannot believe these charges against our good friend, Professor

-Gray. I am sure that he is a good and worthy man. He has given most

-liberally to the church. I am informed that he is a member of his home

-church in good and regular standing, and I find in the editorial

-columns of the ‘Church Pillar’ a warm encomium upon his beneficent

-work, advising all to try his remedies. Surely our friend, Dr. Strong,

-has been led astray by mistaken zeal.

-

-“Only yesterday two members of my congregation, most estimable ladies,

-called to see me and told me how they had benefited by a visit just

-made to Professor Gray. He had treated them with his new Gospel Elixir,

-of which he has spoken to me. There was evidence of its efficacy in

-their very bearing and demeanor—”

-

-“I should say there was! _And_ in their breath. Did you smell it?”

-

-The interruption came in a very clear, positive, and distinct

-contralto.

-

-“Great Grimes’s grass-green ghost!” exclaimed Mr. Thomas Clyde, quite

-audibly amidst the startled hush. “Grandma Sharpless is among those

-present!”

-

-“I—I—I—I do not think,” began the clergyman, aghast, “that the matter

-occurred to me.”

-

-“Because, if _you_ didn’t, _I_ did,” continued the voice composedly.

-“They reeked of liquor.”

-

-The tension to which the gathering had been strung abruptly loosened in

-mirth.

-

-“Mrs. Sharpless will please take the platform,” invited the

-Mayor-chairman.

-

-“No, I’ll do my talking from here.” The old lady stood up, a straight,

-solid, uncompromising figure, in the center of the floor. “I met those

-two ladies in the parsonage hall,” she explained. “They were coming out

-as I was going in. They stopped to talk to me. They both talked at

-once. I wouldn’t want to say that they were—well—exactly—”

-

-“Spifflicated,” suggested a helpful voice from the far rear.

-

-“Spifflicated; thank you,” accepted the speaker. “But they certainly

-were—”

-

-“Lit up,” volunteered another first-aid to the hesitant.

-

-“Yes, lit up. One of them loaned me her bottle. If I’m any judge of bad

-whiskey, that was it.”

-

-An appreciative roar from the house testified to the fact that Mrs.

-Sharpless had her audience in hand.

-

-“As for you women on the stage,” she pursued, rising to her topic, “I

-know what’s wrong with you.‘Mandy Gryce, if you’d tend more to your

-house and less to your symptoms, you wouldn’t be flitting from

-allopathic bud to homoeopathic flower like a bumblebee with the

-stomach-ache.” (“Hear, hear!” from Mr. Gryce.) “Lizzie Tompy, your fits

-are nine tenths temper. I’d cure you of ‘em without morphine. Miss

-Smithson, if you’d quit strong green tea, three times a day, those

-nerves of yours would give you a fairer chance—and your neighbors,

-too.” (Tearful sniffs from Miss Smithson.)

-

-“Auntie Thomas, you wait and see what your rheumatism says to you

-to-morrow, when the dope has died out of your system. Susan Carlin, you

-ought to be home this minute, looking after your sick boy, instead of

-on a stage, in your best bib and tucker, giving testimonials to

-you-don’t-know-what-all poison.

-

-“Bairdstown’s Suffering Womanhood!” exclaimed the vigorous old lady,

-her color rising with her voice. “Go home! Go home, you poor,

-self-coddling fussybuddies, to your washboards and your sewing-machines

-and forget your imaginary symptoms.

-

-“There!” she drew a long breath, looking about over the group of

-wilting testimonial-givers. “That’s the first speech I have ever made,

-and I guess it’ll be the last. But before I stop, I’ve got a word to

-say to you, Professor Graham Gray. Bless us! Where’s the man gone?”

-

-“Professor Gray,” announced the chairman with a twinkle in his voice,

-“has retired to obtain fresh evidence. At least, that is what he _said_

-he had gone for.”

-

-From the main floor came a hoarse suggestion which had the words “tar

-and feathers” in it. It was cut short by a metallic shriek from

-without, followed by a heavy rumbling.

-

-“Something seems to tell me,” said the fat Mayor solemnly, “that the

-9.30 express, which just whistled for the crossing, is the heavier by

-about two hundred pounds of Great Gray Benefactor clinging to the rear

-platform, and happy to be there.”

-

-“And your money back if not benefited,” piped a reedy voice from the

-front, whereupon there was another roar.

-

-“The bright particular star of these proceedings having left, is there

-anything else to come before the meeting?” inquired the chairman.

-

-“I’d like to have one more word,” said Dr. Strong. “Friends, as one

-quack is, all quacks are. They differ only in method and degree. Every

-one of them plays a game with stacked cards, in which you are his

-victims, and Death is his partner. And the puller-in for this game is

-the press.

-

-“You have heard to-night how a good and wellmeaning clergyman has been

-made stool-pigeon for this murderous charlatan, through the lying of a

-religious—God save the mark!—weekly. That publication is beyond our

-reach. But there is one here at home which did the quack’s work for

-him, and took his money for doing it. I suggest that the Honorable

-Silas Harris explain!”

-

-“I’m running my paper as a business proposition,” growled the baited

-editor and owner of the ‘Bugle,’ “and I’m running it to suit myself and

-this community.”

-

-“You’re running it to suit the crooked and cruel advertisers who prey

-on this community,” retorted the other. “And you’ve served them further

-in the legislature, where you voted to kill the patent-medicine bill,

-last session, in protection of your own profits. Good profits, too. One

-third of all your advertising is medical quackery which takes good

-money out of this town by sheer swindling; money which ought to stay in

-town and be spent on the legitimate local products advertised in your

-paper. If I were a local advertiser, I’d want to know why.”

-

-“If that’s the case,” remarked Mr. Stanley Gryce, quick to catch the

-point, “I guess you owe my family seven dollars an’ a half, Silas, and

-till it’s paid up you can just drop my laundry announcement out of your

-columns.”

-

-“I guess I’ll stay out for a spell, too,” supplemented Mr. Corson, the

-hay and feed man. “For a week, my ad’s been swamped by Swamp Root so

-deep you can’t see it.”

-

-“While you’re about it,” added a third, “leave me out. I’m kinder sick

-of appearin’ between a poisonous headache powder and a consumption

-dope. Folks’ll be accusin’ me of seekin’ trade untimely.” This was

-greeted with a whoop, for the speaker was the local undertaker.

-

-“We’ve got a league for Clean Advertising in Worthington,” announced

-Mr. Clyde. “Why not organize something of the kind here?”

-

-“Help!” shouted the Honorable Silas, throwing up his hands. “Don’t

-shoot! I holler ‘Enough!’ As soon as the contracts are out, I’ll quit.

-There’s no money in patent-medicine advertising any more for the small

-paper, anyway.”

-

-“Well, we’ve done our evening’s chores, I reckon,” remarked the

-chairman. “A motion to adjourn will now be in order.”

-

-“Move we adjourn with the chorus of the ‘Hymn of Healing,’” piped the

-wag with the reedy voice, and the audience filed out, uproariously and

-profanely singing:—

-

-“Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed!

-    Trust in the gospel advice.

-Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field;

-    Healed without money or price.”

-

-

-“Well, young man,” said Grandma Sharpless, coming forward to join the

-Health Master, “you certainly carried out your programme.”

-

-“I?” said Dr. Strong, affectionately tucking the old lady’s arm under

-his. “To you the honors of war. I only squelched a quack. You taught

-Bairds-town’s self-coddling womanhood a lesson that will go down the

-generations.”

-

-“What I want to know,” said the Mayor, advancing to shake hands with

-Mrs. Sharpless, “is this: what’s a fussybuddy?”

-

-“A fussybuddy,” instructed Grandma Sharpless wisely, “is a woman who

-catches a stomach-ache from a patent-medicine almanac. What I want to

-know, Tom Allen, is what you had against the man. I seemed to get an

-inkling that you didn’t exactly like him.”

-

-“He’s forgotten me,” chuckled the Mayor, “but I haven’t forgotten him.

-Fifteen years ago he came along here horse-doctoring and poisoned a

-perfectly good mare for me. He won’t try to poison this town again in a

-hurry. You finished him, Mrs. Sharpless, you and Dr. Strong.”

-

-“What _I_ want to know,” said the Health Master, “is how poor old Mr.

-Huddleston feels about that contribution, now.”

-

-A month later he found out. Traveling by trolley one evening, he felt a

-hand on his shoulder, and turned to face Professor Graham Gray.

-

-“No hard feelings, I hope,” said the quack with superb urbanity. “All

-in the way of business, I take it. I’d have done the same to you, if

-you’d come butting in on my trade. Say, but that old lady was a Tartar!

-She cooked my goose in Bairdstown. For all that, I got an unsolicited

-testimonial from there two weeks ago that’s a wonder. Anonymous, too.

-Not a word of writing with it to tell who the grateful patient might

-be.”

-

-“What was it?” asked Dr. Strong with polite interest.

-

-“A twenty-dollar bill. Now, _what_ do you think of that?”

-

-When Dr. Strong spoke again—and the Great Gray Benefactor has always

-regarded this as the most inconsequential reply he ever received to a

-plain question—it was after a long and thoughtful pause.

-

-“I think,” said he with conviction, “that I’ll start in going to church

-again, next Sunday.”

-

-

-

-

-X.

-THE HOUSE THAT CAUGHT COLD

-

-

-“Can you cure a cold?” asked Grandma Sharpless.

-

-A flare from the soft-coal fire flickered across the library, revealing

-a smile on the Health Master’s face.

-

-“Am I a millionaire?” he countered.

-

-“Not from your salary as Chinese physician to the Clydes,” laughed the

-head of that family.

-

-“If I could cure a cold, I should be, easily, more than that. I’d be

-the foremost medical discoverer of the day.”

-

-“Then you can’t cure a cold,” pursued Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“What _is_ a cold?” countered the Health Master in that insinuating

-tone of voice which he employed to provoke the old lady into one of

-those frequent verbal encounters so thoroughly enjoyed by both of them.

-

-“An ordinary common cold in the head. You know what I mean perfectly

-well, young man. The kind you catch by getting into drafts.”

-

-“Oh, _that!_ Well, you see, there’s no such thing.”

-

-“No such thing as a cold in the head, Dr. Strong?” said Julia, looking

-up from her book. “Why, we’ve all had ‘em, loads of times.”

-

-“And Bettina is coming down with one now, if I’m any judge,” said Mrs.

-Sharpless. “She’s had the sniffles all day.”

-

-“Let’s hope it isn’t a cold. Maybe it’s only chicken-pox or mumps.”

-

-“Are you wishing chicken-pox and mumps on my baby?” cried Mrs. Clyde.

-

-In the three years during which Dr. Strong had been the “Chinese

-physician” of the household, earning his salary by keeping his patients

-well instead of curing them when ill, Mrs. Clyde had never quite

-learned to guard against the surprises which so often pointed the

-Health Master’s truths.

-

-“Not by any means; I’m only hoping for the lesser of evils.”

-

-“But mumps and chicken-pox are real diseases,” protested Clyde.

-

-“And you think that a ‘cold,’ as you call it, isn’t.”

-

-“Why, no,” said Clyde hesitantly. “I wouldn’t call it a disease, any

-more than I’d call a sprain a broken leg.”

-

-“But it is. A very real, serious disease. Its actual name is coryza.”

-

-“Bogy-talk,” commented Grandma Sharpless scornfully. “Big names for

-little things.”

-

-“Not a little thing at all, as we should all realize if our official

-death-records really dealt in facts.”

-

-“Death-records?” said Grandma Sharpless incredulously. “People don’t

-die of colds, do they?”

-

-“Hundreds every year; all around us.”

-

-“Well, _I_ never hear of it.”

-

-“Are you sure? Think back and recall how many of your friends’ obituary

-notices include some such sentence as this: ‘Last Thursday evening Mr.

-Smith caught a severe cold, from which he took to his bed on Saturday,

-and did not leave it again until his death yesterday morning?’ Doesn’t

-that sound familiar?”

-

-“So familiar,” cried Mr. Clyde, “that I believe the newspapers keep it

-set up in type.”

-

-“But the newspaper always goes on to say that Mr. Smith developed

-pneumonia or grip or bronchitis, and died of that, not of the cold,”

-objected Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“Oh, yes. In the mortality records poor Smith usually appears under the

-heading of one of the well-recognized diseases. It would hardly be

-respectable to die of a cold, would it?”

-

-“He doesn’t _die_ of the cold,” insisted the old lady. “He catches the

-cold and dies of something else.”

-

-“If I take a dose of poison,” the Health Master mildly propounded, “and

-fall down and break my neck, what do I die of?”

-

-“It’s no parallel,” said Grandma Sharpless. “And even if it is,” she

-added, tacitly abandoning that ground, “we’ve always had colds and we

-always will have ‘em.”

-

-“Not with my approval, at least,” remarked the Health Master.

-

-“I guess Providence won’t wait for your approval, young man.”

-

-“Then you regard coryza as a dispensation of Providence? The

-Presbyterian doctrine of foreordination, applied to the human nose,”

-smiled the physician. “We’re all predestined to the ailment, and

-therefore might as well get out our handkerchiefs and prepare to sneeze

-our poor sinful heads off. Is that about it?”

-

-“No, it isn’t! This is a green December and it means a full churchyard.

-We’re in for a regular cold-breeding season.”

-

-“Nonsense! Weather doesn’t breed colds.”

-

-“What does, then?”

-

-“A very mean and lively little germ. He’s rather more poisonous than

-the chicken-pox and mumps variety, although he hasn’t as bad a name. In

-grown-ups he prepares the soil, so to speak, for other germs, by

-getting all through the system and weakening its resistant powers,

-thereby laying it open to the attacks of such enemies as the

-pneumococcus, which is always waiting just around the corner of the

-tongue to give us pneumonia. Or bronchitis may develop, or tonsillitis,

-or diphtheria, or kidney trouble, or indeed almost anything. I once

-heard an eminent lecturer happily describe the coryza bacillus as the

-bad little boy of the gang who, having once broken into the system,

-turns around and calls back to the bigger boys: ‘Come on in, fellers.

-The door’s open.’

-

-“With children the coryza-bug makes various trouble without necessarily

-inviting the others in. A great proportion of the serious ear-troubles

-come from colds; all the way from earache to mastoiditis, and the

-consequent necessity of quick operations to save the patient’s life.

-Almost any of the organs may be impaired by the activity of the little

-pest. And yet as intelligent a family as this”—he looked around the

-circle—“considers it a ‘mere cold.’”

-

-“Why haven’t you told us before?” asked Mr. Clyde bluntly.

-

-“A just reproach,” admitted the Health Master. “Not having been

-attacked, I haven’t considered defense—a wretched principle in health

-matters. In fact, I’ve let the little matters of life go, too much, in

-my interest in the bigger.”

-

-“But what about Bettina?” said the mother anxiously.

-

-“Let’s have her in,” said the Health Master, and the six-year-old

-presently trotted into the room, announcing through a somewhat reddened

-nose, “I’m all stobbed ub; and Katie rubbed me with goose-grease, and I

-don’d wand to take any paregoric.”

-

-“Paregoric?” said the physician. “Opium? I guess not. Off to bed with

-you, Toots, and we’ll try to exorcise the demon with hot-water bottles

-and extra blankets.”

-

-Following her usual custom of kissing everybody good-night around the

-circle, Bettina held up her arms to her sister, who was nearest.

-

-“Stop!” said the Health Master. “No kissing.”

-

-“Not even my mamma?” queried the child. “I’m afraid not. You remember

-when Charley had scarlet fever he wasn’t allowed even to be very near

-any of you.”

-

-“But scarlet fever is the most contagious of any of the diseases, isn’t

-it?” asked Julia.

-

-“Not as contagious as a cold in the head.”

-

-“I don’t know how contagious a cold is,” said Grandma Sharpless; “but I

-do know this: once it gets into a house, it goes through it like

-wildfire.”

-

-“Then the house ought to be ashamed of itself. That’s sheer

-carelessness.”

-

-“Half the kids in our school have got stopped-up noses,” contributed

-Charley.

-

-“Why hasn’t the Committee on Schools reported the fact?” demanded the

-Health Master, turning an accusing eye on Julia.

-

-“Why—why, I didn’t think of it,” said she. “I didn’t think it was

-anything.”

-

-“Oh, you didn’t! Well, if what Charley says is correct, I should think

-your school ought to be put under epidemic regimen.”

-

-“You’d have a fine row with the Board of Education, trying to persuade

-them to special action for any such cause as that,” remarked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“There’s the measure of their intelligence, then,” returned the Health

-Master. “Sickness is sickness, just as surely as a flame is fire; and

-there is no telling, once it’s well started, how much damage it may

-do.”

-

-“But a cold is only in the head, or rather, in the nose,” persisted

-Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“That’s where you’re wrong. Coryza is a disease of the whole system,

-and it weakens the whole system. The symptoms are most apparent in the

-nose and mouth: and it is from the nose and mouth that the disease is

-spread. But if you’ve got the cold you’ve got it in every corner of

-your being. You won’t be convinced of its importance, I suppose, until

-I can produce facts and figures. I only hope they won’t be producible

-from this house. But by the end of the season I’ll hope to have them.

-Meantime we’ll isolate Bettykin.”

-

-Bettina was duly isolated. Meanwhile the active little coryza bacillus

-had got its grip on Mr. Clyde, who for three days attended to his

-business with streaming eyes, and then retired, in the company of

-various hot-water bags, bottles, and foot-warmers, to the sanctuary of

-his own bedroom, where he led a private and morose existence for one

-week. His general manager succeeded to his desk; likewise, to his

-contaminated pencils, erasers, and other implements, whereby he

-alternately sneezed and objurgated himself into the care of a doctor,

-with the general and unsatisfactory result that the balance-sheet of

-Clyde & Co., Manufacturers, showed an obvious loss for the month—as it

-happened, most unfortunately, an unusually busy month—of some three

-thousand dollars, directly traceable to that unconsidered trifle, a

-cold in the head.

-

-“At that you got off cheap,” argued the Health Master.

-

-It was three months after the invasion of the Clyde household by

-Bettina’s coryza germ.

-

-“I’m glad somebody considers it cheap!” observed Mr. Clyde. “Personally

-I should rather have taken a trip to Europe on my share of that three

-thousand dollars.”

-

-“Yet you were lucky,” asserted Dr. Strong. “Bettykin got through her

-earache without any permanent damage. Robin’s attack passed off without

-complications. Your own onset didn’t involve any organ more vital than

-your bank account. And the rest of us escaped.”

-

-“Doesn’t it prove what I said,” demanded Grandma Sharpless; “that a

-cold in the head is only a cold in the head?”

-

-“‘Answer is No,’ as Togo would put it,” replied the Health Master. “In

-fact, I’ve got proof here of quite the opposite, which I desire to

-present to this gathering.”

-

-“This meeting of the Household Protective Association is hereby called

-to order!” announced Mr. Clyde, in the official tones proper to the

-occasion. The children put aside their various occupations and assumed

-a solemn and businesslike aspect which was part of the game. “The lone

-official member will now report,” concluded the chairman.

-

-“Let the Health Officer of the city report for me,” said Dr. Strong,

-taking a printed leaflet from his pocket. “He is one of those rare

-officials who aren’t afraid to tell people what they don’t know, and

-may not want to know. Listen to what Dr. Merritt has to say.” And he

-read:—

-

-“‘The death-rate of the city for the month of February, like the rate

-for December and January, is abnormally high, being a shade over ten

-per cent above the normal for this time of year. While the causes of

-mortality range through the commoner diseases, with a special rise in

-pulmonary troubles, it is evident that the increase must be due to some

-special cause. In the opinion of the Bureau of Health this cause is the

-despised and infectious “cold,” more properly known as coryza, which

-has been epidemic this winter in the city. Although the epidemic wave

-is now receding, its disastrous aftereffects may be looked for in high

-mortality rates for some months. Should a similar onset occur again,

-the city will be asked to consider seriously a thorough school

-campaign, with careful isolation of all suspicious cases.’”

-

-“Did you write that, young man?” asked Mrs. Sharpless suspiciously.

-

-“Why, no; I didn’t _write_ it,” answered the Health Master. “I’ll go as

-far as to admit, however, that Dr. Merritt listens politely to my

-humble suggestions when I offer them.”

-

-“Humph! Ten per cent increase. What is that in real figures?”

-

-“Twenty-five extra deaths a month,” said Manny Clyde, a growing expert

-on local statistics.

-

-“Seventy-five needless deaths for the three months, and more to come,”

-said the Health Master, “besides all the disability, loss of time and

-earning power and strength, and all the pain and suffering—which things

-never get into the vital statistics, worse luck! So much to the account

-of the busy little coryza-bug.”

-

-“Can’t the Health Bureau do something?” asked the practical Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Not much, until its public is better educated,” said Dr. Strong

-wearily. “The present business of a health official is to try and beat

-the fool-killer off from his natural prey with a printed tract. It’s

-quite a job, when you come to consider it.”

-

-“What he ought to have, is the club of the law!” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Precisely. The people won’t give it to him. In this household we’re

-better off, since we can make our own laws. Since Betty’s attack we’ve

-tried out the isolation plan pretty effectually; and we’ve followed, as

-well as might be, the rule of avoiding contact with people having

-coryza.”

-

-He glanced up at a flamboyant poster which Mrs. Clyde, who had a

-natural gift of draftsmanship, had made in a spirit of mischief,

-entitling it “The Red Nose as a Danger Signal.”

-

-“As much truth as fun in that,” he remarked. “But, at the best, we

-can’t live among people and avoid all danger. In fact, avoidance is

-only the outer line of defense. The inner line is symbolized by a

-homely rule, ‘Keep Comfortable.’”

-

-“What’s comfort to do with keeping well?” asked Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“What are your nerves for?” retorted Dr. Strong with his quizzical

-smile.

-

-“Young man,” said the old lady plaintively, “did I ever ask you a

-question that you didn’t fire another back at me before it was fairly

-out of my mouth? My nerves, if I let myself have any, wouldn’t be for

-anything except to plague me.”

-

-“Oh, those are pampered nerves. Normal nerves are to warn you. They’re

-to tell you whether the little things of life are right with you.”

-

-“And if they’re not?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Why, then you’re uncomfortable. Which is to say, there’s something

-wrong; and something wrong means, in time, a lessening of vitality, and

-when you let down your body’s vitality you’re simply saying to any germ

-that may happen along, ‘Come right in and make yourself at home.’

-

-“Perhaps you remember when the house caught cold, how shocked Grandma

-Sharpless was at my saying that colds aren’t caught in a draft. Well,

-they’re not. Yet I ought to have qualified that. Now, what is a draft?

-Air in motion. If there is one thing about air that we thoroughly know,

-it’s this: that moving air is infinitely better for us than still air.

-Even bad, stale air, if stirred vigorously into motion, seems to purify

-itself and become breathable and good. Now, the danger of a draft is

-that it may mean a sudden change of the body’s temperature. Nobody

-thinks that wind is unhealthful, because when you’re out in the

-wind—which is the biggest and freest kind of a draft—you’re prepared

-for it. If not, your nerves say to you, ‘Move faster; get warm.’ It’s

-the same indoors. If the draft chills you, your nerves will tell you

-so. Therefore, mind your nerves. Otherwise, you’ll become specially

-receptive to the coryza germ and when you’ve caught _that_, you’ll have

-caught cold.”

-

-“I wish,” remarked Mr. Clyde, “that my nerves would tell me why I feel

-so logy every morning. They don’t say anything definite. It isn’t

-indigestion exactly. But I feel slow and inert after breakfast, as if

-my stomach hadn’t any enthusiasm in its job.”

-

-“Breakfast is the only meal I don’t have with you, so I don’t know,”

-replied the Health Master, who was a very early riser. “But I should

-say you were eating the wrong things, perhaps.”

-

-“How could that be?” said Mrs. Clyde. “Tom has the simplest kind of

-breakfast, and it’s the same every day.”

-

-“Well, there you are.” The Health Master’s tone assumed that the

-solution was found.

-

-“Where are we?” queried Mr. Clyde. “I’m up in the air!”

-

-“What is this remarkably regular breakfast?”

-

-“Eggs, rolls, and coffee.”

-

-“Oh! Eggs every morning?”

-

-“Two of them. Medium boiled.”

-

-“Not even the method is varied. Same eggs, same preparation every

-morning, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months—”

-

-“No. That’s my winter breakfast only.”

-

-“Very well; four or five months in the year. No wonder your poor

-stomach gets bored.”

-

-“What’s the matter with eggs, Dr. Strong?” inquired Manny. “They let us

-have ‘em, in training.”

-

-“Nothing is the matter with two eggs, or twenty. But when you come to

-two hundred, there’s something very obvious the matter—monotony. Your

-stomach is a machine, it’s true, but it’s a human machine. It demands

-variety.”

-

-“Then Charles ought to be a model. He wants everything from soup to

-pie.”

-

-“A thoroughly normal desire for a growing boy.”

-

-“He eats an awful lot of meat,” observed Julia, who was a somewhat

-fastidious young lady. “My Sunday-school teacher calls meat-eaters

-human tigers.”

-

-“Oh, that’s too easy a generalization, Junkum,” replied the Health

-Master. “With equal logic she could say that vegetable-eaters are human

-cows.”

-

-“But the vegetarians make very strong arguments,” said Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“A lot of pale-eyed, weak-blooded nibblers!” stated Grandma Sharpless.

-“If meat weren’t good for us, we wouldn’t have been eating it all these

-generations.”

-

-“True enough. Perhaps we eat a little too much of it, particularly in

-the warm months. But in winter it’s practically a necessity.”

-

-“Some of the big athletes say they’re vegetarians,” said Manny.

-

-“There are individual cases,” admitted the Health Master; “but in the

-long run it doesn’t work. A vegetarian race is, generally speaking,

-small of stature and build, and less efficient than a meat-eating race.

-The rule of eating is solid food, sound food, plenty of it, and a good

-variety. Give your stomach a fair chance: don’t overload it, don’t

-understock it, and don’t let it get bored.”

-

-For some time Miss Bettina had been conducting a quiet and strategic

-advance upon the Health Master, and now by a sudden onslaught she

-captured his knee and, perching herself thereon, put a soft and chubby

-hand under his chin.

-

-“You want something, Miss Toodles,” he accused with a formidable frown.

-“None of your wheedling ways with me! Out with it!”

-

-“Candy,” said the child, in no way impressed by his severity.

-

-“Candy, indeed! When?”

-

-“Now. Any time. Lots of it. Lots of sugar, too.”

-

-“Betty’s developing _such_ a sweet tooth!” mourned her mother. “I have

-to limit her rigidly.”

-

-“Why?”

-

-“You wouldn’t let the child stuff herself on sweets all the time,”

-protested Grandma Sharpless, scandalized.

-

-“Nor on anything else. But if she craves sweets, why not let her have

-them at the proper time?”

-

-“Well, in my day children ate plain food and were thankful.”

-

-“Hm! I’m a little dubious about the thankfulness. And in your day

-children died more frequently and more easily than in ours.”

-

-“They weren’t pampered to death on candy, anyway!”

-

-“Possibly they weren’t pampered quite enough. Take the Cherub, here,”

-he tossed Betty in the air and whisked her to his shoulder. “She’s a

-perfect little bundle of energy, always in motion. She needs

-energy-producing food to keep going, coal for that engine. Sugar is

-almost pure carbon; that is, coal in digestible form. Of course she

-wants sweets. Her little body is logical.”

-

-“But isn’t it bad for her teeth?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“No; nor for her last year’s overshoes or her tin dog’s left hind leg,”

-chuckled the Health Master. “Sometimes I marvel that the race has

-survived all the superstitions surrounding food and drink.”

-

-“In my father’s household,” said Mr. Clyde, “the family principle was

-never to drink anything with meals. The mixture of solids and liquids

-was held to be bad. Another superstition, I suppose.”

-

-“At that rate, bread and milk would be rank poison,” said Dr. Strong.

-“Next to food, water has got the finest incrustation of old-wives’

-warnings. Now, there’s some doubt whether a man should eat whenever he

-wants to. Appetite, in the highly nervous American organization, is

-sometimes tricky. But thirst is trustworthy. The normal man is

-perfectly safe in drinking all the water he wants whenever he wants

-it.”

-

-“I can still remember the agonies that I suffered when, as a boy, I had

-scarlet fever, and they would allow me almost no water,” said Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“One of medicine’s direst errors,” said Dr. Strong. “Nobody will ever

-know how much that false and cruel system has added to our death-rate

-in the past. To-day a practitioner who kept water from a fever

-patient—unless there were unusual complications—would be properly

-citable for malpractice. By the way,” he continued, “we’re changing our

-views about feeding in long illnesses. Typhoid patients have always

-been kept down to the lowest possible diet, nothing but milk. Now, some

-of the big hospitals are feeding typhoid cases, right through the

-fever, on foods carefully selected for their heat and energy values,

-with the result that not only has the patient more strength to fight

-the disease, but he pulls through practically free from the emaciation

-which has always been regarded as inevitable.”

-

-“Can I have my candy?” inquired Bettina, holding to her own point.

-

-“If it’s good, sound candy. Now I’m going to utter an awful heresy.

-Generally speaking, and in moderation, what you want is good for you.”

-

-“Pure anarchy,” laughed Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Not at all; the law of the body, always demanding what is best for its

-development.”

-

-“Well, I want,” declared Robin, with a sudden energy, “to take off

-these hot, scratchy flannels.”

-

-“Too late now,” said the Health Master, “until spring. You’ve been

-wearing them all winter. But another year, if I have my way, you won’t

-have to put them on.”

-

-“You’d let him tempt pneumonia by going through a winter with light

-summer underwear?”

-

-“Unless you get out an injunction against me,” smiled the physician.

-“Bobs had a pretty tough time of it for the first week when he changed

-to flannels. He’s thin-skinned, and the rough wool irritated him pretty

-badly. In fact, he had a slight fever for two days. It isn’t worth that

-suffering. Besides, he’s a full-blooded youngster, and doesn’t need the

-extra warmth. You can’t dress all children alike in material any more

-than you can dress them all from the same pattern.”

-

-“Then I want to leave off mine, too,” announced Charles.

-

-“Nonsense! You little ruffian, you could wear sandpaper on that skin of

-yours. Don’t talk to me, or next time I see you without your overcoat

-I’ll order a hair shirt for you.”

-

-“I’ve never thought much about the children’s clothes, except to change

-between the seasons,” confessed Mrs. Clyde. “I supposed that was all

-there is to it.”

-

-“Not wholly. I once knew a man who died from changing his necktie.”

-

-“Did he put on a red tie with a pink shirt?” interestedly queried

-Manny, who had reached the age where attire was becoming a vital

-interest.

-

-“He changed abruptly from the big puff-tie which he had worn all

-winter, and which was a regular chest-protector, to a skimpy bow,

-thereby exposing a weak chest and getting pneumonia quite naturally.

-Yet he was ordinarily a cautious old gentleman, and shifted the weight

-of his underclothes by the calendar—a rather stupid thing to do, by the

-way.”

-

-“On the first of November,” began Grandma Sharpless severely—

-

-“Yes, I know,” cut in the Health Master. “Your whole family went into

-flannels whether the thermometer was twenty or seventy. And we’ve seen

-it both, more than once on that date.”

-

-“What harm did it ever do them?”

-

-“Bodily discomfort. In other words, lessened vitality. Think how much

-nervous wear is suffered by a child itching and squirming in a scratchy

-suit of heavy flannels on a warm day.”

-

-“Children can’t be changing from one weight to another every day, can

-they?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“No need of that. But in the fall and spring we can regulate that

-matter a little more by the thermometer, and a little less by the

-almanac. There is also the consideration of controlling heat. Now,

-Charley, what would you think of a man who, in June, say, with the

-mercury at seventy-five, wandered around in a heavy suit and his winter

-flannels.”

-

-“I’d think he was sick,” said the nine-year-old promptly, “or else

-foolish. But what makes you ask me?”

-

-“Just by way of calling your attention to the thermometer, which in

-this room stands at seventy-nine. And here we all sit, dressed

-twenty-five per cent warmer than if we were out doors in a June

-temperature several degrees colder. You’re the Committee on Air and

-Light, Charley. I think this matter of heat ought to come within your

-province.”

-

-“And it makes you feel so cold when you go out,” said Julia.

-

-“Of course. We Americans live in one of the most trying climates in the

-world, and we add to its rigors by heating our houses like incubators.

-No room over seventy, ought to be the rule.”

-

-“It’s hard to work in a cold room,” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Not when you’re used to it. The Chicago schools that have started

-winter roof classes for sickly children, find that the average of

-learning capacity goes up markedly in the cold, clean air.”

-

-“But they can’t be as comfortable,” said Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Much more so. As soon as the children get used to it, they love it,

-and they object strenuously to going back into the close rooms. The

-body grasps and assimilates the truth; the mind responds.”

-

-“Well, I like to be comfortable as well as anybody,” said Mrs.

-Sharpless, “but I don’t consider it the chief end of life.”

-

-“Not the chief end,” assented Dr. Strong; “the chief means.”

-

-“Comfort and health,” mused Mrs. Clyde. “It seems a natural

-combination.”

-

-“The most natural in the world. Let me put it into an allegory. Health

-is the main line, the broad line, the easy line. It’s the simple line

-to travel, because comfort keeps pointing it out. Essentially it is the

-line of the least resistance. The trouble with most of us is we’re

-always unconsciously taking transfers to the cross-lines. The transfer

-may be Carelessness, or Slothfulness, or Gluttony, or one of the

-Dissipations in food, drink, work or play; or it may be even Egotism,

-which is sometimes a poison: but they all take you to Sick Street.

-Don’t get a transfer down Sick Street. The road is rough, the scenery

-dismal, and at the end is the cemetery.”

-

-“That’s the end of all roads,” said Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“Then in Heaven’s name,” said the Health Master, “let us take the

-longest and sunniest route and sing as we go!”

-

-

-

-

-XI.

-THE BESIEGED CITY

-

-

-To Bettina falls the credit of setting the match to the train. That

-lively-minded young lady had possessed herself of a large, red square

-of cardboard, upon which, in the midst of the Clyde family circle, she

-wrought mightily with a paint-brush.

-

-“What comes after p in ‘diphtheria,’ Charley?” she presently appealed

-to her next older brother.

-

-Charley considered the matter with head aslant. “Another p,” he

-answered, tactfully postponing the evil moment.

-

-“It doesn’t look right,” announced the Cherub, after a moment’s

-contemplation. “Dr. Strong, how do you spell ‘diphtheria’?”

-

-“I? Why, Toots, I spell it with a capital, but leave off the final x,”

-replied the Health Master cheerfully. “What kind of a game are you

-playing? Quarantining your dolls?”

-

-“It isn’t a game.” Betty could be, on occasion, quite a self-contained

-young person.

-

-“What is it, then, if I’m not prying too far into personal matters?”

-

-“It’s for Eula Simms to put on her house.”

-

-“The Simmses _will_ be pleased,” remarked Julia.

-

-“They ought to be,” said Betty complacently. “I don’t suppose they can

-afford a regular one like the one we put up when Charley had scarlet

-fever, two years ago. And Eula’s big sister’s got diphtheria,” she

-added quite casually.

-

-“What’s that?” The Health Master straightened up sharply in his chair.

-“How do you know that, Twinkles?”

-

-“Eula told me across the fence this morning. She’s excused from school.

-Three other houses on the street have got it, too. I’m going to make

-placards for them.”

-

-“And do the work in play that the Health Department ought to be doing

-in the deadliest earnest! What on earth is Dr. Merritt thinking of?”

-And he went to the telephone to call up the Health Officer and find

-out.

-

-“We’re due for a bad diphtheria year, too,” observed Grandma Sharpless,

-whose commentaries on practical matters, being always the boiled-down

-essence of first-hand observation, carried weight in the household.

-“I’ve noticed that it swings around about once in every five or six

-years. And it was six years ago we had that bad epidemic.”

-

-“Then there is the influenza epidemic of last spring to consider,” said

-Mrs. Clyde. “Dr. Strong told us then that we’d have to pay for that for

-months. So, I suppose, the city is still in a weakened condition and

-easy soil for diphtheria or any other epidemic.”

-

-“There’s measles already in our school,” said Julia. “That’ll help,

-too.”

-

-“Why haven’t you reported it, Junkum?” asked her father. “You’re

-Chairman of the Committee on School Conditions of the Clyde Household

-Protective Association.”

-

-“We only found out to-day,” said Bobs, “when they told us maybe school

-would close.”

-

-“Three years I’ve been President of the Public Health League,” remarked

-Mr. Clyde with a wry face, “and nothing has happened. Now that I’m just

-about retiring I hope there isn’t going to be serious trouble. What

-does the Health Department say, Strong?” he inquired, turning as the

-Health Master entered.

-

-“Something very wrong there. Merritt won’t talk over the ‘phone. Wants

-me to come down.”

-

-“This evening?”

-

-“Yes. He’s ill, himself, and badly worried. What do _you_ think?”

-

-“It looks like some skullduggery,” declared Mr. Clyde, borrowing one of

-his mother-in-law’s expressive words. “Is it possible that reports of

-diphtheria are being suppressed, and that is why the infected houses

-are not placarded?”

-

-“If it is, we’re in for trouble. As I told you, when I undertook the

-Chinese job of keeping this household in health,” continued the Health

-Master, addressing the family, “I can’t reliably protect a family in a

-community which doesn’t protect itself. There are too many loopholes

-through which infection may penetrate. So the Protective Association,

-in self-defense, may have to spur up the city to its own defense.

-First, though, I’m going over the throats of this family and take

-cultures.”

-

-“You don’t think,” began the mother anxiously, “that the children—”

-

-“No; I don’t think they’ve got it. But the bacteriological analysis

-will show.”

-

-“I hate to have it done,” said Mrs. Clyde, shuddering. “It seems so—so

-inviting of trouble.”

-

-“Superstition,” said Dr. Strong, smiling. “Aren’t you just as anxious

-to find out that they _haven’t_ got the infection as that they have?

-Come on, Bettykin; you’re first.” And, having prepared his material, he

-swabbed the throats of the whole company, after which he took the

-cultures with him to Dr. Merritt.

-

-It was late when he returned, but he went direct to Mr. Clyde’s room.

-

-“It’s worse than I thought, Clyde,” said he. “We’re in the first stage

-of a bad epidemic. The reports have been suppressed by Mullins, the

-Deputy Health Officer.”

-

-“What did he do that for?”

-

-“To cover his own inefficiency. He is City Bacteriologist, also, and

-the law requires him, in time of epidemic, to make bacteriological

-analyses. He doesn’t know how. So he simply pigeonholed the case

-reports as they came in.”

-

-“How did such a rascal ever get the job?” asked Clyde.

-

-“Political pull. The most destructive of all the causes of death which

-never get into the mortality records,” said Dr. Strong bitterly.

-

-“How many cases?”

-

-“Three or four hundred, at least. It’s got a good start. And more than

-that of measles. While he was in the business of suppressing, Mullins

-threw a lot of measles reports aside, too. I don’t like the prospect.”

-

-“The first thing to do,” decided Mr. Clyde, with customary energy, “is

-to get Dr. Mullins out. I’ll call an emergency meeting of the Public

-Health League to-morrow. By the way, Julia has some matters to report

-from school.”

-

-“Well, suppose we call an emergency meeting of our own of the Household

-Protective Association for to-morrow evening,” suggested Dr. Strong.

-“Since we’re facing an epidemic, we may as well fortify the youngsters

-as soundly as possible.”

-

-Directly after dinner on the following evening the Association was

-called to order by Mr. Clyde, presiding. It was a full meeting except

-for Maynard, who had not returned for dinner. First Dr. Strong reported

-that the cultures from the throats of the family had turned out

-“negative.”

-

-“So we don’t have to worry about that,” he remarked.

-

-Whereupon Mrs. Clyde and her mother drew long breaths of relief.

-

-“And now for the Committee on School Conditions,” said Mr. Clyde.

-

-“All I’ve heard of in our school is measles,” announced Julia. “There’s

-a lot of the boys and girls away.”

-

-“No diphtheria?” asked Mr. Clyde.

-

-“I asked Miss Brown that at recess, and she looked queer and said,

-‘None that we know of.’ But I heard of some cases in the Academy; so I

-told Manny.”

-

-“Why Manny?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“He’s Chairman of the Committee on Milk, and the Bliss children from

-our dairy go to the Academy.”

-

-“That explains why Maynard isn’t here, then,” said the grandmother. “I

-suppose he’s gone out to the farm.”

-

-“Yes. He took the interurban trolley out, to make sure that they’d be

-careful about keeping the children away from the dairy.”

-

-“Good team-work, Junkum,” approved the presiding officer.

-

-“And I asked Mary and Jim Bliss to come around to-morrow to see Dr.

-Strong and have him look at their throats.”

-

-“You ought to be drawing a salary from the city, young lady,” said the

-Health Master warmly. “You may have stopped a milk-route infection; one

-of the hardest kind to trace down.”

-

-“They’re talking of closing school after to-morrow,” concluded the

-girl.

-

-“The very worst thing they could do,” declared Dr. Strong.

-

-“The very best, I should think,” controverted Grandma Sharpless, who

-never hesitated to take issue with any authority, pending elucidation

-of the question under discussion. “If you group a lot of children close

-together it stands to reason they’ll catch the disease from each

-other.”

-

-“Not unless you group them too close. Arm’s length is the striking

-distance of a contagious disease. _There’s_ a truth for all of us to

-remember all the time.”

-

-“If it _is_ a truth,” challenged Mrs. Sharpless. “One of the surest and

-one of the most important,” averred the Health Master. “The only

-substance that carries the contagion of diphtheria or measles is the

-mucus from the nose or throat of an infected person. As far as that can

-be coughed or sneezed is the danger area. Of course, any article

-contaminated with it is dangerous also. But a hygienically conducted

-schoolroom is as safe a place as could be found. I’d like to run a

-school in time of epidemic. I’d make it a distributing agency for

-health instead of disease.”

-

-“How would you manage that?”

-

-“By controlling and training the pupils hygienically. Don’t you see

-that school attendance offers the one best chance of keeping track of

-such an epidemic, among the very ones who are most liable to it, the

-children? Diphtheria is contagious in the early stages, as soon as the

-throat begins to get sore, and before the patient is really ill. Just

-now there is an indeterminate number of children in every one of our

-schools who have incipient diphtheria. What is the one important thing

-to do about them?”

-

-“Find out who they are,” said Julia quickly. “Exactly. If you close

-school to-morrow and scatter the scholars far and wide in their homes,

-how are we going to find out this essential fact? In their own homes,

-with no one to watch their physical condition, they will go on

-developing the illness unsuspected for days, maybe, and spread it about

-them in the process of development. Whereas, if we keep them in school

-under a system of constant inspection, we shall discover these cases

-and surround them with safeguards. Why, if a fireman should throw

-dynamite into a burning house and scatter the flaming material over

-several blocks, he’d be locked up as insane. Yet here we propose to

-scatter the fire of contagion throughout the city. It’s criminal

-idiocy!”

-

-“If we could only be sure of controlling it in the schools,” said

-Grandma Sharpless, still doubtful.

-

-“At least we can do much toward it. As a matter of fact the best

-authorities are very doubtful whether diphtheria is a ‘school disease,’

-anyway. There is more evidence, though not conclusive, that measles

-is.”

-

-“Surely we don’t have to consider measles now, in the face of the

-greater danger.”

-

-“Most emphatically we do. For one thing, it will increase the

-diphtheria rate. A child weakened by measles is so much the more liable

-to catch any other disease which may be rife. Besides, measles spreads

-so rapidly that it often kills a greater total than more dangerous

-illnesses. We must prepare for a double warfare.”

-

-“At the Public Health League meeting,” said Mr. Clyde, “the objections

-to closing the schools came from those who feared that an official

-acknowledgment that the city had an epidemic would hurt business.”

-

-“A viciously wrong reason for being right,” said the Health Master. “By

-the way, I suppose that Dr. Mullins will be Acting Health Officer, now

-that Merritt is unfortunately out of it. Merritt went to the hospital

-in collapse after the session of the Board of Education at which he

-appeared, to argue for keeping the schools open.”

-

-“No,” said Clyde. “We’ve blocked Mullins off. But it’s the next step

-that is troubling me. What would you do, Strong, if you were in

-control?”

-

-“Put a medical inspector in every school,” answered Dr. Strong

-instantly. “Send home every child with the snuffles or an inflamed

-throat. And send with him full warning and instructions to the parents.

-Have daily inspection and instruction of all pupils.”

-

-“Can you make school children understand?”

-

-“Why not? It is merely a matter of telling them repeatedly: ‘Keep your

-fingers and other objects away from your mouth and nose. Wash your

-hands frequently. Brush your teeth and rinse your mouth well. And keep

-your distance. Remember, that the striking distance of disease is arm’s

-length.’ Then I would break class every hour, throw open every window,

-and march the children around for five minutes. This for the sake of

-improved general condition. Penalize the pupils for any violation of

-hygienic regulations. Hygienic martial law for war-time.”

-

-“Good!” applauded Mr. Clyde. “So much for the schools. What about the

-general public?”

-

-“Educate them to the necessity of watching for danger signals; the

-running nose, the sore throat, the tiny pimples on the inside of the

-mouth or cheek which are the first sign of measles. Above all, furnish

-free anti-toxin. Make it free to all. This is no time to be higgling

-over pennies.”

-

-“I don’t like the principle of coddling our citizens by giving to those

-who can afford to pay.”

-

-“Better coddled citizens than dead children. Unless you give out free

-anti-toxin, physicians to families where every dollar counts will say,

-‘Oh, it may not be diphtheria. We’ll wait and see, and maybe save the

-extra dollars.’ Diphtheria doesn’t wait. It strikes. Then there is the

-vitally important use of anti-toxin as a preventive. To render a whole

-family immune, where there is exposure from a known case of diphtheria,

-is expensive at the present rates, but is the most valuable expedient

-known. It is so much easier to prevent than to cure.”

-

-“All right; I give in. What else?”

-

-“Education, education, education; always education of the public, till

-the last flame is stamped out. Get the press, first; that is the most

-direct and far-reaching agency. Then organize public meetings,

-lectures, addresses in churches and Sunday schools, talks wherever you

-can get people together to listen. That is what I’d do.”

-

-“Go ahead and do it, then.”

-

-“Easily said,” smiled the Health Master. “Who am I, to practice what I

-preach?”

-

-“Provisional Health Officer of Worthington,” came the quick answer. “I

-have the Mayor’s assurance that he will appoint you to-morrow if you

-will take the job.”

-

-“I’ll do it,” said the Health Master, blinking a little with the

-suddenness of the announcement, but speaking unhesitatingly, “on two

-conditions: open schools and free anti-toxin.”

-

-“I’ll get that arranged with the Mayor. Meantime, you have unlimited

-leave of absence as Chinese physician to the Clyde household.”

-

-“But the Household Protective Association will have to back me,” said

-Dr. Strong, as the meeting broke up. “I can’t get along without you.”

-

-Swiftly and terribly moves an epidemic, once it has gained headway. And

-silence and concealment had fostered this onset from the first. Despite

-the best efforts of the new Health Officer, within a week the streets

-of the city were abloom with the malign flower of the scarlet for

-diphtheria and the yellow for measles.

-

-“First we must find out where we stand,” Dr. Strong told his

-subordinates; and, enlisting the services of the great body of

-physicians,—there is no other class of men so trained and inspired to

-altruistic public service as the medical profession,—he instituted a

-house-to-house search for hidden or undiscovered cases. From the best

-among his volunteers he chose a body of auxiliary school inspectors,

-one for every school, whom he held to their daily régime with military

-rigor.

-

-“But my patients are dying while I am looking after a roomful of

-healthy children,” objected one of them.

-

-“You can save twenty lives by early detection of the disease, in the

-time it takes to save one by treatment,” retorted the disciplinarian.

-“In war the individual must sometimes be sacrificed. And this is war.”

-

-The one bright spot in the early days of the battle was Public School

-Number Three which the twins and Bettina attended. The medical

-inspector who had this assignment was young, intelligent, and an

-enthusiast. Backed by Dr. Strong, and effectively aided by the Clyde

-children, he enforced a system which brought prompt results. In every

-instance where a pupil was sent home under suspicion,—and the first

-day’s inspection brought to light three cases of incipient diphtheria,

-and fifteen which developed into measles, besides a score of suspicious

-symptoms,—Julia, or Robin Clyde, or one of the teachers went along to

-deliver printed instructions as to the defense of the household, and to

-explain to the family the vital necessity of heeding the regulations

-until such time as the physician could come and determine the nature of

-the ailment. Within a week, amidst growing panic and peril, Number

-Three was standing like an isle of safety. After that time, not a

-single new case of either disease developed from exposure within its

-limits, and in only two families represented in the school was there

-any spread of contagion.

-

-“It’s the following-up into the house that does it,” said Dr. Strong,

-at an early morning meeting of the Household Protective Association (he

-still insisted on occasional short sessions, in spite of the

-overwhelming demands on his time and energies, on the ground that these

-were “the only chances I get to feel the support of full understanding

-and sympathy”), “that and the checking-up of the three carriers we

-found.”

-

-“What’s a carrier?” asked Bettina, who had an unquenchable thirst for

-finding out things.

-

-“A carrier, Toodlekins, is a perfectly well person who has the germs of

-disease in his throat. Why he doesn’t fall ill himself, we don’t know.

-He can give the disease to another person just as well as if he were in

-the worst stages of it himself. Every epidemic develops a number of

-carriers. One of the greatest arguments for inspection is that it

-brings to light these people, who constitute the most difficult and

-dangerous phase of infection, because they go on spreading the disease

-without being suspected. Now, I’ve got ours from Number Three

-quarantined. If I could catch every carrier in town, I’d guarantee to

-be in control of the situation in three weeks.”

-

-“Our reports show over twenty of them discovered and isolated,” said

-Mrs. Clyde, who had turned her abounding energies to the organization

-of a corps of visiting nurses.

-

-“Perhaps I’d better say something about carriers in my next talk,” said

-Grandma Sharpless, whose natural gift as a ready and convincing

-speaker, unsuspected by herself as well as her family until the night

-when she had met and routed the itinerating quack on his own platform,

-was now being turned to account in the campaign for short talks before

-Sunday schools and club gatherings.

-

-“Develop it as part of the arm’s-length idea,” suggested the Health

-Master. “Any person may be a carrier and therefore a peril on too close

-contact. Tell ‘em that in words of one syllable.”

-

-“Never use any other kind when I mean it,” answered Mrs. Sharpless.

-“What about that party at Mrs. Ellery’s, Manny?”

-

-“I’ve got that fixed,” replied Maynard Clyde, who had been acting as

-general factotum for the household in its various lines of endeavor.

-“Mrs. Ellery gave a party to our crowd Friday night,” he explained to

-Dr. Strong, “and Monday one of the Ellery girls came down with

-diphtheria.”

-

-“What have you done about it?” asked the Health Master.

-

-“Notified all the people who were there. That was easy. The trouble is

-that a lot of the fellows have gone back to college since: to Hamilton,

-Michigan, Wisconsin, Harvard, Columbia,—I suppose there were a dozen

-colleges represented.”

-

-“And you think that’s too wide a field for the follow-up system?” asked

-his father.

-

-“Why, no,” said the boy thoughtfully. “I figured that starting a new

-epidemic would be worse than adding to an old one. So I went to Mrs.

-Ellery and got a list of her guests, and I wrote to every college the

-fellows have gone back to, and wrote to the fellows themselves. They

-probably won’t thank me for it.”

-

-“They ought to give you a life-saving medal each,” declared Dr. Strong.

-“As for the situation here”—his face darkened—“we’re not making any

-general headway. The public isn’t aroused, and it won’t be until we can

-get the newspapers to take up the fight. The thing that discourages me

-is that they won’t help. I don’t understand it.”

-

-“Don’t you? I do,” said Clyde grimly. “Their advertisers won’t let ‘em

-print anything about it. As I told you in the matter of closing the

-schools, business is frightened. The department stores, theaters, and

-other big advertisers are afraid that the truth about the epidemic

-would scare away trade. So they are compelling the papers to keep

-quiet.”

-

-“Idiots!” cried Dr. Strong. “Suppressing news is like suppressing gas.

-The longer you do it, the more violent the inevitable explosion. But

-when I called on the editors, they didn’t say anything to me about the

-advertising pressure. It was, ‘We should be glad to help in any way,

-Dr. Strong. But an alarmist policy is not for the best interests of

-Worthington; and the good of our community must always be the first

-consideration.’—Bah! The variations I’ve heard on that sickening theme

-today! The ‘Press,’ the ‘Clarion,’ the ‘Evening News,’ the ‘Telegram,

-the ‘Observer’—all of ‘em.”

-

-“You didn’t mention the ‘Star,’” said Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“That rag? It’s against everything decent and for everything rotten in

-this town,” said Clyde.

-

-“When I need a danger signal,” observed the old lady with her most

-positive air, “I’ll wave any kind of rag. The ‘Star’ has circulation.”

-

-“Yes,” admitted the Health Master, “and among the very class we want to

-reach. But what’s the use?”

-

-“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “But I’m going to find out.”

-

-One hour later she walked into the editorial sanctum of Mr. “Bart”

-Snyder, editor, proprietor, and controlling mind of as “yellow” a sheet

-as ever subsisted on a combination of enterprise, real journalistic

-ability, and blackmail. Mr. Snyder sat in a perfect slump of apparent

-languor, his body sagging back into his tilted chair, one foot across

-his desk, the other trailing like a broken wing along the floor, his

-shrewd, lined face uplifted at an acute angle with the cigar he was

-chewing, and his green hat achieving the most rakish effect possible to

-a third slant. His brilliant gray eyes were narrowed into a hard

-twinkle as he surveyed his visitor.

-

-“Siddown,” he grunted, and shoved a chair toward her with the grounded

-foot.

-

-Grandma Sharpless did not “siddown.” Instead she marched over to a spot

-directly in front of him, halted, and looked straight into the hard,

-humorous face.

-

-“Bartholomew Snyder,” said she crisply, “I knew you when you were a

-boy. I knew your mother, too. She was a decent woman. Take off that

-hat.”

-

-The Snyder jaw fell so unpremeditatedly that the Snyder cigar dropped

-upon the littered floor. One third of a second later, the Snyder foot

-descended upon it (and it was a twenty-cent cigar, too) as the Snyder

-chair reverted to the perpendicular, and the Snyder hat came off. The

-Snyder countenance quivered into articulation and therefrom came a

-stunned, “Well, I’ll be—”

-

-“No, you don’t! Not in _my_ presence,” cut in his visitor. “Now, you

-listen.”

-

-“I’m listening,” he assured her in a strangled murmur.

-

-She seated herself and threw a quality of rigidity into her backbone

-calculated to impress if not actually to appeal. “I want your help,”

-she said.

-

-“Fine, fat way you’ve got of opening up a request for a favor,” he

-retorted, recovering himself somewhat, and in a particularly

-discouraging voice. But the shrewd old judge of human nature before him

-marked the little pursing at the corners of the mouth. “I’ll bet I know

-what it is.”

-

-“I’ll bet all the money I’ve got in the bank and my best gold tooth

-thrown in you don’t,” was the prompt retort.

-

-“There’s a sporting proposition, all right,” cried the editor in great

-admiration. “I thought you was going to ask me to let up on the city

-administration now you’ve got one of the fat jobs in the family, with

-your Dr. Strong.”

-

-“It’s a good thing you don’t have to make guesses for a living,”

-returned his caller scornfully. “Pitch into the administration as hard

-as you like. I don’t care. All I want is for you to print the news

-about this diphtheria epidemic.”

-

-“Is that all?” There was a profound sardonicism in the final word.

-

-“Come to think of it, it isn’t. I want you to print some editorials,

-too, telling people how to take care of themselves while the disease is

-spreading.”

-

-“Anything more?”

-

-“Well, you might do the same thing about the measles epidemic.”

-

-“Harr-rr-rr!” It was a singular growl, not wholly compounded of wrath

-and disgust. “Doc Strong send you here?”

-

-“No; he didn’t!”

-

-“Don’t bite me. I believe you.”

-

-“Will you publish some articles?”

-

-“Look-a-here, Mrs. Sharpless; the ‘Star’ is a business proposition. Its

-business is to make money for me. That’s all it’s here for. People say

-some pretty tough things about me and the paper. Well, we’re pretty

-tough. We can stand ‘em. Let ‘em talk, so long as I get the circulation

-and the advertising and the cash. Now, you want me to print something

-for you. Come down to brass tacks; what is there in it for me?”

-

-“A chance to be of some real use to your city for once in your life,”

-answered Grandma Sharpless mildly. “Isn’t that enough?”

-

-Bart Snyder threw back his head and laughed immoderately. “Say, I like

-you,” he gurgled. “You’ve got nerve. Me a good Samaritan! It’s so rich,

-I’m half a mind to go you, if it wasn’t for losing the advertising.

-Wha’ d’ ye want me to say, anyway, just for curiosity and cussedness?”

-

-“Just give the people plain talk,” explained the visitor. “Talk to ‘em

-in your editorials as if you had ‘em by the buttonhole. Say to them:

-‘Do you want to get diphtheria? Well, you don’t need to. It’s just as

-easy to avoid it as to have it. Are you anxious to have measles in your

-house? It’s for you to decide. All you need is to take reasonable care

-against it. Infectious disease only kills foo—careless people.’”

-

-“Let it go at ‘fools,’” interjected Mr. Snyder, smiting his thigh. “Go

-on.”

-

-“Then I’d give them simple, straight advice; tell them how to recognize

-the early symptoms; how and where to get anti-toxin. And I’d scare ‘em,

-too. I’d tell ‘em there are five thousand cases of the two diseases in

-town, and there will be ten thousand in a week unless something is

-done.”

-

-Up rose the editor-proprietor, kicked over his own chair, whirled Mrs.

-Sharpless’s chair with its human burden to the desk, thrust a pencil

-into her hand, and slapped down a pad before her.

-

-“Write it,” he adjured her.

-

-“Who? Me?” cried Mrs. Sharpless, her astonishment momentarily

-overwhelming her grammar. “Bless you, man! I’m no writer.”

-

-“Talk it, then, and make your pencil take down the talk. I’ll be back

-in a minute.”

-

-That minute stretched to a good half-hour, during which period Grandma

-Sharpless talked to her pencil. When Mr. Snyder returned, he had with

-him a mournful-looking man who, he explained occultly, “holds down our

-city desk.”

-

-“This is our new Health Editor,” chuckled Snyder, indicating Mrs.

-Sharpless. “How many cases did you say there were in town, ma’am?”

-

-“Five thousand or more.”

-

-The city editor whistled whisperingly. “Where do you get that?” he

-asked.

-

-“From Dr. Strong.”

-

-“That’s news,” said the desk man. “I didn’t suppose it was half so bad.

-If only we dared print it!”

-

-“No other paper in town dares,” suggested the visitor insinuatingly.

-

-“Makes it all the more news,” remarked Snyder. “What if we played it up

-for a big feature, eh?”

-

-“Advertisers,” said the city editor significantly.

-

-“Let ‘em drop out. They’ll come back quick enough, when we’ve shown up

-one or two and told why they quit us. And think of the splash we can

-make! Only paper in the city that dares tell the truth. We’ll rub that

-into our highly respectable rivals. I’ll make you a proposition,” he

-added, turning to his caller.

-

-“Make it.”

-

-“You know I’ve hammered at Tom Clyde pretty hard. I don’t cotton to

-that saintly, holier-than-thou reform bunch at all. Well, let Clyde

-come into the ‘Star’ with a signed statement as President of the Public

-Health League, and we’ll make it the basis of a campaign that will rip

-this town wide open for a couple of weeks. I’d like to see him in my

-paper, after all the roasting we’ve handed him.” And the malicious face

-wrinkled into another grin.

-

-“You’ve bought a bargain,” stated Mrs. Sharpless. “The statement will

-be ready to-night. And another from Dr. Strong for good measure.”

-

-“Fine business!” ejaculated the “Star’s” owner. “Not open to a

-reasonable offer in the newspaper game, are you?” he added, laughing.

-“No? Well, I’m sorry.”

-

-“Would there be any use in my seeing the editors of the other papers?”

-asked Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“Watch them fall in line,” was the grim response. “Before we’ve been

-out a day, they’ll be tumbling over each other to make the dear,

-deluded public believe that they’re the real pioneers in saving the

-city from the deadly germ.”

-

-“Well, here are my notes, if you can make anything out of them.”

-

-“Eh? Notes?” said the newspaper man, who had been glancing at the

-sheets over Mrs. Sharp-less’s shoulder. “Oh—ah. Yes, of course. All

-right. Glad to have metcher,” he added, politely ushering her to the

-door. “I’ll send a reporter up for the statements at eight o’clock.”

-

-“Thank you very much, Bartholomew Snyder,” said Grandma Sharpless,

-shaking hands.

-

-“Not a bit of it! Thanks the other way. You’ve given me a good tip in

-my own game. Watch me—us—wake ‘em up to-morrow.”

-

-Only the combined insistence of Grandma Sharpless and diplomacy of the

-Health Master overrode Mr. Clyde’s angry objections to “going into that

-filthy sheet” when the matter was broached to him that evening. For the

-good of the cause he finally acceded. And next morning the “Star” was a

-sight! It blazed in red captions. It squirmed and wriggled with

-illustrations of alleged germs. It shrieked in stentorian headlines. If

-the city had been beset by all the dogs of war, it couldn’t have blared

-more martial defiance against the enemy. It held its competitors up to

-infinite scorn and derision as mean-spirited shirks and cowards, and

-slathered itself with fulsome praises as the only original prop of

-truth and righteousness. And, as the centerpoint and core of all this,

-flaunted-the statement and signature of the Honorable Thomas Clyde,

-President of the Worthington Public Health League—with photograph. The

-face of Mr. Clyde, as he confronted this outrage upon his sensibilities

-at the breakfast table, was gloom itself until he turned to the

-editorial page. Then he emitted a whoop of glee. For there,

-double-leaded and double-headed was a Health Column, by “Our Special

-Writer, Grandma Sharpless, the Wisest Woman in Worthington. She will

-contribute opinions and advice on the epidemic to the ‘Star’

-exclusively.” (Mr. Snyder had taken a chance with this latter

-statement.)

-

-“Let me see,” gasped the old lady, when her son-in-law made known the

-cause of his mirth. Then, “They’ve published that stuff of mine just as

-I wrote it. I didn’t dream it was for print.”

-

-“That’s what makes it so bully,” said the Health Master. “You’ve got

-the editorial trick of confidential, convincing, man-to-man talk down

-fine. What’s more, you’ll have to keep it up, now. Your friend, Snyder,

-has fairly caught you. Well, we need an official organ in the

-household.”

-

-Vowing that she couldn’t and wouldn’t do it, nevertheless the new

-“editor” began to think of so many things that she wanted to say that,

-each day, when a messenger arrived from the “Star” with a polite

-request for “copy,” there was a telling column ready of the Health

-Master’s wisdom, simplified and pointed by Grandma Sharpless’s own

-pungent, crisp, vigorous, and homely style. Thanks largely to this, the

-“Star” became the mouthpiece of an anti-epidemic campaign which

-speedily enlisted the whole city.

-

-But the “yellow” was not to have the field to itself. Once the cat was

-out of the bag, the other papers not only recognized it as a cat with

-great uproar, but, so to speak, proceeded to tie a can to its tail and

-pelt it through the streets of the city. As a matter of fact, no

-newspaper wishes to be hampered in the publishing of legitimate news;

-and it was only by the sternest threats of withdrawal of patronage that

-the large advertisers had hitherto succeeded in coercing the press of

-Worthington. Further coercion was useless, now that the facts had found

-their way into type. With great unanimity and an enthusiasm none the

-less genuine for having been repressed, the papers rushed into the

-breach. The “Clarion” organized an Anti-Infection League of School

-Children, with officers and banners. The “Press” “attended to” the

-recreant Dr. Mullins so fiercely that, notwithstanding his pull, he

-resigned his position in the Health Department because of “breakdown

-due to overwork in the course of his duties,” and ceased to trouble, in

-official circles. Enterprising reporters of the “Observer” caused the

-arrest of thirty-five trolley-car conductors for moistening transfers

-with a licked thumb, and then got the street-car company to issue a new

-form of transfer inscribed across the back, “Keep me away from your

-Mouth.” It fell to the “Evening News” to drive the common drinking-cup

-out of existence, after which it instituted reforms in soda fountains,

-restaurants, and barber shops, while the “Telegram” garnered great

-glory by interspersing the inning-by-inning returns of the baseball

-championship with bits of counsel as to how to avoid contagion in the

-theater, in the street, in travel, in banks, at home, and in various

-other walks of life. But the “Star” held foremost place, and clinched

-it with a Sunday “cut-out” to be worn as a badge, inscribed “Hands Off,

-Please, Until It’s Over.” All of which, while it sometimes verged upon

-the absurd, served the fundamentally valuable purpose of keeping the

-public in mind of the peril of contact with infected persons or

-articles.

-

-Slowly but decisively the public absorbed the lesson. “Arm’s length”

-became a catch-phrase; a motto; a slogan. People came slowly to

-comprehend the methods by which disease is spread and the principles of

-self-protection.

-

-And as knowledge widened, the epidemic ebbed, though gradually. Serious

-epidemics are not conquered or even perceptibly checked in a day. They

-are like floods; dam them in one place and they break through your

-defenses in another. Inexplicable outbreaks occur just when the tide

-seems to have turned. And when victory does come, it may not be

-ascribable to any specific achievement of the hygienic forces. The most

-that can be said is that the persevering combination of effort has at

-last made itself felt.

-

-The red placards began to disappear; many of them, alas! only after the

-sable symbol of death had appeared beneath them. Dr. Strong and his

-worn-out aides found time to draw breath and reckon up their accounts

-in human life. The early mortality had been terrific. Of the cases

-which had developed in the period of suppression, before antitoxin was

-readily obtainable, more than a third had died.

-

-“Nobody will ever be indicted for those murders,” said Dr. Strong to

-Mr. Clyde grimly. “But we have the satisfaction of knowing what can

-really be done by prompt work. Look at the figures after the free

-anti-toxin was established.”

-

-There was a drop in the death rate, first to twenty per cent, then to

-ten, and, in the ebb stage of the scourge, to well below five.

-

-“How many infections we’ve prevented by giving anti-toxin to immunize

-exposed persons, there’s no telling,” continued Dr. Strong. “That

-principle of starting a back-fire in diphtheria,—it’s exactly like

-starting a back-fire in a prairie conflagration,—by getting anti-toxin

-into the system in time to head off the poison of the disease itself,

-is one of the two or three great achievements of medical science. There

-isn’t an infected household in the city today, I believe, where this

-hasn’t been done. The end is in sight.”

-

-“Then you can go away and get a few days’ rest,” said Grandma

-Sharpless, who constituted herself the Health Master’s own health

-guardian and undiplomaed medical adviser, and to whom he habitually

-rendered meek obedience; for she had been watching with anxiety the

-haggard lines in his face.

-

-“Not yet,” he returned. “Measles we still have with us.”

-

-“Decreasing, though,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Our nurses report a heavy drop

-in new cases and a big crop of convalescents.”

-

-“It is those convalescents that we must watch. I don’t want a

-generation of deaf citizens growing up from this onset.”

-

-“But can you prevent it if the disease attacks the ears?” asked Clyde.

-

-“Almost certainly. We’ve got to inspect every child who has or had

-measles in this epidemic, and, where the ear-drum is shiny and concave,

-we will puncture it, by a very simple operation, which saves serious

-trouble in ninety per cent of the cases, at least. But it means

-constant watchfulness, for often the infection progresses without

-pain.”

-

-“At the same time your inspectors will watch for other after-effects,

-then,” suggested Mrs. Sharpless.

-

-“Exactly. It’s my own opinion that nearly all the serious diseases of

-the eye, ear, liver, kidney, heart, and so on in early middle age are

-the late remote effects of what we carelessly call the lesser diseases

-of childhood. It is only a theory as yet; though some day I think it

-will be proved. At any rate, we know that a serious and pretty definite

-percentage of all deafness follows measles; and we are going to carry

-this thing through far enough to prevent that sequel and to turn over a

-reasonably cleaned-up situation to Dr. Merritt.”

-

-“He’s out of danger, by the way,” said Mrs. Clyde, “and will be back at

-his desk in a fortnight.”

-

-“Well; he’ll have an easier job henceforth,” prophesied Mr. Clyde.

-“He’s got an enlightened city to watch over. And he can thank you for

-that, Strong.”

-

-“He can thank the Clyde family,” said Dr. Strong with feeling. “I could

-have done little without you back of me.”

-

-“It’s been interesting to extend the principles of our Household

-Protective Association to the larger world,” smiled Clyde. “Beyond our

-own city, too, in one case. Manny has had a letter from the Professor

-of Hygiene at Hamilton College, where he enters next year, thanking him

-on behalf of the faculty for his warning about young Hyland who was

-exposed to diphtheria at the Ellery party. He went back to Hamilton a

-few days after and was starting in to play basketball, which would have

-been decidedly dangerous for his team mates; but the authorities, after

-getting Manny’s letter, kept him out of the gymnasium, and kept a watch

-on him. He developed the disease a week later; but there has been no

-infection from him.”

-

-“There’s direct result,” approved Dr. Strong. “That’s what I call

-spreading the gospel.”

-

-“Grandma’s our real revivalist, at that,” said Julia. “The children at

-Number Three pay more attention to her column than they do to what the

-teachers tell them. The principal told us that it was the greatest

-educational force for health that Worthington had ever known.”

-

-“Only reflected wisdom from you, young man,” said Grandma Sharpless to

-the Health Master. “Thank goodness, I’m through with it. I’m so sick of

-it that I can’t look at writing materials without wanting to cut the

-ink bottle’s throat with my penholder. Bart Snyder has let me off.

-What’s more, he sent me a check for $250. Pretty handsome of him. But

-I’m going to send it back.”

-

-“Why waste good money, grandma?” drawled Mr. Clyde.

-

-“You wouldn’t have me keep it, would you, for doing that work?”

-

-“Who said anything about keeping it? But don’t feed it back to Bart

-Snyder. Why not contribute it to the Public Health League? It’s always

-got a handsome deficit.”

-

-“In graceful recognition of my having a son-inlaw as president of it, I

-suppose.”

-

-“I’m not president any more. My term was up last night. They didn’t

-honor me with a reelection,” said Mr. Clyde, with a rather too obvious

-glumness, which, for once, escaped the sharp old lady.

-

-“The slinkums!” she cried. “After all the time and work you’ve given to

-it!”

-

-“Well,” said the ex-incumbent philosophically, “there’s one comfort.

-They’ve put a better man in my place.”

-

-“No such a thing,” declared his mother-in-law, with vehement

-partisanship. “They couldn’t find one. Who was it?”

-

-“Give you one guess.”

-

-“Was it you, young man?” queried she, fixing the Health Master with a

-baleful eye.

-

-“Oh, no; a better man than I,” he hastened to assure her.

-

-“Well, in the name of sakes, who, then?”

-

-“You,” said Mr. Clyde, grabbing the old lady by both shoulders and

-giving her a vigorous kiss. “Unanimously elected amidst an uproar of

-enthusiasm, as the ‘Star’ puts it. Here it is, on the first column of

-the front page.”

-

-For the first time in the history of the Clyde household, the senior

-member thereof gave way to an unbridled license of speech, in the

-presence of the family.

-

-“Well, I vum!” said Grandma Sharpless.

-

-

-

-

-XII.

-PLAIN TALK

-

-

-“What do you find so interesting in that paper, Strong?” asked Mr.

-Thomas Clyde, from his place in the corner of the big living-room.

-

-Dinner was just finished in the Clyde household, and the elders were

-sitting about, enjoying the easy and intermittent talk which had become

-a feature of the day since the Health Master had joined the family.

-From outside, the play of lively voices, above the harmonized

-undertones of a strummed guitar, told how the children were employing

-the after-dinner hour. Dr. Strong let the evening paper drop on his

-knees.

-

-“Something that has set me thinking,” he said.

-

-“Don’t you ever give that restless mind of yours a vacation, young

-man?” inquired Grandma Sharpless, looking up from her game of

-solitaire.

-

-“All that is good for it. Perhaps you’d like to share this problem, and

-thus relieve me of part of the responsibility.”

-

-“Do go on, if you’ve found anything exciting,” besought Mrs. Clyde,

-glancing up with her swift, interrogating smile. “The paper seemed

-unusually dull to me.”

-

-“Because you didn’t read quite deep enough into it, possibly.” He

-raised the journal, folded it neatly to a half-page, and holding it

-before his eyes, began smoothly:—

-

-“Far, far away, as far as your conscience will let you believe, in the

-Land of Parables—”

-

-“Wait a minute,” interrupted Mr. Clyde. “That ‘Land of Parables’ sounds

-as if we were going to have some Improving Information.” He regarded

-his friend and adviser with a twinkling eye. “Ought the children to

-miss this?”

-

-“That is for you to decide later,” said the Health Master gravely. And

-he resumed:—

-

-“Far, far away, as far as conscience will let you believe, in the Land

-of Parables, there once stood a prosperous and self-contented city. Men

-lived therein by rule and rote. Only what their fathers before them had

-believed and received did they believe and receive. ‘As it hath been,

-so it is now and ever must and shall be,’ was the principle whereby

-their lives were governed. Therefore they endured, without hope as

-without complaint, the depredations of a hideous Monster who preyed

-upon them unceasingly.

-

-“So loathsome was this Monster that the very thought of him was held to

-taint the soul. His name was sealed away from the common speech. Only

-the boldest men spoke of him, and then in paraphrases and by

-circumlocutions. Fouled, indeed, was the fame of the woman who dared so

-much as confess to a knowledge of his existence.

-

-“From time to time the wise and strong men of the city banded together

-and sallied forth to drive back other creatures of prey as they pressed

-too hard upon the people. Not so with the Monster. Because of the ban

-of silence no plan could be mooted, no campaign formulated to check his

-inroads. So he grew great and ever greater, and his blood hunger fierce

-and ever more fierce, and his scarlet trail wound in and out among the

-homes of the people, manifest even to those eyes which most sedulously

-sought to blind themselves against it.

-

-“Seldom did the Monster slay outright. But where his claws clutched or

-his fangs pierced, a slow venom crept through the veins, and life was

-corroded at its very wellsprings. Nor was this the worst. Once the

-blight fell upon one member of a household, it might corrupt, by hidden

-and subtle ways, the others and innocent, who knew not of the curse

-overhanging them.

-

-“Upon the foolish, the reckless, and the erring the Monster most

-readily fastened himself. But man nor woman nor child was exempt.

-Necessity drove young girls, struggling and shuddering, into the

-Monster’s very jaws. The purity of a child or of a Galahad could not

-always save from the serpent-stroke which sped from out the darkness.”

-

-“One moment, Strong,” broke in Mr. Clyde. “You’ve read this before?”

-

-“I know what is in it, if that is what you mean. Why?”

-

-“Nothing,” hesitated the other, glancing toward his wife and her

-mother. “Only, I suspect it isn’t going to be pleasant.”

-

-“It isn’t pleasant. It’s true.”

-

-Grandma Sharpless laid down her cards. “Let him go on, Tom,” she said

-decisively. “We have no ban of silence in this house.”

-

-At a nod from Clyde, the Health Master continued:—

-

-“Always the taboo of silence hedged the Monster about and protected

-him; and men secretly revolted against it, yet were restrained from

-speech by the fear of public dishonor. So, in time, he came to have a

-Scarlet Court of Shame, with his retinue of slaves, whose duty it was

-to procure victims for his insatiate appetite. But this service availed

-his servitors nothing in forbearance, for, sooner or later, his breath

-of fiery venom blasted and withered them, one and all.

-

-“One refuge only did the people seek against the Monster. At every

-doorpost of the city stood a veiled statue of the supposed Goddess and

-Protectress of the Household, worshiped under the name of _Modesty_,

-and to her the people appealed for succor and protection. Also they

-invoked her vengeance against such as spoke the name of the Monster,

-and bitter were the penalties wrought upon these in her name.

-Nevertheless there arose martyrs whose tongues could not be silenced by

-any fear.

-

-“One was a brave priest who stood in his pulpit unashamed and spoke the

-terrible truth of the Monster, bidding his hearers arise and band

-themselves together and strike a blow for their homes and their dear

-ones. But the people hurried forth in dread, and sought refuge before

-the Veiled Idol; and the priest’s words rang hollow in the empty

-tabernacle; and his church was deserted and crumbled away in neglect,

-so that the fearful said:—

-

-“‘Behold the righteous wrath which follows the breaking of the

-prescribed silence.’

-

-“Again, a learned and pious physician and healer gathered the young men

-about him in the marketplace to give them solemn warning against the

-Monster and his scarlet slaves. But his words returned upon himself,

-and he was branded with shame as one who worshiped not the Veiled

-Goddess, and was presently driven forth from his own place into the

-wilderness.

-

-“Then there came into the hall of the City Fathers a woman with

-disheveled hair and tear-worn cheeks, who beat upon her breast and

-cried:—“‘Vengeance, O Wise and Great Ones! My son, my little son went

-to the public baths, and the venom of the Monster was upon the waters,

-and my son is blind forever. What will ye do, that others may not

-suffer my grief?’

-

-“And the Wise and Great Ones spoke together and said:—

-

-“‘Surely this woman is mad, that she thus fouls her lips.’ And they

-drove her out of their presence.

-

-“From among their own number there came a terror and a portent. For

-their Leader, who had been stricken in youth, but thought himself to

-have thrown off the toils of the Monster, rose in his place and spoke

-in a voice that piped and shook:—

-

-“‘Because no man taught me in my unripe days, I strayed into the paths

-of the Scarlet One. For the space of a generation I hoped; but now the

-clutch is upon me again, and I die. See to it, O my Fellows, that our

-youth no longer perish in their ignorance.’

-

-“So he passed out from the place of honor; and the strength of his mind

-and his body was loosened until he died. But, rather than violate the

-taboo, the Wise and Great Ones gave a false name to his death, and he

-was buried under a graven lie.

-

-“Finally there came to the Council Hall one with the fire of martyrdom

-in his eyes.

-

-“‘Though I perish,’ he said, ‘I and mine, yet will I speak the truth

-for once. My daughter I have given in marriage, and the Monster has

-entered into the house of her marriage, and from henceforth she must

-go, a maimed creature, sexless and childless, to the end of her days.

-Shame upon this city, that it endures such shame; for my daughter is

-but one of many.’

-

-“‘The shame be yours,’ replied the Fathers, ‘that you bring scandal

-upon your own. Go forth into exile, in the name of the Veiled Goddess,

-_Modesty_, beneath whose statue we meet.’

-

-“But the man strode forward, and with a violent hand plucked the veil

-from the statue.

-

-“‘Not the Protectress of Homes,’ he cried, ‘but the ally of the

-Monster. Not the Goddess, _Modesty_, but her sham sister, _Prudery_.

-Down with false gods!’

-

-“So saying, he threw the idol to the ground, where it was shattered

-into a thousand pieces. With those pieces the Fathers stoned him to

-death.

-

-“But in many households that night there was a baring of the Veiled

-Idol. And ever, behind the folds, was revealed not the pure gaze of the

-True Goddess, but the simper and leer of _Prudery_, mute accomplice of

-_Shame_.

-

-“Thus did the city awake. Fearfully it gathered its forces; tremblingly

-it prepared its war upon the Monster. But the Monster is intrenched.

-Its venom runs through the blood of the people, poisoning it from

-generation to generation, so that neither the grandsons nor the

-great-grandsons of those who stoned the martyr to the False Goddess

-shall escape the curse. The Prophet has said it: ‘Even unto the third

-and the fourth generations.’

-

-“_De te fabula narratur_; of you is the fable narrated.

-

-“The Land of Parables is your country.

-

-“The stricken city is your city.

-

-“The Monster coils at your doorway, lying in wait for your loved ones;

-and no prudence, no precaution, no virtue can guard them safely against

-his venom so long as the Silence of Prudery holds sway.”

-

-Dr. Strong let the newspaper fall on his lap, and looked slowly from

-face to face of the silent little group.

-

-“Need I tell you the name of the destroyer?” he asked.

-

-“Not me,” said Mrs. Clyde in a low tone. “It is a two-headed monster,

-isn’t it?”

-

-The Health Master nodded. “And because we all fear to utter the words

-‘venereal disease,’ our children grow up in the peril of the Monster

-whose two allies are Vice and Ignorance.”

-

-“One editor in this town, at least, has some gumption,” commented

-Grandma Sharpless, peering over her spectacles at the sheet which Dr.

-Strong had let fall. “Which paper is it?”

-

-“None, if you must know. The fact is, I read that allegory into the

-newspaper, not out of it.”

-

-“Then it was your own?” asked Mrs. Clyde. “Such as it is, mine own. But

-the inspiration came from this headline.” He pointed to a legend in

-heavy type:—

-

-DIVORCE IN THE INSIDE SET

-

-AFTER SEX MONTHS OF MARRIAGE, MRS. BARTLEY STARR SEEKS FREEDOM—NATURE

-OF CHARGES NOT MADE PUBLIC

-

-

-“Do you know what is back of it, Strong?” asked Clyde.

-

-“The ruin of a life. Bartley Starr has been a ‘rounder.’ With the curse

-of his vices upon him he married a young and untaught girl.” He

-repeated with slow significance a passage from the allegory. “The

-Monster entered into the house of her marriage, and from henceforth she

-must go, a maimed creature, sexless and childless, to the end of her

-days.”

-

-“Oh, no, no!” burst out Mrs. Clyde. “Not poor little, lovely, innocent

-Margaret Starr!”

-

-“Too innocent,” retorted the Health Master. “And more than innocent;

-ignorant.”

-

-“But Bartley Starr!” said Mr. Clyde. “Who would have supposed him such

-a scoundrel? And with his bringing-up, too!”

-

-“The explanation lies in his bringing-up.”

-

-“Nonsense! Henry Starr is as upright a man and as good a father as you

-can find in Worthington.”

-

-“The former, perhaps. Not the latter, certainly. He is a worshiper of

-the False Veiled Goddess, I suspect. Hence Bartley’s tragedy.”

-

-“Do you blame Bartley’s viciousness upon his father?” demanded Mrs.

-Clyde.

-

-“In part, at least. I happen to know a good deal about this case.

-Bartley got his sex-education or miseducation from chance talk at

-school. He took that to college with him, and there, unguided, fell

-into vicious ways. I don’t suppose his father ever had a frank talk

-with him in his life. And I judge that little Mrs. Starr’s mother never

-had one with her, either. Look at the result!”

-

-“But boys find out about such things some way,” said Mr. Clyde

-uneasily.

-

-“Some way? What way? And from whom? How much has Manny found out?”

-

-“I don’t know,” said Manny’s father.

-

-“Why don’t you know?” persisted the Health Master relentlessly. “You

-are his father, and, what is more, his friend.”

-

-“Why must Manny know?” cried Mrs. Clyde. “Surely my son isn’t going to

-wallow in that sort of foulness.”

-

-“Pray God he is not!” said Grandma Sharpless, turning her old, shrewd,

-kind face, the eyes bright and soft with feeling, toward her daughter.

-“But, oh, my dear, my dear, the bitterest lesson we mothers have to

-learn is that our children are of the common flesh and blood of

-humanity.”

-

-“Manny is clean-minded and high-spirited,” said Strong. “But not all of

-his companions are. Not a month ago I heard one of the older boys in

-his class assuring some of his fellows, in the terms of the most

-damnable lie that ever helped to corrupt youth, ‘Why, it ain’t any

-worse than an ordinary cold.’”

-

-“That was a stock phrase of the young toughs when I was a boy,” said

-Mr. Clyde. “So it still persists, does it?”

-

-“Any worse than an ordinary cold?” repeated Mrs. Clyde, looking

-puzzled. “What did he mean?”

-

-“Gonorrhoea,” said Dr. Strong.

-

-Mrs. Clyde winced back and half-rose from her chair.

-

-“Are you going?” asked the Health Master rather ‘grimly. “Must I be

-mealy-mouthed on this subject? Here I am, trying to tell you something

-of the most deadly import, and am I to choose perfumed words and pick

-rose-tinted phrases?”

-

-“Speak out, Strong,” said the head of the house. “I’ve been rather

-expecting this.”

-

-“First, then: you need not worry about Manny. I talked to him, long

-ago.”

-

-“But he’s only a boy, still,” said Mrs. Sharpless involuntarily.

-

-“He enters college this fall. And I’ve made sure that he won’t take

-with him the ‘no worse than a cold’ superstition about a disease which

-has wrecked the lives of thousands of Bartley Starrs.”

-

-“But I thought that Starr’s was the—the other and worse form,” said Mr.

-Clyde.

-

-“Plain talk,” adjured the Health Master. “You thought it was syphilis?”

-

-“Yes.”

-

-“And you thought syphilis worse than gonorrhoea?”

-

-“Surely!”

-

-“Well, it isn’t. I’ll explain that in detail presently. Just now—”

-

-“Do I have to hear all of this,” appealed Mrs. Clyde, with a face of

-piteous disgust.

-

-“Well, _I_ told Manny,” said the Health Master in measured tones. “Must

-I be the one to tell Julia, too?”

-

-“Julia!” cried the mother. “Tell Julia?”

-

-“Some one must tell her.”

-

-“That child?”

-

-“Fourteen years old, and in high school. Last year there were ten known

-cases of venereal disease among the high-school girls.”[3]

-

- [3] These and the following instances are based on actual and

- established medical findings.

-

-

-“How horrible!”

-

-“Bad enough. I have known worse elsewhere. In a certain small city

-school, several years ago, it was discovered that there was an epidemic

-of vice which involved practically the whole school. And it was

-discovered only when venereal disease broke out. Our school authorities

-are just beginning to learn that immorality must be combated by

-watchfulness and quarantine, just as contagious disease must.”

-

-“How was the outbreak in our high school found out?” asked Grandma

-Sharpless.

-

-“In a curious and tragic way. One of the boys developed a sudden and

-serious inflammation of the eyes. At first the ophthalmologist to whom

-he went was puzzled. Then he began to suspect. A bateriological

-analysis showed that it was a case of gonorrhoeal infection. It was by

-a hair’s breadth that the less infected eye was saved. The sight of the

-other is lost. Examination showed that the disease was confined to the

-eyes. By a careful bit of medical detective work, the physician and the

-principal of the high school determined that the infection came from

-the use of a bath-towel in the house of a fellow-pupil where the

-patient had spent two or three nights. This pupil was examined and

-found to have a fully developed case, which he had concealed, in fear

-of disgrace. Consequently, the poison is now so deep-seated in him that

-it may be years before he is cured. He made a confession implicating a

-girl in the class above him. A rigid investigation followed which

-brought the other cases to light.”

-

-“I shall take Julia out of that school at once,” said Mrs. Clyde,

-half-crying.

-

-“No,” controverted the Health Master gently. “I shouldn’t do that. In

-the complex life of a city like this, it is impossible to shelter a

-girl completely and permanently. Better armor her with knowledge.

-Besides, the danger in the school, being discovered, is practically

-over now. In time, and using this experience as a lever with the school

-authorities, we hope to get a course of lectures on hygiene

-established, including simple sex-instruction. Meantime this must be

-carried on by the mothers and fathers.”

-

-“But what am I to say to Julia?”

-

-“That is what I am going to tell you,” replied the Health Master, “and

-look to you to pass on the truth in terms too plain to admit of any

-misunderstanding. First, does she know what womanhood and motherhood

-mean?”

-

-“Not yet, I think. She seems so young. And it’s so hard to speak of

-those things. But I thought I would try to explain to her some day.”

-

-“Some day? At once! How can you think her too young? She has already

-undergone the vital change from childhood to womanhood, and without so

-much as a word of warning or reassurance or explanation as to what it

-means.”

-

-“Not quite without,” put in Grandma Sharpless quietly.

-

-“Good!” approved the Health Master. “But be sure that the explanation

-is thorough. Tell her the significance of sex and its relation to

-reproduction and life. If you don’t, be sure that others will. And

-their version may well be in terms which would make a mother shudder to

-hear.”

-

-“Who would tell her?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Her playmates. Do you think that girls don’t talk of the mysteries as

-much as boys? If so, you’re sadly in error. The first essential is that

-she should understand truly and wisely what it means to be a woman.

-That is fundamental. And now for the matter of venereal disease. I am

-going to lay certain facts before you all, and you can hand on to the

-children such modifications as you deem best.

-

-“First, gonorrhoea, because it is the worse of the two. That is not the

-accepted notion, I know: but the leading specialists one by one have

-come around to the view, that, by and large, it does more damage to

-humanity than the more greatly dreaded syphilis. For one thing, it is

-much more widespread. While there are no accurate statistics covering

-the field in general, it is fairly certain that forty per cent of all

-men over thirty-five in our larger cities have had the disease at some

-time.”

-

-“That doesn’t seem possible,” broke in Mr. Clyde.

-

-“Not to you, because you married early, and your associations have been

-largely with family, home-loving men. But ask any one of the traveling

-salesmen in your factory his view. Your traveling man is the Ulysses of

-modern life, ‘knowing cities and the hearts of men.’ I think that

-you’ll find that compared with the ‘commercial’ view, my forty per cent

-is optimistic.”

-

-“But it is easily curable, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Clyde, insensibly

-yielding to the Health Master’s matter-of-fact tone, and finding,

-almost insensibly, that her interest in the hygienic problem had

-overcome her shamed reluctance to speak of it.

-

-“Often in the early stages. But it is very uncertain. And once firmly

-fixed on the victim, it is one of the most obstinate and treacherous of

-diseases. It may lie dormant for months or even years, deceiving its

-victim into thinking himself wholly cured, only to break out again in

-full conflagration, without warning.

-

-“This is the history of many ruined marriages. Only by the most

-searching tests can a physician make certain that the infection is

-stamped out. Probably no disease receives, on the average, such harmful

-treatment by those who are appealed to to cure it. The reason for this

-is that the young man with his first ‘dose’—that loathsome, light term

-of description!—is ashamed to go to his family physician, and so takes

-worthless patent medicines or falls into the hands of some ‘Men’s

-Specialist’ who advertises a ‘sure cure’ in the papers. These

-charlatans make their money, not by skillful and scientific treatment,

-of which they know nothing, nor by seeking to effect a cure, but by

-actually nourishing the flame of the disease, so as to keep the patient

-under their care as long as possible, all the time building up fat fees

-for themselves. If they were able, as they claim, to stop the infection

-in a few days at a small fee, they couldn’t make money enough to pay

-for the scoundrelly lies which constitute their advertisements. While

-they are collecting their long-extended payments from the victim, the

-infection is spreading and extending its roots more and more deeply,

-until the unfortunate may be ruined for life, or even actually killed

-by the ravages of the malignant germs.”

-

-“I didn’t suppose that it was ever fatal,” said Clyde.

-

-“Oh, yes. I’ve seen deaths in hospitals, of the most agonizing’ kind.

-But it is by virtue of its byproducts, so to speak, that gonorrhoea is

-most injurious and is really more baneful to the race than syphilis.

-The organism which causes it is in a high degree destructive to the

-eyes. Newborn infants are very frequently infected in this way by

-gonorrhoeal mothers. Probably a quarter of all permanent blindness in

-this country is caused by gonorrhoea. The effect of the disease upon

-women is disastrous. Half of all abdominal operations on married women,

-excluding appendicitis, are the results of gonorrhoeal infection from

-their husbands. A large proportion of sterility arises from this cause.

-A large proportion of the wives of men in whom the infection has not

-been wholly eradicated pay the penalty in permanently undermined

-health. And yet the superstition endures that ‘it’s no worse than a bad

-cold.’”

-

-“There is no such superstition about syphilis, at least,” remarked

-Clyde.

-

-“No. The very name is a portent of terror, and it is well that it

-should be so. The consequence is that the man who finds himself

-afflicted takes no chances, as a rule. He goes straight to the best

-physician he can find, and obeys orders under terror of his life. Thus

-and thus only, he often is cured. Terrible as syphilis is, there is

-this redeeming feature: we can tell pretty accurately when the organism

-which causes it is eliminated. Years after the disease itself is cured,

-however, the victim may be stricken down by the most terrible form of

-paralysis, resulting from it.”

-

-“Isn’t the Ehrlich treatment regarded as a sure cure?” asked Mrs.

-Sharpless.

-

-“No cure is sure. Salvarsan, skillfully administered, is as near a

-specific as any known form of treatment. But we don’t know whether it

-has any effect at all upon locomotor ataxia or general paralysis, the

-after effects, which may destroy the patient fifteen or twenty years

-after the actual disease has been cured. All locomotor ataxia and all

-general paralysis come from syphilis. And these diseases are not only

-incurable, but are as nearly a hell on earth as poor humanity is ever

-called upon to endure. Of course, you know that a man who is base

-enough to marry with syphilis dooms his children. Fortunately

-seventy-five or eighty per cent of the offspring of such marriages die

-in infancy or early childhood. The rest grow up deficient in mind or

-body or both. Upwards of ten per cent of all insanity is syphilitic in

-its origin.

-

-“Both venereal diseases are terribly contagious. Innocence is no

-protection. Syphilis may be contracted from a drinking-cup or

-eating-utensil, or from the lips of an infected person having an open

-sore on the mouth. Gonorrhoea is spread by towels, by bathtubs, or from

-contaminated toilets. No person, however careful, is immune from either

-of the ‘red plagues.’ And yet the public is just beginning to be

-educated to the peril.”

-

-“Why wouldn’t that be a good topic for the Woman’s Club to discuss?”

-asked Grandma Sharpless.

-

-“Splendid!” said Dr. Strong. “That is, if they would allow you to talk

-about it.”

-

-“_Allow_ me!” The old lady’s firm chin tilted up sharply. “Who’s going

-to put the ban of silence on me?”

-

-“Nobody, I dare say, if you make up your mind to speak,” replied Dr.

-Strong, smiling. “But some will probably try. Would you believe that,

-only a short time since, a professor of hygiene in one of our leading

-universities had to abandon a course of lectures to the students

-because the wives of the faculty and trustees objected to his including

-venereal diseases in his course? And a well-known lecturer, who had

-been invited to speak on health protection before a list of colleges,

-suffered the indignity of having the invitation withdrawn because he

-insisted that he could not cover the ground without warning his hearers

-against the twin pestilences of vice.”

-

-“Are the colleges so greatly in need of that sort of warning?” asked

-Mrs. Clyde.

-

-“Subsequent records obtained from some of the protesting institutions

-showed that one third of the students had at some time been infected.”

-

-“I’m glad you’ve told my boy,” said Mrs. Clyde, rising. “I’ll talk to

-my girls.”

-

-“And I to the women,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “Then I’d better make a

-list, for both of you, of the literature on the subject which you will

-find useful,” said the Health Master. “I’ll give it to you later.”[4]

-

- [4] The list of publications on the sex problem and venereal disease

- recommended by the Health Master to the Clyde family was as follows:—

-Published by the California Social Hygiene Society, Room 256, U.S.

-Custom House, San Francisco, Calif.: The Four Sex Lies, When and How to

-Tell the Children, A Plain Talk with Girls about their Health and

-Physical Development. Published by the Detroit Society for Sex Hygiene,

-Wayne Co. Medical Society Building, Detroit, Mich.: To the Girl who

-does not Know, A Plain Talk with Boys. Published by the Chicago Society

-of Social Hygiene, 305 Reliance Building, Chicago, Ill: Self

-Protection, Family Protection, Community Protection. Published by the

-Maryland Society for Social Hygiene, 15 East Pleasant Street,

-Baltimore, Md.: The So- Called Sexual Necessity in Man, The Venereal

-Diseases. Published by the American Federation for Sex Hygiene, 105

-West 40th St., N.Y. City: List of Publications of the Constituent

-Societies, The Teaching of Sex Hygiene, Sex Instruction as a Phase of

-Social Education. Published by the Society of Sanitary and Moral

-Prophylaxis: The Sex Problem, Health and the Hygiene of Sex.

-

-

-For a time after the women had left, the two men sat silent.

-

-“Strong,” said Mr. Clyde presently, “who is Bartley Starr’s physician?”

-

-“Dr. Emery.”

-

-“Why didn’t he warn him not to marry?”

-

-“He did. He positively forbade it.”

-

-“And Starr married that young girl in the face of that prohibition?”

-

-“He thought he was cured. Dr. Emery couldn’t say positively that he

-wasn’t. He could only beg him to wait another year. Starr hadn’t the

-courage—or the principle; he feared scandal if he postponed the

-wedding. So he disregarded the warning and now the scandal is upon him

-with tenfold weight.”

-

-“Isn’t there any law for such cases?”

-

-“Not in this state. Indiana requires that parties to a marriage swear

-to their freedom from venereal disease and certain other ailments.

-Other states have followed suit. Every state ought to.”

-

-“Why didn’t Dr. Emery go to the girl’s father, then?”

-

-“Because of our damnable law,” returned the Health Master with a sudden

-and rare access of bitterness.

-

-“You mean that the law forbids?”

-

-“It holds the physician liable for any professional confidence

-violated.” Dr. Strong rose and paced up and down the room, talking with

-repressed energy. “Therein it follows medical ethics in its most

-conservative and baneful phase. The code of medical conduct provides

-that a physician is bound to keep secret all the private affairs of a

-patient, learned in the course of practice. One body, the American

-Institute of Homoeopathy, has wisely amended its code to except those

-cases where ‘harm to others may result.’ That amendment was passed with

-particular reference to venereal disease.”

-

-“What about contagious disease?” asked Mr. Clyde. “Doesn’t the law

-require the physician to report diphtheria, for instance, and thus

-violate the patient’s confidence?”

-

-“Certainly it does. All schools recognize that principle of protection

-to the public. Yet, in the case of syphilis or gonorrhoea, when the

-harm to the public health is far greater than from any ‘reportable’

-disease except tuberculosis, the physician must hold his peace, though

-he sees his patient pass out of his hands bearing fire and sword and

-poison to future generations. There’s the Ban of Silence in its most

-diabolical form!”

-

-Mr. Clyde regarded his household physician keenly. “I’ve never before

-seen you so stirred,” he observed.

-

-“I’ve reason to be stirred.” The Health Master whirled suddenly upon

-his friend and employer. “Clyde, you’ve never questioned me as to my

-past.”

-

-“No.”

-

-“Have you never wanted it cleared up?”

-

-“No.”

-

-“You’ve always been willing to take me on trust?”

-

-“Yes.”

-

-“And I appreciate it. But now I’m going to tell you how I happened to

-come to you, a broken and ruined man.”

-

-“Think it over, Strong,” advised Mr. Clyde. “Don’t speak now. Not that

-it would make any difference to me. I know you. If you were to tell me

-that you had committed homicide, I’d believe that it was a necessary

-and justifiable homicide.”

-

-“Suicide, rather,” returned the other with a mirthless laugh;

-“professional suicide. I’ll speak now, if you don’t object.”

-

-“Go ahead, then, if it will ease your mind.”

-

-“I’m a lawbreaker, Clyde. I did, years ago, what you thought Emery

-should have done. I deliberately violated the profession’s Ban of

-Silence. The man was my patient, in the city where I had built up a

-good high-class practice. He had contracted gonorrhoea and I had

-treated him for a year. The infection seemed to be rooted out. But I

-knew the danger, and when he told me that he was engaged to be married,

-to a girl of my own set and a valued friend, I was horror-stricken. I

-pleaded, argued, and finally threatened. It was no use. He was the

-spoiled child of a wealthy family, impatient of any thwarting. One day

-the suspicions of the girl’s mother were aroused. She came to me in

-deep distress. I told her the truth. The engagement was broken. The man

-did not bring suit against me, but his family used their financial and

-social power to persecute and finally drive me out of the city, a

-nervous wreck. That’s my history.”

-

-“You could have protected yourself by telling the true facts,”

-suggested Clyde. .

-

-“Yes: but that would have been an unforgivable breach of confidence.

-The public had no right to the facts. The girl’s family had.”

-

-“Then they should have come to your rescue with the truth.”

-

-“I bound them to secrecy.”

-

-Slowly Mr. Clyde rose, walked over, picked up the paper with the

-staring headlines, folded it, laid it on the table, and, in passing the

-physician, set a hand, as if by chance, upon his shoulder. From so

-undemonstrative a man the action meant much.

-

-“So,” he said with affectionate lightness, “my Chinese physician had

-been fighting dragons before he ever came to us; worse monsters than

-he’s been called upon to face, since. That was a splendid defeat,

-Strong.”

-

-“A bitter one,” said the Health Master; “and by the same old Monster,

-in another manifestation that we’ve been fighting here. We’ve downed

-him now and again, you and I, Clyde. But he’s never killed: only

-scotched. He’s the universal ally of every ill that man hands on to

-man, and we’ve only to recognize him under the thousand and one

-different forms he assumes to call him out to battle under his real

-name.”

-

-“And that is?” inquired Clyde.

-

-“Ignorance,” said the Health Master.

-

-THE END

-

-

-

-

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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Health Master, by Samuel Hopkins Adams
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Health Master
+
+Author: Samuel Hopkins Adams
+
+Release Date: August 2, 2018 [eBook #57543]
+[Most recently updated: April 14, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HEALTH MASTER ***
+
+
+
+
+THE HEALTH MASTER
+
+By Samuel Hopkins Adams
+
+Associate Fellow of the American Medical Association
+
+Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company
+
+1913
+
+
+
+
+_To George W. Goler, M.D., a type of the courageous, unselfish, and
+far-sighted health official, whom the enlightened and progressive city
+of Rochester, N. Y., hires to keep it well, on the “Chinese plan,” this
+book is inscribed, with the hope that it may, by exercising some
+influence in the hygienic education of the public, aid the work which
+he and his fellow guardians of the public health are so laboriously and
+devotedly performing throughout the nation._
+
+
+Contents
+
+ INTRODUCTORY NOTE
+ I. THE CHINESE PLAN PHYSICIAN
+ II. IN TIME OF PEACE
+ III. REPAIRING BETTINA
+ IV. THE CORNER DRUG-STORE
+ V. THE MAGIC LENS
+ VI. THE RE-MADE LADY
+ VII. THE RED PLACARD
+ VIII. HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS
+ IX. THE GOOD GRAY DOCTOR
+ X. THE HOUSE THAT CAUGHT COLD
+ XI. THE BESIEGED CITY
+ XII. PLAIN TALK
+ 
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE
+
+
+To dogmatise on questions of medical practice is to invite controversy
+and tempt disaster. The highest wisdom of to-day may be completely
+refuted by to-morrow’s discovery. Therefore, for the simple principles
+of disease prevention and health protection which I have put into the
+mouth of my Health Master, I make no claim of finality. In support of
+them I maintain only that they represent the progressive specialized
+thought of modern medical science. So far as is practicable I have
+avoided questions upon which there is serious difference of belief
+among the authorities. Where it has been necessary to touch upon these,
+as, for example, in the chapter on methods of isolation in contagious
+diseases, a question which arises sooner or later in every household, I
+have advocated those measures which have the support of the best
+rational probability and statistical support.
+
+Not only has the book been prepared in consultation with the recognized
+authorities on public health and preventive medicine, but every chapter
+has been submitted to the expert criticism of specialists upon the
+particular subject treated. My own ideas and theories I have advanced
+only in such passages as deal with the relation of the physician and of
+the citizen to the social and ethical phases of public health. To the
+large number of medical scientists, both public and private, whose
+generous aid and counsel have made my work possible, I gratefully
+acknowledge my debt. My thanks are due also for permission to reprint,
+to the _Delineator_, in which most of the chapters have appeared
+serially; to _Collier’s Weekly_, and to the _Ladies’ Home Journal_.
+
+The Author.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+THE CHINESE PLAN PHYSICIAN
+
+
+THE eleven-o’clock car was just leaving Monument Square when Mr. Thomas
+Clyde swung aboard with an ease and agility worthy of a younger and
+less portly man. Fortune favored him with an unoccupied seat, into
+which he dropped gratefully. Just in front of him sprawled a
+heavy-shouldered young man, apparently asleep. Mr. Clyde was
+unfavorably impressed both by his appearance and by the manner of his
+breathing, which was as excessive as it was unusual. As the car swung
+sharply around a curve the young man’s body sagged at the waist, and
+lopped over toward the aisle. Before Mr. Clyde’s restraining hand could
+close upon his shoulder, he had tumbled outward to the floor, and lay
+quiet, with upturned face. There was a stir through the car.
+
+“The horrid drunken creature!” exclaimed a black-clad woman opposite
+Mr. Clyde. “Why do they allow such people on the cars?”
+
+The conductor hurried forward, only to find his way blocked by a very
+tall, slender man who had quietly stepped, from a seat next the window,
+over an intervening messenger boy and the box he was carrying. The new
+arrival on the scene of action stooped over the prostrate figure. One
+glance apparently satisfied him. With a swift, sharp motion he slapped
+the inert man forcefully across the cheek. The sound of the impact was
+startlingly loud. The senseless head rolled over upon the left
+shoulder, only to be straightened out by another quick blow. A murmur
+of indignation and disgust hummed and passed, and the woman in black
+called upon the conductor to stop the assault. But Mr. Thomas Clyde,
+being a person of decision and action, was before the official. He
+caught the assailant’s arm as it swung back again.
+
+“Let him alone! What do you mean by beating a helpless man that way!”
+
+“Do you know more about this affair than I do?” The crisp query was
+accompanied by a backward thrust of the tall man’s elbow which broke
+Mr. Clyde’s hold, and—smack! smack!—the swift double blow rocked the
+victim’s head again. This time the man groaned. The car was in an
+uproar. Mr. Clyde instantly and effectively pinned the tall man’s
+elbows from behind. Some one pulled the bell, and the brakes ground,
+throwing those forward who had pressed into the aisle. Against this
+pressure, Mr. Clyde, aided by the conductor, began dragging his man
+backward. The stranger was helpless to resist this grip; but as he was
+forced away he perpetrated a final atrocity. Shooting out one long leg,
+he caught the toe of his boot under the outstretched man’s jawbone and
+jerked the chin back. This time, the object of the violence not only
+groaned, but opened his eyes.
+
+“I’ll have you in jail for that!” panted Mr. Clyde, his usually placid
+temper surging up.
+
+Other passengers began to lift the victim.
+
+“Drop him!” snapped the tall man, with such imperative decisiveness,
+that the helping hands involuntarily retracted. “Let him lie, you
+fools! Do you want to kill him?”
+
+Misgivings beset and cooled Mr. Thomas Clyde. He had now reached the
+rear platform, still holding in his powerful and disabling grasp the
+unknown man, when he heard a voice from an automobile which had been
+halted by the abrupt stop of the car.
+
+“Can I be of any help?”
+
+“Dr. Magruder!” exclaimed Mr. Clyde, “come in here, will you, and look
+at a sick man?”
+
+As the doctor stepped aboard, the captive with a violent wrench freed
+himself from Mr. Clyde’s relaxing hold and dropped from the platform
+into the darkness. Dr. Magruder forced his way through the crowd, took
+one look at the patient, and, right and left, struck him powerfully
+across the cheeks time and again, until the leaden-lidded eyes opened
+again. There was a quick recourse to the physician’s little satchel;
+then—
+
+“All right,” said the doctor cheerfully. “He’ll do now. But, my friend,
+with that heart of yours, you want to sign the pledge or make your
+will. It was touch and go with you that time.”
+
+Waiting to hear no more, Mr. Thomas Clyde jumped from the rear step and
+set off at a rapid pace, looking about him as he ran. He had not gone a
+block when he saw, by the radiance of an electric light, a tall figure
+leaning against a tree in an attitude of nerveless dejection. The
+figure straightened up.
+
+“Don’t try to man-handle me again,” advised the man, “or you may meet
+with a disappointment.”
+
+“I’ve come to apologize.”
+
+“Very well,” returned the other coolly; “I appreciate it. Many a fool
+wouldn’t go even so far.” Mr. Clyde smiled. “I own to the soft
+impeachment. From what Dr. Magruder said I judge you saved that fellow
+from the hospital.”
+
+“I judge I did—no thanks to you! You’ve a grip like a vise.”
+
+“Yes; I keep in good training,” said the other pleasantly. “A man of my
+age has to, if he is to hold up his work.” He looked concernedly at the
+stranger who had involuntarily lapsed against the tree again. “See
+here,” he added, “I don’t believe you’re well.”
+
+“No; I don’t believe I am,” answered the tall man in uncompromising
+tones; “but I do believe that it is peculiarly my own affair whether I
+am or not.”
+
+“Nonsense! Man, your nerves are on the jump. You used yourself up on
+that chap in the street car. Come across to my club and take something
+to brace you up.”
+
+People usually found it hard to resist Mr. Clyde’s quiet
+persuasiveness. The stranger, after a moment of consideration, smiled.
+
+“Begin with a fight and end with a drink?” he asked. “That’s a reversal
+of the usual process. If your cuisine runs to a cup of hot milk as late
+as this, I’d be glad to have it.”
+
+As they entered the club, Mr. Clyde turned to his guest.
+
+“What name shall I register?”
+
+The stranger hesitated. “Strong,” he said finally.
+
+“Dr. Strong?”
+
+“Well—yes—Dr. Strong if you will.”
+
+“Of what place?”
+
+“Any place—Calcutta, Paris, Mexico City, Philadelphia, Rio. I’ve tried
+‘em all. I’m a man without a country, as I am without a profession.” He
+spoke with the unguarded bitterness of shaken nerves.
+
+“Without a profession! But you said ‘Doctor.’”
+
+“A title isn’t a profession,” returned the guest shortly.
+
+Turning that over in his mind, Mr. Clyde led the way to a quiet table
+in the corner of the diningroom, where he gave his order. Observing
+that his new acquaintance was _distrait_, he swung into the easy
+conversational flow of a cultured man of the world, at the same time
+setting his keen judgment of men to work upon the other. There was much
+there to interest a close observer. The face indicated not much over
+thirty years; but there were harsh lines in the broad and thoughtful
+forehead, and the hair that waved away from it was irregularly blotched
+with gray. The eyes, very clear and liquid, were marred by an
+expression of restlessness and stress. The mouth was clear-cut, with an
+expression of rather sardonic humor. Altogether it was a face to remark
+and remember; keen, intellectual, humorous, and worn. Mr. Thomas Clyde
+decided that he liked the man.
+
+“You’ve been a traveler, Doctor?” he asked.
+
+“Yes. I’ve seen life in many countries—and death.”
+
+“And traced the relations between them, I suppose?”
+
+“Oh, I’ve flashed my little pin-point lantern at the Great Darkness in
+the fond hope of discovering something,” returned the other cynically.
+
+“In a way, I’m interested in those matters,” continued Mr. Clyde.
+“They’ve organized a Public Health League here, and made me president
+of it. More from finance than fitness,” he added, humorously.
+
+“Finance has its part, too,” said the other. “Give me millions enough
+and I’ll rid any city of its worst scourge, tuberculosis.”
+
+“Then I wish to Heaven you had the millions to spend here in
+Worthington! We’re in a bad way. Two years ago we elected a reform
+administration. The Mayor put in a new Health Officer and we looked for
+results. We’ve had them—the wrong kind. The death rate from
+tuberculosis has gone up twenty-five per cent, and the number of cases
+nearly fifty per cent since he took office.”
+
+“You don’t say so!” said the stranger, showing his first evidence of
+animation. “That’s good.” Mr. Clyde stared. “You think so? Then you’ll
+undoubtedly be pleased to learn that other diseases are increasing
+almost at the same rate: measles, scarlet fever, and so on.”
+
+“Fine!” said Dr. Strong.
+
+“And finally, our general mortality rate has gone up a full point. We
+propose to take some action regarding it.”
+
+“Quite right. You certainly ought to.” Something in his guest’s tone
+made Mr. Clyde suspicious. “What action would you suggest, then? he
+asked.
+
+“A vote of confidence in your Health Officer.”
+
+“You propose that we indorse the man who is responsible for a marked
+rise in our mortality figures?”
+
+“Certainly.”
+
+“In the name of all that’s absurd, why?”
+
+“Let me answer that by another question. If disease appears in your
+household, do you want your doctor to conceal it or check it?”
+
+Mr. Clyde took that under advisement. “You mean that this city has been
+concealing its diseases, and that Dr. Merritt, our new Health Officer,
+is only making known a condition which has always existed?” he asked
+presently.
+
+“Haven’t you just told me so?”
+
+“When did I tell you anything of the sort?” The younger man smiled.
+“That’s five questions in a row,” said he. “Time for an answer. You
+said that deaths from tuberculosis had increased twenty-five per cent
+since the new man came in.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“You’re wrong. Tuberculosis doesn’t increase in sudden leaps. It isn’t
+an epidemic disease, rising and receding in waves. It’s endemic, a
+steady current.”
+
+“But look at the figures. Figures don’t lie, do they?”
+
+“Usually, in vital statistics,” was the imperturbable reply. “In this
+case, probably not. That is, they don’t lie to me. I’m afraid they do
+to you.” Mr. Clyde looked dubiously at the propounder of this curious
+suggestion and shook his head.
+
+“Don’t get it?” queried Dr. Strong. “Perhaps you recall the saying of
+Thoreau—I think it the profoundest philosophical thought of the New
+World—that it takes two to tell the truth, one to speak and one to hear
+it.”
+
+“You mean that we’ve misinterpreted the figures? Why, they’re as plain
+as two and two.”
+
+“Truth lies behind figures, not in them,” said Dr. Strong. “Now, you’re
+worried because of a startling apparent swelling of the tuberculosis
+rate. When you find that sort of a sudden increase, it doesn’t signify
+that there’s more tuberculosis. It signifies only that there’s more
+knowledge of tuberculosis. You’re getting the disease more honestly
+reported; that’s all. Dr. Merritt—did you say his name is?—has stirred
+up your physicians to obey the law which requires that all deaths be
+promptly and properly reported, and all new cases of certain
+communicable diseases, as well. Speaking as a doctor, I should say
+that, with the exception of lawyers, there is no profession which
+considers itself above the law so widely as the medical profession.
+Therefore, your Health Officer has done something rather unusual in
+bringing the doctors to a sense of their duty. As for reporting, you
+can’t combat a disease until you know where it is established and
+whither it is spreading. So, I say, any health officer who succeeds in
+spurring up the medical profession, and in dragging the Great White
+Plague out of its lurking-places into the light of day ought to have a
+medal.”
+
+“What about the other diseases? Is the same true of them?”
+
+“Not to the same extent. No man can tell when or why the epidemic
+diseases—scarlet fever, measles, whooping-cough, and diphtheria—come
+and go. By the way, what about your diphtheria death rate here?”
+
+“That is the exception to the rule. The rate is decreasing.”
+
+Dr. Strong brought his hand down flat on the table with a force which
+made his cup jump in its saucer. “And your misnamed Public Health
+League proposes to take some action against the man who is shown, by
+every evidence you’ve suggested thus far, to be the right man in the
+right place!”
+
+“How does the diphtheria rate show in his favor any more than the other
+death rates against him?”
+
+“Because diphtheria is the one important disease which your medical
+officer can definitely control, and he seems to be doing it.”
+
+“The only important one? Surely smallpox is controllable?”
+
+“Smallpox is the poisoned arrow of the fool-killer. It is controllable;
+but it isn’t important, except to fools and anti-vaccination bigots.”
+
+Mr. Thomas Clyde softly rubbed his cleanshaven chin, a sign and token
+with him that his mind was hard at work.
+
+“You’re giving me a new view of a city in which I’ve lived for the
+first and last forty-five years of my life,” he said presently. “Are
+you familiar with conditions here?”
+
+“Never have been here before, and have no reason to suppose that I
+shall ever return. Traveling at night is too much for me, so I stopped
+over to have a look at a town which has been rather notorious among
+public health officials for years.”
+
+“Notorious!” repeated Mr. Clyde, his local pride up in arms.
+
+“For falsifying its vital statistics. Your low mortality figures are a
+joke. Worthington has been more jeered at, criticized, and roasted by
+various medical conventions than any other city in the United States.”
+
+“Why, I’ve never seen anything of that sort in the papers.”
+
+Dr. Strong laughed. “Your newspapers print what you want to read; not
+what you don’t want to read. They follow the old adage, ‘What you don’t
+know won’t hurt you.’ It’s a poor principle in matters of hygiene.”
+
+“So one might suppose,” returned the host dryly. “Still you can
+scarcely expect a newspaper to run down its own city. I’ve known
+business to suffer for a year from sensational reports of an epidemic.”
+
+The other grunted. “If a pest of poisonous spiders suddenly bred and
+spread in Worthington, the newspapers would be full of it, and
+everybody would commend the printing of the facts as a necessary
+warning and safeguard. But when a pest of poisonous germs breeds and
+spreads, Business sets its finger to its lips and says, ‘Hush!’ and the
+newspapers obey. You’re a business man, I assume, Mr. Clyde? Frankly, I
+haven’t very much sympathy with the business point of view.”
+
+He rose and pushed his chair back.
+
+“Wait a moment,” said the other. “Sit down. I have something that may
+be of importance to suggest to you. It occurs to me that Worthington
+would be the better for having a man with your ideas as a citizen. Now,
+supposing the Public Health League should offer you—”
+
+“I am not at present in medical practice,” broke in the other.
+
+“Even at that, I was thinking that you would be of use as an advisory
+physician and scientific lookout.”
+
+For a moment, the other’s face brightened, an indication which Mr.
+Clyde was quick to note. But instantly the expression of eagerness died
+out.
+
+“Ten hours a day?” said Dr. Strong. “It couldn’t be done properly in
+less time. And I’m a mere nervous wreck, bound for the scrap-heap.”
+
+“Would you mind,” said Mr. Clyde very gently, “telling me what’s wrong?
+I’m not asking without a purpose.”
+
+Dr. Strong held out his long arms before him. “I’m a surgeon without a
+right hand, and a bacteriologist without a left.” The sinewy and pale
+hands shook a little. “Neuritis,” he continued. “One of the diseases of
+which we doctors have the most fear and the least knowledge.”
+
+“And with the loss of your occupation, general nervous collapse?” asked
+Mr. Clyde. Being himself a worker who put his heart into his work, he
+could guess the sterile hopelessness of spirit of the man banned from a
+chosen activity.
+
+Dr. Strong nodded. “I may still be fit for the lecture platform as a
+dispenser of other men’s knowledge. Or perhaps I’ll end up as medical
+watchdog to some rich man who can afford that kind of pet. Pleasing
+prospect, isn’t it, for a man who once thought himself of use in the
+world?”
+
+“Good idea,” said Mr. Clyde quietly. “Will you try the position with my
+family?”
+
+The other stared in silence at his questioner.
+
+“Just consider my situation for a moment. As you know, I’m a layman,
+interested in, but rather ignorant of, medical subjects. As wealth goes
+in a city of one hundred and fifty thousand population, I’m a rich man.
+At any rate, I can afford a considerable outlay to guard against
+sickness. In the last five years I suppose disease has cost my
+household ten thousand dollars in money, and has cost me, in worry and
+consequent incapacity for work, ten times that amount. Even at a large
+salary you would doubtless prove an economy. Come, what do you say?”
+
+“You know absolutely nothing of me,” suggested the other.
+
+“I know that you are a man of quick and correct judgment, for I saw you
+in action.” The other smiled. “You are, for reasons which are your own,
+not very expansive, as to your past professional career. I’m content
+with that attitude of yours, and I’m quite satisfied to base my offer
+on what I have been able to judge from your manner and talk. Without
+boasting, I may say that I have built up a great manufacturing plant
+largely on my judgment of men. I think I need you in my business of
+raising a family.”
+
+“How much of a family?”
+
+“Five children, their mother and their grandmother. I may warn you at
+once that you’ll have a jealous rival in Grandma. She’s the household
+guardian, and pretty ‘sot’ in her ideas. But the principal thing is for
+you to judge me as I’ve judged you, and determine whether we could work
+out the plan together.”
+
+Dr. Strong set his chin in one thin, cupped hand and gazed
+consideringly upon the profferer of this strange suggestion. He saw a
+strong-built, clear-skinned man, whose physical aspect did not suggest
+the forty-five years to which he had owned. Mr. Clyde recommended
+himself at first sight by a smooth-voiced ease of manner, and that
+unostentatious but careful fitness of apparel which is, despite wise
+apothegms to the contrary, so often an index of character. Under the
+easy charm of address, there was unobtrusively evident a quick
+intelligence, a stalwart self-respect, and a powerful will.
+
+Yet, the doctor noted, this man had been both ready and fair in
+yielding his judgment, under the suggestion of a new point of view.
+Evidently he could take orders as well as give them.
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Clyde, “have you appraised me?”
+
+The weary eyes of the other twinkled a little. “Physically you disclose
+some matters plainly enough, if one wishes to show off in the Sherlock
+Holmes manner. For instance, you’ve recently been in the tropics; your
+eyesight is better than your hearing, you drink lightly if at all, and
+don’t use tobacco in any form; you’ve taken up athletics—handball
+principally—in recent years, as the result of a bad scare you got from
+a threatened paralytic attack; and your only serious illness since then
+has been typhoid fever.”
+
+Mr. Clyde laughed outright. “If you had started our acquaintance that
+way,” he said, “I’d have thought you a fortune-teller. Part of it I can
+follow. You noticed that I kept my left ear turned, of course; and the
+fact that my nose shows no eyeglass marks would vouch for my eyesight.
+Did you judge me a non-smoker because I forgot to offer you a
+cigar—which deficiency I’ll gladly make up now, if it isn’t too late.”
+
+“Partly that—no, thank you. I’m not allowed to smoke—but principally
+because I noticed you disliked the odor of my hot milk. It is
+offensive, but so faint that no man without a very keen sense of smell
+would perceive it across a table; no tobacco-user preserves his sense
+of smell to any such degree of delicacy. As for the drink, I judged
+that from your eyes and general fitness.”
+
+“And the handball, of course, from my ‘cushioned’ palms.”
+
+“Obviously. A man at the heart of a great business doesn’t take up
+violent indoor exercise without some special reason. Such a reason I
+saw on the middle finger of your left hand.”
+
+Holding up the telltale member, Mr. Clyde disclosed a small dark area
+at the side of the first joint.
+
+“Leaky fountain-pen,” he remarked.
+
+“As you are right-handed naturally, but write with your left hand, it’s
+clear that you’ve had an attack of writer’s paralysis—”
+
+“Five years ago,” put in Mr. Clyde.
+
+“And that your doctor made good use of the salutary scare it gave you,
+to get you to take up regular exercise.”
+
+“And, incidentally, to cut out my moderate, occasional cocktail. Now,
+as to the tropics and the typhoid?”
+
+“The latter is a guess; the former a certainty. Under your somewhat
+sparse long hair in front there is an outcropping of very fine hairs.
+Some special cause exists for that new growth. The most likely cause,
+at your age, is typhoid. As you’ve kept in good training, it isn’t
+likely that you’d have had any other serious ailment recently. On that
+I took a chance. The small scars at the back of your ears could be
+nothing but the marks of that little pest of the tropics, the _bête
+rouge_. I’ve had him dug out of my skin and I know something of him.”
+
+“Right on every count,” declared Mr. Clyde. “You’ve given me cumulative
+proof of your value to me. I’ll tell you. Forget formalities. Let me
+‘phone for a cab; we’ll go to your hotel, get your things, and you come
+back with me for the night. In the morning you can look the ground
+over, and decide, with the human documents before you, whether you’ll
+undertake the campaign.”
+
+The younger man smiled a very pleasant and winning smile. “You go
+fast,” said he. “And as in all fast motion, you create a current in
+your direction. Certainly, if I’m to consider your remarkable plan I’d
+best see the whole family. But there’s one probable and perhaps
+insurmountable obstacle. Who is your physician?”
+
+“Haven’t such a thing in the house, at present,” said Mr. Clyde
+lightly. Then, in a graver tone, “Our old family physician died six
+months ago. He knew us all inside and out as a man knows a familiar
+book.”
+
+“A difficult loss to replace. Knowledge of your patient is half the
+battle in medicine. You’ve had no one since?”
+
+“Yes. Six weeks ago, my third boy, Charley, showed signs of fever and
+we called a distant cousin of mine who has a large practice. He felt
+quite sure from the first that it was diphtheria; but he so managed
+matters that we had no trouble with the officials. In fact, he didn’t
+report it at all, though I believe it was a very light case of the
+disease.”
+
+Dr. Strong’s eyes narrowed. “At the outset, I’ll give you two bits of
+advice, gratis, Mr. Clyde. First, don’t ever call your doctor-cousin
+again. He’s an anarchist.”
+
+“Just what do you mean by that?”
+
+“It’s plain enough, isn’t it? Anarchist, I said: a man who doesn’t
+believe in law when it contravenes his convenience.”
+
+Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin again. “Hum,” he remarked. “Well! the second
+gift of advice?”
+
+“That you either respect the law yourself or resign the presidency of
+the Public Health League.” A distinct spot of red appeared on each of
+the elder man’s smooth cheeks. “Are you trying to provoke me to a
+quarrel?” he asked brusquely.
+
+Then his expression mollified. “Or are you testing me?”
+
+“Neither. I’m giving you my best and most honest advice. If you expect
+me to do as your substitute physician did, to guard your household in
+violation of the law which tries to protect the whole public equally,
+you’ve got the wrong man, and your boasted judgment has gone askew,”
+was the steady reply.
+
+Mr. Clyde turned and left the room. When he returned his hand was
+outstretched.
+
+“I’ve taken three swallows of cold air, and sent for a cab,” he said.
+“Shake hands. I think you and I will be friends. Only—train me a little
+gently at the outset. You’ll come with me?”
+
+“Yes,” said Dr. Strong, and the two men shook hands.
+
+During the drive Mr. Clyde expounded the virtues and characteristics of
+his native city to his new acquaintance, who was an excellent listener.
+Long afterward he found Dr. Strong acting on remembered and shrewdly
+analyzed information given in that first long talk. When they reached
+the big, rambling, many-windowed house which afforded the growing Clyde
+family opportunity to grow, the head of the household took his guest to
+an apartment in one of the wings.
+
+“These two rooms are yours,” he said. “I hope you’ll be like Coleridge
+who came to visit with one satchel and stayed five years.”
+
+“That remains to be seen to-morrow,” said Dr. Strong. “By the way, as I
+usually read myself to sleep, you might leave me some of your local
+health reports. Thus I can be looking the ground over.”
+
+“All I’ve got you’ll find on the shelf over the desk. Good-night!”
+
+Being of that type of man who does his thinking before and not after a
+decision, Mr. Thomas Clyde arose in the morning with an untroubled mind
+as to his new venture in household economics. Voices from the library
+attracted him thither, as he came downstairs, and, entering, he beheld
+his guest hedged in a corner by the grandmother of the Clyde household.
+
+“Don’t tell me, young man,” the old lady was saying, in her clear,
+determined voice. “You’ve not slept well for ages! I know that kind of
+an eye.”
+
+“Mrs. Sharpless has been diagnosing my case, Mr. Clyde,” called the
+guest, with a rather wry smile.
+
+“You stay here for a while,” said she vigorously, “and I’ll cocker you
+up. I don’t believe you even eat properly. Do you?”
+
+“Maybe not,” admitted the young man. “We doctors are sometimes less
+wise for ourselves than for others.”
+
+“Oh! So you’re a doctor?” asked the grandmother with a shrewd,
+estimating glance.
+
+“Dr. Strong is, I hope, going to stay with us awhile,” explained her
+son-in-law.
+
+“Good!” said Mrs. Sharpless. “And I’ll take care of him.”
+
+“It’s a strong inducement,” said Dr. Strong gracefully. “But I want a
+little more material on which to base a decision.”
+
+“Between us Grandma and I ought to be able to answer any questions,”
+said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“About sickness, then, in the family. I’ve already introduced myself to
+Mrs. Clyde and questioned her; but her information isn’t definite.”
+
+“Myra seldom is,” observed Mr. Clyde. “It’s part of her charm. But
+Grandma Sharpless has been keeping a daybook for years. Everything
+that’s ever happened, from the cat’s fits to the dressmaker’s misfits,
+is in that series. I’ve always thought it might come in handy
+sometime.”
+
+“Just the thing!” said Dr. Strong heartily. “Will you bring it, Mrs.
+Sharpless? I hope you’ve included your comment on events as well as the
+events themselves.”
+
+“My opinions are generally pronounced enough so that I can remember
+‘em, young man,” returned Mrs. Sharpless, as she departed for the
+desired volumes.
+
+“That last remark of yours sounded a little like making fun of
+Grandma,” suggested Mr. Clyde, as the door closed after her.
+
+“Far from it,” retorted Dr. Strong quickly. “Can’t you see that she’s a
+born diagnostician? She’s got the sixth sense sticking out all over
+her. Women more often have it than men. When a doctor has it, and
+sometimes when he’s only able to counterfeit it, he becomes great and
+famous.”
+
+“Now that you speak of it, I remember my wife’s saying that when she
+was a girl and lived in the country, her mother was always being sent
+for in cases of illness.”
+
+Dr. Strong nodded. “Heretical though it is to say so, I would rather
+have the diagnosis of such a woman, in an obscure case, than of many a
+doctor. She learns in the school of experience.”
+
+Here, Mrs. Sharpless returned, carrying several diaries.
+
+“These go five years back,” said she. “You’ll find ‘em pretty complete.
+We’ve had our fair share of trouble; measles, whooping-cough,—I thought
+Betsy was going to bark her poor little head off,—mumps, and
+chicken-pox. I nursed ‘em through, myself.”
+
+“All of them?”
+
+“All of ‘em didn’t have all the things because Tom Clyde sent the rest
+away when one of ‘em came down. All nonsense, I say. Better let ‘em get
+it while they’re young, and have done with it.”
+
+“One of the worst of the old superstitions,” said Dr. Strong quietly.
+
+“Don’t tell me, young man! Doctor or no doctor, you can’t teach me
+about children’s diseases. There isn’t any of those measly and mumpy
+ones that I’m afraid of. Bobs _did_ scare me, though, with that queer
+attack of his.”
+
+“Bobs,” explained Mr. Clyde, “is Robin, one of the eight-year-old
+twins.”
+
+“Tell me about the attack.”
+
+“When _was_ it?” said the grandmother, running over the leaves of a
+selected diary. “Oh, here it is. Last March. It was short and sharp.
+Only lasted three days; but the child had a dreadful fever and pretty
+bad cramps.”
+
+“Anything else?”
+
+“Why, yes; though that idiot of a cousin of Tom’s snubbed me when I
+told him about it. The boy seemed kind of numb and slow with his hands
+for some time after.”
+
+“And now?” So sharp came the question that Mr. Clyde glanced at the
+speaker, not without apprehension.
+
+“Nothing left of it that I can see.”
+
+“What had you in mind?” asked Mr. Clyde of the doctor, curiously.
+
+“Speaking technically, anterior poliomyelitis.” Grandma Sharpless
+laughed comfortably. “I’ve noticed that a very long name like that
+usually means a sore toe or a pimple behind your ear. It’s the short
+names that bring the undertaker.”
+
+“Shrewdly said, but exception noted,” said Dr. Strong.
+
+“As for Bobs, I remember two cases I saw at Clinton years ago, like
+that attack of his. One of ‘em never walked afterward, and the other
+has a shriveled hand to this day.”
+
+Dr. Strong nodded. “To come down nearer to English, that’s infantile
+paralysis, one of the mysteries of medicine. I’ll tell you some things
+about it some day. Your Bobs had a narrow escape.”
+
+“You’re sure it is an escape?” asked the father anxiously.
+
+“If Mrs. Sharpless is satisfied that there’s no trace left, I am.”
+
+“Come in to breakfast,” said Mrs. Clyde, entering the room with a child
+attached to either hand. She was a tall, fair woman with the charm of
+fresh coloring and regular features, large, intelligent eyes, and a
+somewhat restless vigor and vitality. That her husband and children
+adored her was obvious. One had to look twice to perceive that she was
+over thirty; and even a careful estimate did not suggest her real age
+of thirty-seven.
+
+During the introductory meal, Dr. Strong talked mostly to her, but he
+kept watching the children. And when it was over, he went to his study
+and made an inventory, in the order of age.
+
+GRANDMA SHARPLESS;
+_Probably 70; sound and firm as a good apple; ought to live to be 90.
+Medical demands, none._
+
+MR. CLYDE;
+_45; sturdy, restrained, active, phlegmatic: Tends to
+over-concentration; his own best physician._
+
+MRS. CLYDE;
+_35; possibly more. Quick-witted, nervously active; eager, perhaps a
+little greedy of enjoyment. Somewhat intemperate; probably in eating,
+possibly in the use of tea or candy. An invariably loving mother; not
+invariably a wise one._
+
+MAYNARD, _otherwise_ “MANNY” CLYDE;
+_14 years old; rangy, good-tempered, intelligent boy with a good
+physical equipment._ (_Note: watch his eyes._)
+
+ROBIN, _alias_ BOBS _and_ JULIA (_mysteriously_) JUNKUM;
+_8-year old twins; Bobs, quick and flashing like his mother; Julia,
+demure, thoughtful, a little lethargic, and with much of her father s
+winning quality of friendliness._ (_Note: test Bobs for reflexes. Watch
+Julia's habits of play._)
+
+CHARLES;
+_Aged 7; strong rough-and-tumble urchin, the particular pet of his
+grandmother._ (_Note: watch his hand motions._)
+
+BETTINA, _alias variously_ BETSY, TOOTS, TWINKLES, _and the_ CHERUB;
+_4 years old; a Duck_ [here the human side of the doctor broke
+through], _though a little spoiled by her father._ (_Note: a
+mouth-breather; the first case to be considered._)
+
+ADDENDUM;
+_Various servants, not yet identified or studied; but none the less
+members of our household community._
+
+
+This catalogue Dr. Strong put away, with Grandma Sharpless’s day books,
+for further notation and amplification. Then he made three visits: one
+to the Health Bureau, one to the Water Department, and one to the City
+Engineer’s office, where he spent much time over sundry maps. It was
+close upon dinner-time when he returned, and immediately looked up Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“Well?” said that gentleman.
+
+“Assuming that I accept your offer it should be understood that I’m
+only a guardian, not, a physician.”
+
+“Meaning—”
+
+“That I shall expect, in emergency, to call in such physicians or
+others as I consider best equipped for the particular task.”
+
+“Very well. But why that phrase ‘or others’?”
+
+“I’ve suggested before that I am a heretic. In certain instances I
+might want an osteopath, or, if I were dealing with a sick soul causing
+a sick body, I might even send for a Christian Scientist.”
+
+“You have a refreshingly catholic breadth of view.”
+
+“I’m trying to map out for you, a rich man, as good treatment as a very
+poor man would have in a hospital—that is, the best technical advice
+for every hygienic emergency that may arise—plus some few extensions of
+my own. Now we come to what is likely to prove the stumbling-block.”
+
+“Set it up.”
+
+“If I’m to take this job, I must be the autocrat, in so far as my own
+department is concerned. As you know, a city health official’s powers
+are arbitrary. He can burn your house down; he can imprison you; he can
+establish a military régime; he can override or undo the laws which
+control the ordinary procedure of life. Hygienic law, like martial law,
+supersedes rights in crises. You are asking me to act as health officer
+of your house. If I’m to do my work, I must have full sway, and I shall
+expect you to see that every member of your household obeys my
+orders—except,” he added, with a twinkle, “Grandma Sharpless. I expect
+she’s too old to take orders from any one. Diplomacy must be my agent
+with her.”
+
+Mr. Clyde pondered. “That’s a pretty wide authority you’re asking.”
+
+“Yes, but I shall use it only in extreme cases. I shall deal
+extensively in advice and suggestion, which you may take or leave as
+you choose. But an order will mean a life or death matter.”
+
+“Agreed. Now, as to terms—”
+
+“Let the terms go, until we see how much I can save you. Meantime,
+don’t overestimate what I undertake to do. Suppose you just run through
+the roster of what you consider the danger points, and I’ll tell you
+how far I can promise anything.”
+
+“First, then, tuberculosis, of course.”
+
+“Practical immunity from that, as long as you maintain your present
+standards of life.”
+
+“Typhoid fever. As I told you, we’ve had one visitation.”
+
+“There’s no reason why you should ever have another if the children
+will take ordinary precautions.”
+
+“Diphtheria?”
+
+“We can’t guarantee the youngsters against getting it, though we can do
+something to protect them. And if they do get it, we can be pretty
+certain of pulling them through.”
+
+“Scarlet fever and measles?”
+
+“Why not add whooping-cough and influenza? The former kills as many
+people as either scarlet fever or measles, and the latter twice as
+many. They’re all in the same category; medical science is pretty near
+helpless against their onset. You and your family may be as rigidly
+careful as they will; if the family next door, or a family at the
+farthermost end of the town, is careless, we’re as likely as not to
+suffer for their sins. All that I can promise, then, is hope against
+the occurrence of these diseases, and the constant watchfulness, when
+they come, which they call for but don’t always get.”
+
+“Cancer?”
+
+“Eternal vigilance, again; so that, if it does come, we may discover it
+in time.”
+
+“Let me see,” mused Mr. Clyde; “what else is there? Oh—nervous and
+functional disorders.”
+
+“Functional disorders mean, usually, either a bad start, or the
+heritage of some disease like scarlet fever or grippe, or excess or
+carelessness in living. I think your household is free from them; and
+it should remain free. As for nervous ailments, they commonly mean lack
+of self-discipline. It may be overindulgence in work”—he glanced down
+at his right hand—“or it may be overindulgence in play.” His glance
+wandered significantly to the doorway, through which the voice of Mrs.
+Clyde could be heard. “By the way, you’ve left out the greatest
+destroyer of all—perhaps because you’re beyond the danger point.”
+
+“Tuberculosis is the greatest destroyer, isn’t it?”
+
+“Not numerically. It is beaten out by the death record of intestinal
+poisoning in the very young. Your flock has run the gamut and come
+through with undiminished vitality. Two of them, however, are running
+life’s race under a handicap”—the father’s eyelids went up—“which I’ll
+take up shortly, when I’ve fully determined the causes. They can be
+repaired, one readily, the other in time. Finally, I hope to be able to
+teach them the gospel of the sound, clean mind in the sound, clean
+body. In a desert I might guarantee immunity from most of the ills that
+flesh is heir to. Amid the complexities of our civilization, disease
+and death are largely social; there is no telling from what friend the
+poison may come. No man can safeguard his house. The most he can hope
+for is a measure of protection. I can offer you nothing more than that,
+under our compact.”
+
+“That is enough,” returned Mr. Clyde. He took from his inner pocket a
+folded paper, which he handed over to the young man. “There’s the
+contract, duly signed. Come in, Grandma.”
+
+Mrs. Sharpless, entering the door, stopped on seeing the two men.
+
+“Business, Tom?” she asked.
+
+“Business that you’re interested in,” said her son-in-law, and briefly
+outlined his plan.
+
+Grandma Sharpless shook a wise gray head. “I’m glad you’re going to
+stay, young man,” said she. “You need looking after. But as for the
+scheme, I don’t hold much with these new-fangled notions.”
+
+“Perhaps it isn’t as new-fangled as you suppose,” returned the head of
+the household. “I’ve just given Dr. Strong a contract, and where do you
+suppose I got it?”
+
+“That lawyer man of yours, probably,” said Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“Well, he looked it over and made sure it was sound in American law.
+But essentially it’s a copy of a medical contract in force before
+Hippocrates ever rolled a pill. It’s the old logical Chinese form,
+whereby the doctor’s duty is prescribed as warding off sickness, not
+curing it. Is that old-fashioned enough for you, grandma?”
+
+“Chinese! My land!” said the old lady. “What do they know about
+sickness?”
+
+“They know the one most important fact in all medical practice, ma’am,”
+said Dr. Strong, “that the time for locking the stable door is before
+the horse is stolen, and that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound
+of cure.”
+
+
+
+
+II.
+IN TIME OF PEACE
+
+
+“How is the Chinese plan working?” asked Mr. Thomas Clyde, stretching
+himself on the lounge in Dr. Strong’s study.
+
+One week before, the doctor had been officially installed, on the
+Oriental principle of guarding the Clyde household against intruding
+sickness. In that time he had asked few questions. But Mr. Clyde,
+himself a close observer, noted the newcomer’s quietly keen observation
+of the children, and sometimes of Mrs. Clyde, as they met at mealtime.
+He had remarked, too, that the nervous tension of the man was relaxing;
+and guessed that he had found, in his new and unique employment,
+something of that panacea of the troubled soul, congenial work. Now,
+having come to Dr. Strong’s wing of the house by request, he smilingly
+put his question, and was as smilingly answered.
+
+“Your Chinese physician has been making what the Chinese call a
+‘go-look-see.’ In other but less English terms, a reconnaissance.”
+
+“In what department?”
+
+“Earth, air, and water.” The other waved an inclusive hand.
+
+“Any results?”
+
+“Oh, all kinds. Preliminary report now ready. I’d like to make it a
+sort of family conference.”
+
+“Good idea! I’ll send for Mrs. Clyde and Grandma Sharpless.”
+
+“Children out of town?” inquired Dr. Strong suggestively.
+
+“Of course not. Oh, I see. You want us all. Servants, too?”
+
+“The cook certainly. She should be very important to our council of
+war. Perhaps we might leave the rest till later.”
+
+They gathered in the spacious study; and Grandma Sharpless glanced
+round approvingly.
+
+“It’s like family prayers,” she commented.
+
+“Concerted effort _is_ a sort of prayer, if it’s honest,” said Dr.
+Strong gravely. “I’ve never had much of an opinion of the man who gets
+up in meeting to beg the Lord for sound health for himself and family
+and then goes home and sleeps with all his windows closed.”
+
+“There are no closed windows in this house,” said Grandma Sharpless
+emphatically. “I see to that, having been brought up on fresh air
+myself.”
+
+“You show it,” returned the doctor pleasantly.
+
+“And I’ve noticed that this house breathes deep at night, through
+plenty of open windows. So I can save my own breath on that topic. Just
+now I want to talk milk.”
+
+“All our milk comes from my farm,” said the head of the family. “Cows
+are my hobby. You ought to see the place, Strong; it’s only ten miles
+out.”
+
+“I have seen the place.”
+
+“What do you think of it?”
+
+“I think you’d better get your milk somewhere else for a while.”
+
+“Why, Dr. Strong!” protested Mrs. Clyde. “There isn’t a woman among my
+friends who doesn’t envy me our cream. And the milk keeps sweet—oh, for
+days, doesn’t it, Katie?”
+
+“Yes’m,” replied the cook. “Three days, or even four, in the ice-box.”
+
+“Doesn’t that show it’s pure?” asked Mrs. Clyde triumphantly.
+
+Dr. Strong shook his head. “Hardly proof,” he said. “Really clean milk
+will keep much longer. I have drunk milk from the Rochester municipal
+supply that was thirteen days old, and as sweet as possible. And that
+was in a hot August.”
+
+“Thirteen days old! I’d be ashamed to tell it!” declared Grandma
+Sharpless, with so much asperity that there was a general laugh, in
+which the doctor joined.
+
+“I shouldn’t care to try it with your milk. It is rich, but it isn’t by
+any means pure. Eternal vigilance is the price of good milk. I don’t
+suppose you inspect your farm once a month, do you, Mr. Clyde?”
+
+“No; I leave that to the farmer. He’s an intelligent fellow. What’s
+wrong?”
+
+“Scientifically speaking, from 300,000 to 500,000 bacteria per cubic
+centimeter.”
+
+“Do we drink all those things when we have a glass of milk, Dr.
+Strong?” inquired “Manny” Clyde, the oldest boy.
+
+“Four or five times that many for every teaspoonful,” said the doctor.
+“But it isn’t as bad as it sounds, Manny. One hundred thousand is
+considered a fairly safe allowance, though _very_ good milk—the kind I
+drank when it was thirteen days old—may contain only two or three
+thousand. When the count runs up to half a million or so, it shows that
+some kind of impurity is getting in. The bacteria in your milk may not
+be disease germs at all; they may all be quite harmless varieties. But
+sooner or later, if dirt gets into milk, dangerous germs will get in
+with it. The high count is a good danger signal.”
+
+“If Bliss, the farmer, has been allowing dirt to get into the milk,
+he’ll find himself out of a place,” said Mr. Clyde decisively.
+
+“Don’t be too hard on him,” advised the doctor. “His principal fault is
+that he’s getting the milk dirty trying to keep it clean. He is washing
+his cans with water from an open well near the barnyard. The water in
+the well is badly contaminated from surface drainage. That would
+account for the high number of bacteria; that and careless milking.”
+
+“And on that account you advise me to give up the milk?” asked Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“Only temporarily. There are other more immediate considerations. For
+one thing, there are both diphtheria and typhoid near by, and the
+people on the farm are in contact with them. That’s dangerous. You see,
+milk under favorable conditions is one of the best cultures for germs
+that is known. They flourish and multiply in it past belief. The merest
+touch of contamination may spread through a whole supply, like fire
+through flax. One more thing: one of your cows, I fear, is
+tuberculous.”
+
+“We might pasteurize, I suppose,” suggested Mrs. Clyde anxiously.
+
+Dr. Strong returned a decisive negative. “Pasteurized milk is better
+than poisoned milk,” he said; “but it’s a lot worse than good raw milk.
+Pasteurizing simply means the semi-cooking of all the varieties of
+germs, good and bad. In the process of cooking, some of the nutritive
+quality is lost. To be sure, it kills the bad germs, but it also kills
+the good ones.”
+
+“Do you mean that some of the germs are actually useful?” asked Mrs.
+Clyde.
+
+“Very useful, in certain rôles. For example, the lactic acid bacteria
+would be unpopular with you, Mrs. Clyde, because they are responsible
+for the souring of milk. But they also perform a protective work. They
+do their best to destroy any bacilli of disease which may invade their
+liquid home. Now, when you pasteurize, you kill all these millions of
+defenders; and any hostile germs that come along afterward and get into
+the milk, through dust or other mediums, can take possession and
+multiply without hindrance. Therefore pasteurized milk ought to be
+guarded with extra care after the process, which it seldom is. I once
+visited a large pasteurizing plant which made great boasts of its
+purity of product, and saw flies coming in from garbage pail and manure
+heap to contaminate the milk in the vats; milk helpless to protect
+itself, because all its army of defense had been boiled to death.”
+
+“If we are allowed neither to use our farm milk raw nor to pasteurize
+it, what shall we do with it?” inquired Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Full directions are in there,” answered Dr. Strong, pointing to an
+envelope on his desk. “If you’ll look over what I’ve written, and
+instruct your farmer to follow it out, you’ll have milk that is
+reasonably good. I’ll go further than that; it will be even good enough
+to give to the babies of the tenements, if you should have any left
+over.”
+
+Mr. Thomas Clyde proceeded to rub his chin, with some degree of
+concentration, whereby Dr. Strong knew that his hint had struck in.
+
+“Meantime,” said Mrs. Clyde, with a trace of sarcasm, “do you expect us
+to live on condensed milk?”
+
+“Not at all; on certified milk.”
+
+“What’s that mean?” asked Miss Julia, who had a thirst for information.
+
+“What’s a certificate, Junkum?” retorted the doctor.
+
+“That’s what I get when I pass my examinations.”
+
+“Right! Well, milk coming from a farm that passes all its examinations
+gets a certificate from the Medical Society, which keeps a pretty
+constant watch over it. The society sees that all the cattle are tested
+for tuberculosis once in so often; that the cows are brushed off before
+milking; that the milking is done through a cloth, through which no
+dirt or dust can pass, into a can that has been cleaned by steam—not by
+contaminated water—so that no germs will remain alive in it; then
+cooled and sealed up and delivered. From the time the milk leaves the
+cow until it comes on your table, it hasn’t touched anything that isn’t
+germ-proof. That is the system I have outlined in the paper for your
+farmer.”
+
+“It sounds expensive,” commented Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Yes; that is the drawback. Certified milk costs from fifteen to twenty
+cents a quart. But when you consider that nearly half the dead babies
+were poisoned by bad milk it doesn’t seem so expensive, does it?”
+
+“All very well for us,” said Mr. Clyde thoughtfully. “We can afford it.
+But how about the thousands who can’t?”
+
+“There’s the pity of it. Theoretically every city should maintain a
+milk standard up to the requirements of the medical certification, and
+allow no milk to be sold which falls short of that. It’s feasible, and
+it could be done at a moderate price if we could educate the farmer to
+it. Copenhagen’s milk supply is as good as the best certified milk in
+this country, because the great Danish Milk Company cooperates with the
+farmer, and doesn’t try to make huge profits; and its product sells
+under five cents a quart. But, to answer your question, Mr. Clyde: even
+a family of very moderate means could afford to take enough certified
+milk for the baby, and it would pay in doctor’s bills saved. Older
+children and grown-ups aren’t so much affected by milk.”
+
+“I’ll go out to the farm to-morrow,” said Mr. Clyde. “What’s next?”
+
+“Water, Mr. Clyde. I’ve found out where you got your typhoid, last
+summer.”
+
+“Pooh! I could have told you that,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “There was
+sewer-gas in the house. It smelled to heaven the day before he was
+taken down.”
+
+“Isn’t it curious how our belief in ghosts sticks to us!” commented the
+doctor, chuckling,—“malaria rising from swamps; typhoid and diphtheria
+rising in sewer-gas; sheeted specters rising from country
+graveyards—all in the same category.” Grandma Sharpless pushed her
+spectacles up on her forehead, a signal of battle with her. “Do you
+mean to tell me, young man, that there’s no harm in sewer-gas?”
+
+“Far from it! There’s harm enough in sewer-gas, but no germs. The harm
+is that the gas reduces vitality, and makes one more liable to disease
+attack. It’s just as true of coal-gas as of sewer-gas, and more true of
+ordinary illuminating gas than either. I’d much rather have bad
+plumbing in the house than even a small leak in a gas-pipe. No, Mrs.
+Sharpless, if you waited all day at the mouth of a sewer, you’d never
+catch a germ from the gas. Moreover, typhoid doesn’t develop under ten
+days, so your odorous outbreak of the day before could have had nothing
+to do with Mr. Clyde’s illness.”
+
+“Perhaps you’ll give us _your_ theory,” said the old lady, with an
+elaboration of politeness which plainly meant, “And whatever it is, I
+don’t propose to believe it.”
+
+“Not mine, but the City Water Commissioner’s. Mr. Clyde’s case was one
+of about eighty, all within a few weeks of each other. They were all
+due to the criminal negligence of a city official who permitted the
+river supply, which isn’t fit to drink and is used only for fire
+pressure, to flood into the mains carrying the drinking supply.”
+
+“Then why didn’t the whole city get typhoid?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Because only a part of the system was flooded by the river water. The
+problem of the city’s experts was to find out what part was being
+contaminated with this dilute sewage. When the typhoid began to appear,
+the Health Department, knowing the Cypress supply to be pure, suspected
+milk. Not until a score of cases, showing a distribution distinct from
+any milk supply, had appeared, was suspicion directed to the water
+supply. Then the officials of the Water Department and Health
+Department tried a very simple but highly ingenious test. They dumped a
+lot of salt into the intake of the river supply, and tested hydrant
+after hydrant of the reservoir supply, until they had a complete
+outline of the mixed waters. From that it was easy to ascertain the
+point of mixture, and stop it.”
+
+“Our river water is always bad, isn’t it?” said Mr. Clyde. “Last summer
+I had to keep Charley away from swimming-school because the tank is
+filled from the river, and two children got typhoid from swallowing
+some of it.”
+
+“All foolishness, I say,” announced the grandmother. “Better let ‘em
+learn to swim.”
+
+“Can’t you swim at all?” asked Dr. Strong, turning to the
+seven-year-old.
+
+“I went five strokes once,” said Charley. “Hum-m-m! Any other
+swimming-school near by?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“And are the children about water at all?” Dr. Strong asked the mother.
+
+“Well; there are the canal and the river both near us, you know.”
+
+“Then it comes down to this,” said the doctor. “The liability of
+typhoid from what water Charley would swallow in the tank isn’t very
+great. And if he should get it, the chances are we could pull him
+through. With the best care, there should be only one chance in fifty
+of a fatal result. But if Charley falls in the canal and, not knowing
+how to swim, is drowned, why, that’s the end of it. Medical science is
+no good there. Of two dangers choose the lesser. Better let him go on
+with the swimming, Mrs. Clyde.”
+
+“Well!” said Grandma Sharpless, “I—I—I—swanny!” This was extreme
+profanity for her. “Young man, I’m glad to see for once that you’ve got
+sense as well as science!”
+
+“Do you consider the Cypress supply always safe to drink? Several times
+it has occurred to me to outfit the house with filters,” said Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“No need, so long as the present Water Department is in office,”
+returned Dr. Strong. “I might almost add, no use anyway.”
+
+“Isn’t filtered water good?” asked Manny. “They have it at the
+gymnasium.”
+
+“No house filter is absolutely sure. There’s just one way to get a
+guaranteeable water: distill it. But I think you can safely use the
+city supply.”
+
+“What next, the water problem being cleared up?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“By no means cleared up. Assuming that you are reasonably safeguarded
+at home, you’re just as likely—yes, even more likely—to pick up typhoid
+somewhere else.”
+
+“Why more likely?”
+
+“For some mysterious reason a man accustomed to a good water supply is
+the easiest victim to a bad. Pittsburg, for many years the most
+notorious of American cities for filthy drinking, is a case in point.
+Some one pointed out that when Pittsburg was prosperous, and wages
+high, the typhoid rate went up; and when times were hard, it went down.
+Dr. Matson, of the Health Bureau, cleared up that point, by showing
+that the increase in Pittsburg’s favorite disease was mainly among the
+newcomers who flocked to the city when the mills were running full
+time, to fill the demand for labor. An old resident might escape, a new
+one might hardly hope to. Dr. Matson made the interesting suggestion
+that perhaps those who drank the diluted sewage—for that is what the
+river water was—right along, came, in time, to develop a sort of
+immunity; whereas the newcomer was defenseless before the bacilli.”
+
+“Then a man, in traveling, ought to know the water supply of every city
+he goes to. How is he to find out?”
+
+“In your case, Mr. Clyde, he’s to find out from his Chinese doctor,”
+said the other smiling. “I’m collecting data from state and city health
+boards, on that and other points. Air will now come in for its share of
+attention.”
+
+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.”
+
+“Which is exactly why I have insisted on our sticking to the regular
+schools,” put in Mr. Clyde, with the air of quiet decisiveness. “I want
+our children to be brought up like other children!” The mother shook
+her head dubiously. “I wish I were sure it is the right place for
+them.”
+
+“You ought to be sure. I might even say—if you will forgive the implied
+criticism—that you ought to be surer than you are.”
+
+Alarmed at his tone, the mother leaned forward. “Is there anything the
+matter at Number Three?”
+
+“Several things. Nothing that you need worry about immediately,
+however. I’ve been talking with some of the teachers, and found out a
+few points. Charley’s teacher, for instance, tells me that she has a
+much harder time keeping the children up to their work in the winter
+term than at other times.”
+
+“I remember Charley’s tantrums over his arithmetic, last winter,” said
+Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“My head felt funny. Kinder thick,” defended Charley.
+
+“That is bad,” said Dr. Strong, “very bad. I’ve reported the teacher in
+that grade to Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer.”
+
+“Reported teacher?” said Charley, his eyes assuming a prominence quite
+startling. “What for?”
+
+“Starving her grade.”
+
+Mrs. Clyde fairly bounced in her chair. “Our children are not supposed
+to eat at school, Dr. Strong.”
+
+“Starving her grade,” continued the doctor, “in the most important need
+of the human organism, air.”
+
+“How do you reach that conclusion?”
+
+“Evidence and experience. I remember in my college days that the winter
+term was considered to be the most difficult in every year. The
+curriculum didn’t seem to show it, but every professor and every
+undergraduate knew it. Bad air, that’s all. The recitation rooms were
+kept tightly closed. The human brain can’t burn carbon and get a bright
+flame of intelligence without a good draft, and the breathing is the
+draft. Now, on the evidence of Charley’s teacher, when winter comes
+percentages go down, although the lessons are the same. So I asked her
+about the ventilation and found that she had a superstitious dread of
+cold.”
+
+“I remember Miss Benn’s room,” said Julia thoughtfully. “It used to get
+awful hot there. I never liked that grade anyway, and Bobs got such bad
+deportment marks.”
+
+“Both of the twins had colds all the winter they were in that room,”
+contributed Grandma Sharpless.
+
+Up went Dr. Strong’s hands, the long fingers doubled in, in a curious
+gesture which only stress of feeling ever drove him to use.
+
+“‘When will the substitute mothers and fathers who run our schools
+learn about air!” he cried. “Air! It’s the first cry of the newly born
+baby. Air! It’s the last plea of the man with the death-rattle in his
+throat. It’s the one free boon, and we shut it out. If I’m here next
+winter, I think I’ll load up with stones and break some windows!”
+
+“Lemme go with you!” cried Charley, with the eagerness of destruction
+proper to seven years. “On the whole, Charley,” replied the other,
+chuckling a little, “perhaps it’s better to smash traditions. Not
+easier, but better.”
+
+“But you wouldn’t have them study with all the windows open on a zero
+day!” protested Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Wouldn’t I! Far rather than choke them in a close room! Why, in
+Chicago, the sickly children have special classes on the roof, or in
+the yards, all through the cold weather. They study in overcoats and
+mittens. And they _learn_. Not only that, but they thrive on it.”
+
+Mr. Clyde was rubbing his chin hard. “Perhaps our school system isn’t
+all I bragged,” he observed.
+
+“Not in all respects. You still stick to that relic of barbarism, the
+common drinking-cup, after filtering your water. That’s a joke!”
+
+“I don’t see the point,” confessed Mr. Clyde. “Whom is the joke on?”
+
+“All of you who pay for the useless filters and then settle doctors’
+bills for the disease spread by the drinking-cups. Don’t you understand
+that in the common contagious diseases, the mouth is the danger point?
+Now, you may filter water till it’s dry, but if in drinking it you put
+your lips to a cup soiled by the touch of diseased lips, you’re in
+danger. We think too much of the water and too little of what contains
+it. I’ve seen a school in Auburn, New York, and I’ve seen a golf course
+at the Country Club in Seattle, where there isn’t a glass or cup to be
+found; and they have two of the best water supplies I know. A tiny
+fountain spouts up to meet your lips, and your mouth touches nothing
+but the running water. The water itself being pure, you can’t possibly
+get any infection from it.”
+
+“Can you get me a report on that for the Board of Education?” asked Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“It’s already here,” said Dr. Strong quietly. “That is part of my
+Chinese job of watch-dog. One other matter. A teacher in another grade,
+at Number Three, with whom I talked, stood with a pencil, which she had
+taken from one of her scholars, pressed to her lips. While we talked
+she gave it back to the child.”
+
+“Well, land sakes!” said Grandma Sharpless, “where’s the harm? I
+suppose the poor girl was clean, wasn’t she?”
+
+“How do I know? How does anybody know? There is a case on record where
+a teacher carried the virulent bacilli of diphtheria in her throat for
+three months. Suppose she had been careless about putting her lips to
+the various belongings of the children. How many of them do you suppose
+she would have killed with the deadly poison?”
+
+“Didn’t she know she had diphtheria?” asked Junkum, wide-eyed.
+
+“She hadn’t, dear. She was what we call a ‘carrier’ of disease. For
+some reason which we can’t find out, a ‘carrier’ doesn’t fall ill, but
+will give the disease to any one else as surely as a very sick person,
+if the germs from the throat reach the throat or lips of others.”
+
+“Some lectures on hygiene might not be amiss in Number Three,” said Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“That’s what medical school inspectors are for—to teach the teachers.
+The Board of Education should be getting it started.”
+
+“What are you doing over there, Twinkles?” said Mr. Clyde to Bettina,
+who had slipped from his knee and was sliding her chubby fist along the
+window-pane.
+
+The child looked around. “Thwat that fly,” she explained with perfect
+seriousness.
+
+“She has heard the other children talking about the fly-leaflets that
+have been scattered around. Where’s the fly, Toodles?”
+
+“Up they-arr,” replied Bettina, pointing to a far corner of the pane
+where a big “green-bottle” bumped its head against the glass. “Come
+down, buzzy fly.”
+
+“Now, where,” cried Mrs. Clyde, in despair, “do you suppose that
+wretched creature came from? I’m so particular always to keep the rooms
+screened and darkened.”
+
+“Please’m, it might have come from the kitchen,” suggested Katie.
+“There’s a plenty of ‘em there.”
+
+“And before that it came from your next-door neighbor’s manure-heap,”
+added Dr. Strong. “That particular kind of fly breeds only in manure.
+The fact is that the fly is about the nastiest thing alive. Compared to
+it, a hog is a gentleman, and a vulture an epicure. It loves filth, and
+unhappily, it also loves clean, household foods. Therefore the path of
+its feet is direct between the two—from your neighbor’s stable-yard to
+your dinner-table.”
+
+“Disgusting!” cried Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Worse than disgusting: dangerous,” returned Dr. Strong, unmoved by her
+distaste. “A fly’s feet are more than likely to be covered with
+disease-bearing matter, which he leaves behind him.”
+
+“Something ought to be done about Freeman’s manure-heap, next door.
+I’ll see to it,” announced Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Doubtless you could report him for maintaining a nuisance,” admitted
+Dr. Strong; “in which case he might—er—conceivably retort upon you with
+your unscreened garbage-pails, which are hatcheries for another variety
+of fly.”
+
+“That’s a beam in the eye for you, Tom,” said Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“Meantime I’ll have the kitchen windows and doors screened at once,”
+declared Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“That will help,” said Dr. Strong, “though it won’t cure. You can gain
+some idea, from this matter of the flies, how intricate a social
+problem health really is. No man sins to himself alone, in hygiene, and
+no man can thoroughly protect himself against the misdeeds of his
+neighbor. It’s true that there is such a thing as individual
+self-defense by a sort of personal fortifying of the body—I’ll take
+that up some other time—but it’s very limited. You can carry the fight
+into the enemy’s country and eradicate the evil conditions that
+threaten all, only by identifying yourself with your environment, and
+waging war on that basis. Mr. Clyde, do you know anything about the row
+of wooden tenements in the adjoining alley?”
+
+“Saddler’s Shacks? Not much, except that a lot of Italians live there.”
+
+“Some live; some die. The whole settlement is a scandal of
+overcrowding, dirt, and disease. I’ve made out a little local health
+report of the place, for the year. Of course, it’s incomplete; but it’s
+significant. Look it over.”
+
+Mr. Clyde read aloud as follows:—
+
+Diphtheria	11 cases	2 deaths Measles	20	1 Typhoid
+fever	4	2 Scarlet fever	13	1 Whooping-cough	20	3
+Acute intestinal trouble	45	10 Influenza	16	1
+Tuberculosis	6	1 Pneumonia	9	4
+
+“What do you think of it?” asked Dr. Strong.
+
+“It’s a bad showing.”
+
+“It’s a bad showing and a bad property. Why don’t you buy it?”
+
+“Who? I? Are you advising me to buy a job-lot of diseases?” queried Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“Well—as a protective investment. We’d be safe here if those tenements
+were run differently.”
+
+“But we aren’t in touch with them at all. They are around the corner on
+another block.”
+
+“Nevertheless, visitors pass daily between your house and Saddler’s
+Shacks. One of the young men from there delivers bread, often with his
+bare and probably filthy hands. Two of the women peddle fruit about the
+neighborhood. What Saddler’s Shacks get in the way of disease, you may
+easily get by transmission from them. Further, the sanitary
+arrangements of the shacks are primitive, not to say prehistoric, and,
+incidentally, illegal. They are within the area of fly-travel from
+here, so both the human and the winged disease-bearers have the best
+possible opportunity to pick up infection in its worst form.”
+
+“Ugh!” said Mrs. Sharpless. “I’ll never eat with a fly again as long as
+I live!”
+
+“Wouldn’t it be a simple matter to have the Bureau of Health condemn
+the property?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“It would not.” Dr. Strong spoke with curt emphasis.
+
+“Certain features, you said, are illegal.”
+
+“But pull is still stronger than law in this city.”
+
+“Who owns Saddler’s Shacks?” asked Grandma Sharpless, going with
+characteristic directness to the point.
+
+“Mrs. Carson Searle.”
+
+“Why, then, it’s all right,” asserted Mrs. Clyde. “I know Mrs. Searle
+very well. She’s a leader in church and charitable work. Of course, she
+doesn’t know about the condition of the property.”
+
+“She knows enough about it,” retorted Dr. Strong grimly, “to go to the
+Mayor over the Health Officer’s head, and put a stop to Dr. Merritt’s
+order for the premises to be cleaned up at the owner’s expense. She
+wants her profits undisturbed. And now, before the conference breaks
+up, I propose that we organize the Household Protective Association.”
+
+“Oh, can we children belong?” cried Julia.
+
+“Of course. There are offices and honors enough for all. Mr. Clyde
+shall be president; Mrs. Sharpless, vice-president and secretary; Mrs.
+Clyde, treasurer, and each one of the rest of you shall have a
+committee. Katie, I appoint you chairman of the Committee on Food, and
+if any more flies get into your kitchen, you can report ‘em to the
+Committee on Flies, Miss Bettina Clyde, chairman; motto, ‘Thwat that
+fly!’ Manny, you like to go to the farm; you get the Committee on Milk
+Supply. Junkum, your committee shall be that of school conditions.
+Bobs, water is your element. As Water Commissioner you must keep watch
+on the city reports. I’ll see that they are sent you regularly; and the
+typhoid records.”
+
+“You haven’t left anything for me,” protested Charley.
+
+“Haven’t I! You’ve got one of the biggest of all jobs, air. If the
+windows aren’t properly wide when the house is asleep, I want to know
+it from you, and you’ll have to get up early to find out. If the Street
+Cleaning Department sweeps the air full of dust because it’s too lazy
+to wash down the roadway first, we’ll make a committee report to the
+Mayor.”
+
+Bettina, _alias_ Toots, _alias_ Twinkles, _alias_ the Cherub, trotted
+over and laid two plump hands on the doctor’s knee.
+
+“Ain’t you goin’ to be anyfing in the play?” she asked.
+
+“I?” said Dr. Strong. “Of course, Toots. Every real association has to
+have officers and membership, you know. I’m the Member.”
+
+
+
+
+III.
+REPAIRING BETTINA
+
+
+“Medicine would be the ideal profession if it did not involve giving
+pain,” said Dr. Strong, setting a paper-weight upon some school reports
+which had just come in.
+
+“You’ve been here three months and you haven’t hurt any one yet,” said
+Mr. Clyde easily.
+
+“No. I’ve been cautious, and perhaps a little cowardly. My place as
+Chinese doctor has been such a sinecure that I’ve let things go.
+Moreover, I’ve wanted to gain Mrs. Clyde’s confidence as much as
+possible, before coming to the point.”
+
+The expression of Mr. Clyde’s keen, good-humored face altered and
+focused sharply. He scrutinized the doctor in silence. “Well, let’s
+have it,” he said at length. “Is it my wife?”
+
+“No. It’s Bettina.”
+
+The father winced. “That baby!” he said. “Serious?”
+
+“On the contrary, quite simple. _If_ it is handled wisely. But it
+means—pain. Not a great deal; but still, pain.”
+
+“An operation?”
+
+Dr. Strong nodded. “Merely a minor one. I’ve sounded Mrs. Clyde,
+without her knowing it, and she will oppose it. Mrs. Sharpless, too, I
+fear. You know how women dread suffering for the children they love.”
+
+Again Mr. Clyde winced. “It’s—it’s necessary, of course,” he said.
+
+“Not to do it would be both stupid and cruel. Shall we call in the
+women and have it out with them?”
+
+For reply, Mr. Clyde pressed a button and sent the servant who
+responded, for Mrs. Clyde and her mother. Grandma Sharpless arrived
+first, took stock of the men’s grave faces, and sat down silently,
+folding her strong, competent hands in her lap. But no sooner had Mrs.
+Clyde caught sight of her husband’s face than her hand went to her
+throat.
+
+“What is it?” she said. “The children—”
+
+“Nothing to be alarmed about, Mrs. Clyde,” said Dr. Strong quickly. He
+pushed a chair toward her. “Sit down. It’s a question of—of what I
+might call carpenter-work”—the mother laughed a nervous relief—“on
+Betty.”
+
+“Betty?” Her fears fluttered in her voice. “What about Betty?”
+
+“She needs repairing; that’s all.”
+
+“I don’t know what you mean! Is she hurt?”
+
+“Not at all. She is breathing wrong. She breathes through her mouth.”
+
+“Oh!” There was reassurance and a measure even of contempt in Mrs.
+Clyde’s voice. “Lots of children do that. Perhaps she’s got a little
+cold.”
+
+“It isn’t that. This is no new thing with her. She is a
+mouth-breather.”
+
+“I’ll see that it’s corrected,” promised the mother.
+
+“Only one thing can correct it,” said Dr. Strong gravely. “There’s a
+difficulty that must be removed.”
+
+“You mean an operation? On that baby? Do you know that she isn’t five
+yet? And you want to cut her with a knife—”
+
+“Steady, Myra,” came Mr. Clyde’s full, even speech. “Dr. Strong doesn’t
+_want_ to do anything except what he considers necessary.”
+
+“Necessary! Supposing she does breathe through her mouth! What excuse
+is that for torturing her—my baby!”
+
+“I’ll answer that, Mrs. Clyde,” said the doctor, with patient
+politeness. Walking over to the window he threw it up and called, “Oh,
+Tootles! Twinkles! Honorable Miss Cherub, come up here. I’ve got
+something to show you.” And presently in came the child, dragging a
+huge and dilapidated doll.
+
+She was a picture of rosy health, but, for the first time, the mother
+noted the drooping of the lower jaw, and the slight lift of the upper
+lip, revealing the edges of two pearly teeth. Dr. Strong took from a
+drawer a little wooden box, adjusted a lever and, placing the ear
+pieces in Betty’s ears, bade her listen. But the child shook her head.
+Again he adjusted the indicator. This time, too, she said that she
+heard nothing. Not until the fourth change did she announce delightedly
+that she heard a pretty bell, but that it sounded very far away.
+
+“Now we’ll try it on mother,” said the experimenter, and added in a low
+tone as he handed it to Mrs. Clyde, “I’ve set it two points less loud
+than Betty’s mark. Can you hear it?”
+
+Mrs. Clyde nodded. A look of dread came into her eyes.
+
+“Now, Tootles, open your mouth,” directed the doctor, producing a
+little oblong metal contrivance.
+
+“I haven’t got any sore froat,” objected the young lady.
+
+“No, but I want to look at the thoughts inside your head,” he explained
+mysteriously.
+
+With entire confidence the child opened her mouth as wide as possible,
+and Dr. Strong, setting the instrument far back against her tongue,
+applied his eye to the other end.
+
+“All right, Toots,” he said, after a moment. “Get your breath, and then
+let mother look.”
+
+He showed Mrs. Clyde how to press the tiny button setting aglow an
+electric lamp and lighting up the nasal passages above the throat,
+which were reflected on a mirror within the contrivance and thus made
+clear to the eye. Following his instructions, she set her eye to the
+miniature telescope as the physician pressed it against the little
+tongue.
+
+“Well, Betty,” said Dr. Strong, as the implement was again withdrawn,
+“you’ve got very nice thoughts inside that wise little head of yours.
+Now you can continue bringing up your doll in the way she should go.”
+
+As the door closed behind her the mother turned to Dr. Strong.
+
+“Is she going to be deaf?” she asked breathlessly.
+
+“Of course not,” he reassured her. “That will be taken care of. What
+did you see above the back of the throat?”
+
+“Little things like tiny stalactites hanging down.”
+
+“Adenoids.”
+
+“Where could she have gotten adenoids?” cried Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“From her remotest imaginable ancestor, probably.”
+
+“Why, aren’t they a disease?”
+
+“No. An inheritance. The race has always had them. Probably they’re
+vestigial salivary glands, the use of which we’ve outgrown.
+Unfortunately they may overdevelop and block up the air-passages. Then
+they have to come out.”
+
+For the first time in the conference Grandma Sharpless gathered force
+and speech.
+
+“Young man,” she said solemnly—rather accusingly, in fact—“if the Lord
+put adenoids in the human nose he put ‘em there for some purpose.”
+
+“Doubtless. But that purpose, whatever it may have been, no longer
+exists.”
+
+“Everything in the human body has some use,” she persisted.
+
+“Had,” corrected Dr. Strong. “Not has. How about your appendix?”
+
+Mrs. Sharpless’s appendix, like the wicked, had long since ceased from
+troubling, and was now at rest in alcohol in a doctor’s office, having,
+previous to the change of location, given its original proprietress the
+one bad scare of her life. Therefore, she blinked, not being provided
+with a ready answer.
+
+“The ancestors of man,” said Dr. Strong, “were endowed with sundry
+organs, like the appendix and the adenoids, which civilized man is
+better off without. And, as civilized man possesses a God-given
+intelligence to tell him how to get rid of them, he wisely does so when
+it’s necessary.”
+
+“What have the adenoids to do with Betty’s deafness?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Everything. They divert the air-currents, thicken the tubes connecting
+throat and ear, and interfere with the hearing. Don’t let that little
+deficiency in keenness of ear bother you, though. Most likely it will
+pass with the removal of the adenoids. Even if it shouldn’t, it is too
+slight to be a handicap. But I want the child to be repaired before any
+of the familiar and more serious adenoid difficulties are fixed on her
+for life.”
+
+“Are there others?” asked Mrs. Clyde apprehensively.
+
+“Oh, every imaginable kind. How could it be otherwise? Here’s the very
+first principle of life, the breath, being diverted from its proper
+course, in the mouth-breather; isn’t a general derangement of functions
+the inevitable result? The hearing is affected, as I’ve shown you
+already. The body doesn’t get its proper amount of oxygen, and the
+digestion suffers. The lungs draw their air-supply in the wrong way,
+and the lung capacity is diminished. The open mouth admits all kinds of
+dust particles which inflame the throat and make it hospitable to
+infection. By incorrect breathing the facial aspect of the
+mouth-breather is variously modified and always for the worse; since
+the soft facial bones of youth are altered by the continual striking of
+an air-current on the roof of the mouth, which is pushed upward,
+distorting the whole face.”
+
+“None of _our_ children are distorted. You won’t find a better-looking
+lot anywhere,” challenged Mrs. Sharpless, the grandmother’s pride up in
+arms.
+
+“True. None of them has had overdeveloped adenoids, except Betty. The
+others all breathe through their noses. See how different their mouths
+are from Betty’s lifting upper lip—very fascinating now, but
+later—Well, I’ve gone so far as to prepare an object-lesson for you.
+Three extreme types of the mouth-breathers are here from school by my
+invitation to have some lemonade and cakes. They are outside now. When
+they come in, I want each of you to make an analysis of one of them,
+without their seeing it, of course. Talk with them about their work in
+school. You may get ideas from that. Mrs. Sharpless, you take the
+taller of the girls; Mrs. Clyde, you study the shorter. The boy goes to
+you, Mr. Clyde.”
+
+The trio of visitors entered, somewhat mystified, but delighted to be
+the guests of their friend, Dr. Strong, who had a faculty of
+interesting children. So shrewdly did he divert and hold their
+attention that they concluded their visit and left without having
+suspected the scrutiny which they had undergone.
+
+“Now, Mrs. Clyde,” said Dr. Strong, after the good-byes were said,
+“what about your girl?”
+
+“Nothing in particular except that she’s mortally homely and doesn’t
+seem very bright.”
+
+“Homely in what respect?”
+
+“Well, hatchet-faced, to use a slang term.”
+
+“It’s not a slang term any more; it’s a medical term to describe a
+typical result of mouth-breathing. The diversion of the breath destroys
+the even arch of the teeth, pushes the central teeth up, giving that
+squirrel-like expression that is so unpleasantly familiar, lengthens
+the mouth from the lower jaw’s hanging down, and sharpens the whole
+profile to an edge, and an ugly one. Adenoids!”
+
+“My tall girl I thought at first was dull, but I found the poor thing
+was a little deaf,” said Grandma Sharpless. “She’s got a horrid skin;
+so sallow and rough and pimply. I don’t think her digestion is good. In
+fact, she said she had trouble with her stomach.”
+
+“Naturally. Her teeth are all out of place from facial malformation
+caused by mouth-breathing. That means that she can’t properly chew her
+food. That means in turn that her digestion must suffer. That, again,
+means a bad complexion and a debilitated constitution. Adenoids! What’s
+your analysis, Mr. Clyde?”
+
+“That boy? He’s two grades behind where he should be in school. It
+takes him some time to get the drift of anything that’s said to him. I
+should judge his brain is weak. Anyway, I don’t see where he keeps it,
+for the upper part of his face is all wrong, the roof of the mouth is
+so pushed up. The poor little chap’s brain-pan must be contracted.”
+
+“Perfectly correct, and all the result of adenoids again. The boy is
+the worst example I’ve been able to find. But all three of the children
+are terribly handicapped; one by a painful homeliness, one by a ruined
+digestion, and the boy by a mental deficiency—and all simply and solely
+because they were neglected by ignorant parents and still more ignorant
+school authorities.”
+
+“Would you have the public schools deal with such details?” asked Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“Certainly. Have you ever heard what Goler, the Health Officer of
+Rochester, asked that city? ‘Oughtn’t we to close the schools and
+repair the children?’ he asked, and he kept on asking, until now
+Rochester has a regular system of looking after the noses, mouths, and
+eyes of its young. They want their children, in that city, to start the
+battle of life in fighting trim.”
+
+“But you don’t see many misshapen children about,” objected Mrs.
+Sharpless.
+
+“Then it’s because you don’t look. Call to your mind Hogarth’s
+caricatures. Do you remember that in his crowds there are always
+clubfooted, or humpbacked, or deformed people? In those days such
+deformities were very common because medical science didn’t know how to
+correct them in the young. To-day facial deformities, to the scientific
+eye, are quite as common, though not as obvious. We’re just learning
+how to correct them, and to know that the hatchet-face is a far more
+serious clog on a human being’s career than is the clubfoot.”
+
+“If Betty had a clubfoot, of course—” began Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Of course, you’d have it repaired at whatever cost of suffering. You’d
+submit her to a long and serious operation; and probably to the
+constant pain of a rigid iron frame upon her leg for months, perhaps
+years. To obviate the deformity you’d consider that not too high a
+price to pay, and rightly. Well, here is the case of a more
+far-reaching malformation, curable by a minor operation, without
+danger, mercifully quick, with only the briefest after-effects of pain,
+and you draw back from it. Why?”
+
+“The thought of the knife on that little face. Is—is that all there is
+to be done?”
+
+“No, there are the teeth. They should be looked to.”
+
+“Nonsense! They’re only first teeth,” said
+
+Grandma Sharpless vigorously. “What does a doctor know about teeth?”
+
+“Lots, if he knows his business. There would be fewer dyspeptics if
+physicians in general sent their patients to the dentist more promptly,
+and kept them in condition to chew their food.”
+
+“That’s all very well, when people have their real, lasting teeth,”
+returned the grandmother. “But Betty’s first set will be gone in a few
+years. Then it will be time enough to bother the poor child.”
+
+“Apparently, Mrs. Sharpless,” said Dr. Strong mildly, “you consider
+that teeth come in crops, like berries; one crop now, a second and
+distinct crop later. That isn’t the way growth takes place in the human
+mouth. The first teeth are to the second almost what the blossom is to
+the fruit. I shall want immediately to take Betty to the dentist, and
+have him keep watch over her mouth with the understanding that he may
+charge a bonus on every tooth he keeps in after its time. The longer
+the first lot lasts, the better the second lot are. But there is no use
+making the minor repairs unless the main structure is put right first.”
+
+“I must see Betty,” said Mrs. Clyde abruptly, and left the room. Mrs.
+Sharpless followed. “Now comes the first real split.” Dr. Strong turned
+to Mr. Clyde. “They’re going to vote me down.”
+
+“If it comes to a pinch,” said Mr. Clyde quietly, “my wife will accept
+my decision.”
+
+“That is what I want to avoid. Where would my influence with her be, if
+I were obliged to appeal to you on the very first test of professional
+authority? No, I shall try to carry this through myself, even at the
+risk of having to seem a little brutal.”
+
+Mr. Clyde lifted his eyebrows, but he only nodded, as the door opened
+and the two women reentered.
+
+“Doctor,” said Mrs. Clyde, “if, in a year from now, Betty hasn’t
+outgrown the mouth-breathing, I—I—you may take what measures you think
+best.”
+
+“In a year from now, the danger will be more advanced. There is not the
+faintest chance of correction of the fault without an operation.”
+
+“I can’t help it! I can’t stand the thought of it, now,” said Mrs.
+Clyde brokenly. “You should see her, poor baby, as she looks now,
+asleep on the lounge in the library, and even you, Doctor” (the doctor
+smiled a little awry at that), “couldn’t bear to think of the blood and
+the pain.” She was silent, shuddering.
+
+“My dear Mrs. Clyde, the blood will be no more than a nosebleed, and
+the pain won’t amount to much, thanks to anaesthesia. Let me see.” He
+stepped to the door and, opening it softly, looked in, then beckoned to
+the others to join him.
+
+The child lay asleep on her side, one cupped pink hand hanging, the
+other back of her head. Her jaw had dropped and the corner of the mouth
+had slackened down in an unnatural droop. The breath hissed a little
+between the soft lips. Dr. Strong closed the door again.
+
+“Well?” he said, and there was a suggestion of the sternness of
+judgment in the monosyllable.
+
+“I am her mother.” Mrs. Clyde faced him, a spot of color in each cheek.
+“A mother is a better judge of her children than any doctor can be!”
+
+“You think so?” said Dr. Strong deliberately. “Then I must set you
+right. Do you recall sending Charley away from the table for
+clumsiness, two days ago?”
+
+“Why, yes.” Mrs. Clyde’s expressive eyes widened. “He overturned his
+glass, after my warning him.”
+
+“And once last week for the same thing?”
+
+“Yes, but what—”
+
+“Pardon me, do you think your mother-judgment was wise then?”
+
+“Well, really, Dr. Strong,” said Mrs. Clyde, flushing, “you will hardly
+assume the right of control of the children’s manners—”
+
+“This is not a question of manners. There is where your error lies,”
+interrupted the doctor. “Against your mother-judgment I set my
+doctor-judgment, and I tell you now”—his voice rose a little from its
+accustomed polished smoothness, and took on authority—“I tell you that
+the boy is no more responsible for his clumsiness than Betty is for bad
+breathing. It’s a disease, very faint but unmistakable.”
+
+“Not Charley!” said his father incredulously, “Why, he’s as husky as a
+colt.”
+
+“He will be, please God, in a few years, but just now he has—don’t be
+alarmed; it’s nothing like so important as it sounds—he has a slight
+heart trouble, probably the sequel to that light and perhaps mismanaged
+diphtheria attack. It’s quite a common result and is nearly always
+outgrown, and it shows in almost unnoticeable lack of control of hands
+and feet. I observed Charley’s clumsiness long ago; listened at his
+heart, and heard the murmur there.”
+
+“And you never told us!” reproached the grandmother.
+
+“What was the use? There’s nothing to be done; nothing that needs to be
+done, except watch, and that I’ve been doing. And I didn’t want to
+worry you.”
+
+“Then I’ve been punishing him for what wasn’t his fault,” said Mrs.
+Clyde in a choked voice.
+
+“You have. Don’t punish Betty for what isn’t hers,” countered the
+physician, swiftly taking advantage of the opening. “Give her her
+chance. Mrs. Clyde, if Betty were my own, she could hardly have wound
+herself more closely around my heartstrings. I want to see her grow
+from a strong and beautiful child to a strong and beautiful girl, and
+finally to a strong and beautiful woman. It rests with you. Watch her
+breathing to-night, as she sleeps—and tell me to-morrow.”
+
+He rose and left the room. Mr. Clyde walked over and put a hand softly
+on his wife’s soft hair; then brushed her cheek with his lips.
+
+“It’s up to you, dearest,” he said gently.
+
+Three days later, Betty, overhanging the side fence, was heard, by her
+shamelessly eavesdropping father, imparting information to her
+next-door neighbor and friend.
+
+“You’d ought to get a new nothe, Thally. It don’t hurt much, an’
+breathin’ ith heapth more fun!”
+
+Pondering a chain of suggestions induced by this advice, Mr. Clyde
+walked slowly to the house. As was his habit in thought, he proceeded
+to rub the idea into his chin, which was quite pink from friction by
+the time he reached the library. There he found Dr. Strong and Mrs.
+Sharpless in consultation.
+
+“What are you two conspiring about?” he asked, ceasing to rub the
+troubled spot.
+
+“Matter of school reports,” answered the doctor. He glanced at the
+other’s chin and smiled. “And what is worrying you?” he asked.
+
+“I’m wondering whether I haven’t made a mistake.”
+
+“Quite possibly. It’s done by some of our best people,” remarked the
+physician dryly.
+
+“Not a pleasant possibility in this case. You remember quoting
+Rochester as to closing the schools and repairing the children. To-day,
+as I heard Betty commenting on her new nose, it suddenly came to me
+that I was obstructing that very system of repairs by which she is
+benefiting, for less fortunate youngsters in our schools.”
+
+“You!” said Dr. Strong in surprise.
+
+“As president of the Public Health League. The Superintendent of
+Schools came to me with a complaint against Dr. Merritt, the Health
+Officer, who, he claimed, was usurping authority in his scheme for a
+special inspection system to examine all schoolchildren at regular
+intervals.”
+
+“Ought to have been established long ago,” declared Dr. Strong.
+
+“The Superintendent thinks otherwise. He claims that it would interfere
+with school routine. It’s the duty of the health officials, he says, to
+control epidemics from without, to keep sickness out of the schools,
+not to hunt around among the children, scaring them to death about
+diseases that probably aren’t there.”
+
+Dr. Strong muttered something which Grandma Sharpless pretended not to
+hear. “And you’ve agreed to support him in that attitude?” he queried.
+
+“Well, I’m afraid I’ve half committed myself.”
+
+“Heaven forgive you! Why, see here, Clyde, your dodo of a
+superintendent talks of keeping sickness out of the schools. Doesn’t
+that mean keeping sickness out of the pupils? There’s just one way to
+do that: get every child into the best possible condition of
+repair—eyes, ears, nose, throat, teeth, stomach, everything, and
+maintain them in that state. Then disease will have a hard time
+breaking down the natural resistance of the system. Damaged organs in a
+child are like flaws in a ship’s armor-plate; a vital weakening of the
+defenses. And remember, the child is always battling against one
+besieging germ or another.”
+
+“Why can’t medical science wipe out the germs?” demanded Mrs.
+Sharpless. “It’s always claiming to do such wonders.”
+
+“In a few instances it can. In typhoid we fight and win the battle from
+the outside by doing that very thing. In smallpox, and to a lesser
+extent in diphtheria, we can build up an effective artificial barrier
+by inoculation. But, as medical men are now coming to realize, in the
+other important contagions of childhood, measles, whooping-cough, and
+scarlet fever, we must fight the disease from inside the individual;
+that is, make as nearly impregnable as possible the natural
+fortifications of the body to resist and repel the invasion. That is
+what school medical inspection aims at.”
+
+“You wouldn’t rank whooping-cough and measles with scarlet fever, would
+you?” said Mrs. Sharpless incredulously.
+
+“Why not? Although scarlet fever has the worst after-effects,—though
+not much more serious than those of measles,—the three are almost equal
+so far as the death-rate is concerned.”
+
+“Surely not!” protested the old lady. “Why, I’d rather have measles in
+the house ten times, or whooping-cough either, than scarlet fever
+once.”
+
+“You’re about ten times as likely to have.”
+
+She looked puzzled. “But what did you mean by saying that one of ‘em is
+as bad as the other?”
+
+“That it’s as dangerous to the community, though not to the
+individual.”
+
+“Just a little deep for me, too,” confessed Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Yet it’s perfectly simple. Here, take an example. Would you rather be
+bitten by a rattlesnake or a mosquito?”
+
+“A mosquito, of course.”
+
+“Naturally. Yet a rattlesnake country is a good deal safer than a
+mosquito country. You wouldn’t hesitate, on account of your health, to
+move to Arizona, where rattlesnakes live?”
+
+“I suppose not.”
+
+“But you _would_ be afraid to establish your family in the malarious
+swamps of the South?”
+
+“Certainly.”
+
+“Well, people who die of malaria die of mosquito bite, since the
+mosquito is the only agency of infection. Thus, it reduces to this:
+that while the individual rattler is more dangerous than the individual
+mosquito, the mosquito, in general, kills her thousands where the snake
+kills one. Now—with considerable modification of the ratio—scarlet
+fever is the rattlesnake; whooping-cough and measles are the
+mosquitoes. It is just as important to keep measles out of a community
+as it is to shut out scarlet fever. In fact, if you will study the
+records of this city, you will find that in two out of the last three
+years, measles has killed more people than scarlet fever, and
+whooping-cough more than either of them.”
+
+“What are we going to do about it?” asked the practical-minded Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“Ah, if some one would only tell us that! In measles the worst of the
+harm is done before the disease announces itself definitely. The most
+contagious stage is previous to the appearance of the telltale rash.
+There’s nothing but a snuffling nose, and perhaps a very little fever
+to give advance notice that the sufferer is a firebrand.”
+
+“Well, you can’t shut a child out of school for every little sore
+throat,” observed Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“As to that I’m not so sure,” replied the physician slowly and
+thoughtfully. “A recent writer on school epidemics has suggested
+educating the public to believe that every sore throat is contagious.”
+
+“That isn’t true, is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“No. Personally I believe that, while a physician is often justified in
+deceiving his patient, he is never justified in fooling the public. In
+the long run they find him out and his influence for good is lessened.
+Yet that sore-throat theory is near enough true to be a strong
+temptation. Every sore throat is suspicious; that isn’t too much to
+say. And, with a thorough school-inspection system, it is quite
+possible that epidemics could be headed off by isolating the
+early-discovered cases of sore throat. But, an epidemic of the common
+contagions, once well under way, seems to be quite beyond any certainty
+of control.”
+
+“Do you mean to say that quarantine and disinfection and isolation are
+all useless?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“No. I won’t go as far as that. They may exercise a check in some
+cases. But I will say this: that all our cumbersome and expensive and
+often harassing hygienic measures in the contagious diseases haven’t
+made good. Obviously, if they had, we should see a diminution of the
+ills which they are supposed to limit. There is no diminution. No,
+we’re on the wrong tack. Until we know what the right tack is, we
+perhaps ought to keep on doing what we can in the present line. It’s a
+big, complicated subject, and one that won’t be settled until we find
+out what scarlet fever, measles, and whooping-cough really are, and
+what causes them. While we’re waiting for the bacteriologist to tell us
+that, the soundest principle of defense that we have is to keep the
+body up to its highest pitch of resistance. That is why I support
+medical inspection for schools as an essential measure.”
+
+“To repair the children without closing the schools, if I may modify
+Dr. Goler’s epigram,” suggested Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Exactly. Eventually we shall have to build as well as repair. A very
+curious thing is happening to Young America in the Eastern States. The
+growing generation is shrinking in weight and height.”
+
+“Which is almost contradictory enough for a paradox,” remarked Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“It’s a melancholy and literal fact. You know, there’s a height and
+weight basis for age upon which our school grading system rests. The
+authorities have been obliged to reconstruct it because the children
+are continuously growing smaller for their years. _There’s_ work for
+the inspection force!”
+
+“You’d put the children on pulleys and stretch ‘em out, I suppose!”
+gibed Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“That might work, too,” replied the doctor, unruffled. “The Procrustean
+system isn’t so bad, if old Procrustes had only sent his victims to the
+gymnasium instead of putting them to bed. Yes, a quarter of an hour
+with the weight-pulleys every day would help undersized kiddies a good
+deal. But principally I should want the school-inspectors to keep the
+youngsters playing.”
+
+“You don’t have to teach a child to play,” sniffed Grandma Sharpless,
+with womanly scorn of mere man’s views concerning children.
+
+“Pardon me, Mrs. Sharpless, you taught your children to play.”
+
+“I! Whatever makes you think that?”
+
+“The simple fact that they didn’t die in babyhood.”
+
+Mrs. Sharpless looked at him with a severity not unmingled with
+suspicion. “Sometimes, young man,” she observed, “you talk like a—a—a
+gump!”
+
+“Take that, Strong!” said Mr. Clyde, joining in the doctor’s laugh
+against himself.
+
+“Facts may sometimes sound foolish,” admitted Dr. Strong. “If they do,
+that’s the fault of the speaker. And it _is_ a fact that every mother
+teaches her baby to play. Watch the cat if you don’t believe me. The
+wisest woman in America points out in her recent book that it is the
+mother’s playing with her baby which rouses in it the will to live.
+Without that will to live none of us would survive.”
+
+“I don’t know who your wisest woman in America may be, but I don’t
+believe she knows what she is talking about,” declared Grandma
+Sharpless flatly.
+
+“I’ve never known her when she didn’t,” retorted the doctor. “If Jane
+Addams of Hull House isn’t an expert in life, mental, moral, and
+physical, then there’s no such person! Why, see here, Mrs. Sharpless;
+do you know why a baby’s chance of survival is less in the very best
+possible institution without its mother, than in the very worst
+imaginable tenement with its mother, even though the mother is unable
+to nurse it?”
+
+“It isn’t as well tended, I expect.”
+
+“All its physical surroundings are a thousand times more advantageous:
+better air, better food, better temperature, better safeguarding
+against disease; yet babies in these surroundings just pine away and
+die. It’s almost impossible to bring up an infant on an institutional
+system. The infant death-rate of these well-meaning places is so
+appalling that nobody dares tell it publicly. And it is so, simply
+because there is no one to play with the babies. The nurses haven’t the
+time, though they have the instinct. I tell you, the most wonderful,
+mystic, profound thing in all the world, to me, is the sight of a young
+girl’s intuitive yearning to dandle every baby she may see. That’s the
+universal world-old, world-wide, deep-rooted genius of motherhood,
+which antedates the humankind, stirring within her and impelling her to
+help keep the race alive—by playing with the baby.”
+
+“H’m! I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” confessed Grandma Sharpless.
+“There may be something in what you say, young man. But by the time
+children reach school age I guess they’ve learned that lesson.”
+
+“Not always. At least, not properly, always. Let’s consult the
+Committee on School of our household organization.”
+
+He sent for eight-year-old Julia.
+
+“Question to lay before you, Miss Chairwoman,” said Dr. Strong. “How
+many of the girls in your grade hang around the hall or doorways during
+recess?”
+
+“Oh, lots!” said Julia promptly.
+
+“Are they the bigger girls? or the smaller ones?” The Committee on
+School considered the matter gravely. “Mary Hinks, she’s tall, but
+she’s awful thin and sickly,” she pronounced. “Dot Griswold and Cora
+Smith and Tiny Warley—why, I guess they’re most all the littlest girls
+in the class.”
+
+Dr. Strong nodded. “Sure to be the undernourished, anaemic, lethargic
+ones,” said he. “They’re forgetting the lessons of their babyhood.
+Insensibly they are losing the will to live. But there’s nobody to tell
+them so. A thorough medical inspection service would correct that. It
+would include school-nurses who would go to the homes of the children
+and tell the parents what was the matter. Such a system might not be
+warranted to keep epidemics out of our schools, but it would stretch
+out and fill out those meager youngsters’ brains as well as bodies, and
+fit them to combat illness if it did come. The whole theory of the
+school’s attitude toward the child seems to me misconceived by those
+who have charge of the system. It assumes too much in authority and
+avoids too much in responsibility.
+
+“Take the case of John Smith, who has two children to bring up under
+our enlightened system of government. Government says to John Smith,
+‘Send your children to school!’ ‘Suppose I don’t wish to?’ says John
+Smith. ‘You’ve got to,’ says Government. ‘It isn’t safe for me to have
+them left uneducated.’ ‘Will you take care of them while they’re at
+school?’ says John Smith. ‘I’ll train their minds,’ says Government.
+‘What about their bodies?’ says John Smith. ‘Hm!’ says Government;
+‘that’s a horse of another color.’ ‘Then I’ll come with them and see
+that they’re looked after physically,’ says John Smith. ‘You _will_
+not!’ says Government. ‘I’m _in loco ‘parentis_, while they’re in
+school.’ ‘Then you take the entire _loco_ of the _parentis_,’ says John
+Smith. ‘If you take my children away on the ground that you’re better
+fitted to care for their minds than I am, you ought to be at least as
+ready to look after their health. Otherwise,’ says John Smith, ‘go and
+teach yourself to stand on your head. You can’t teach _my_ children.’
+Now,” concluded Dr. Strong, “do you see any flaws in the Smith point of
+view?”
+
+“Just plain common sense,” approved Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“Clyde,” said Dr. Strong, with a twinkle, “if you don’t stop rubbing a
+hole in your chin, I’ll have to repair _you_. What’s preying on your
+mind?”
+
+“I am trying,” replied Mr. Clyde deliberately, “to figure out, with
+reference to the School Superintendent and myself, just how a man who
+has made a fool of himself can write a letter to another man who has
+helped the first man make a fool of himself, admitting that he’s made a
+fool of himself, and yet avoid embarrassment, either to the man who has
+made a fool of himself or to the other man who aided the man in making
+a fool of himself. Do you get that?”
+
+Dr. Strong rose. “I’m a Chinese doctor,” he observed, “not a Chinese
+puzzle-solver. That’s a matter between you and your ink-well. Meantime,
+having attained the point for which I’ve been climbing, I now declare
+this session adjourned.”
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+THE CORNER DRUG-STORE
+
+
+“No, it won’t add to the attractiveness of the neighborhood, perhaps,”
+said Mrs. Clyde thoughtfully. “But how convenient it will be!”
+
+Mr. Clyde had come home with the news that a drug-store was to be
+opened shortly on the adjacent corner. Shifting his position to dodge a
+foliage-piercing shaft of sunlight—they were all sitting out on the
+shady lawn, in the cool of a September afternoon—Dr. Strong shook his
+head.
+
+“Too convenient, altogether,” he observed.
+
+“How’s that?” queried Mr. Clyde. “A drugstore is like a gun in Texas:
+you may not need it often, but when you do need it, you need it like
+blazes.”
+
+“True enough. But most people over-patronize the drug-store.”
+
+“Not this family; at least, since our house-doctor came to keep us well
+on the Chinese plan,” said Mrs. Clyde gracefully.
+
+But Dr. Strong only looked rueful. “Your Chinese doctor has to plead
+guilty to negligence of what has been going on under his very nose.”
+
+“Oh, not more trouble!” pleaded Mrs. Clyde. She had come through the
+dreaded ordeal of little Betty’s operation for adenoids—which had
+proved to be, after all, so slight and comparatively painless—with a
+greatly augmented respect for and trust in Dr. Strong; but her nerves
+still quivered.
+
+“Nothing to trouble you,” the doctor assured her, “but enough to make
+me feel guilty—and stupid. Have you noticed any change in Manny,
+lately?”
+
+“Manny” was fourteen-year-old Maynard Clyde, the oldest of the
+children; a high school lad, tall, lathy, athletic, and good-tempered.
+
+“The boy is as nervous as a witch,” put in Grandma Sharpless. “I’ve
+noticed it since early summer.”
+
+“Then I wish you had taught me my trade,” said Dr. Strong. “Manny is so
+husky and active that I’ve hardly given him a thought.”
+
+“Well, what’s wrong with him?” asked the father anxiously.
+
+“Too much drug-store,” was the prompt reply. “Not drugs!” cried Mrs.
+Clyde, horrified. “That child!”
+
+“Well, no; not in the sense you mean it. Wait; there he is now. Manny!”
+he called, raising his voice. “Come over here a minute, will you?” The
+boy ambled over, and dropped down on the grass. He was brown, thin, and
+hard-trained; but there was a nervous pucker between his eyes, which
+his father noted for the first time. “What’s this? A meeting of the
+Board? Anything for the Committee on Milk Supply to do?” he asked.
+
+“Not at present,” answered Dr. Strong, “except to answer a question or
+two. You don’t drink coffee, do you?”
+
+“Of course not. I’m trying for shortstop on the junior nine, you know.”
+
+“How are you making out?”
+
+“Rotten!” said the boy despondently. “I don’t seem to have any grip on
+myself this year. Sort o’ get the rattles.”
+
+“Hm-m-m. Feel pretty thirsty after the practice, and usually stop in at
+the soda-fountain for some of those patent soft drinks advertised to be
+harmless but stimulating, don’t you?”
+
+“Yes,” said the boy, surprised.
+
+“Ah,” said the doctor carelessly; “three or four glasses a day, I
+suppose?”
+
+Manny thought a moment. “All of that,” he said.
+
+“Well, you quit it,” advised the doctor, “if you want to make the ball
+team. It will put you off your game worse than tea or coffee. Tell the
+athletic instructor I said so, will you?”
+
+“Sure!” said the boy. “I didn’t know there was any harm in it.”
+
+As Manny walked away, Dr. Strong turned to
+
+Mr. Clyde. “I found out about Manny by accident. No wonder the boy is
+nervous. He’s been drinking that stuff like water, with no thought of
+what’s in it.”
+
+“What _is_ in it?” said Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Caffeine, generally. The most widely used of the lot is a mixture of
+fruit syrups doctored up with that drug. There’s as much
+nerve-excitation in a glass of it—yes, and more—than in a cup of strong
+coffee. What would you think of a fourteen-year-old boy who drank five
+cups of strong coffee every day?”
+
+“I’d think his parents were fools,” declared Grandma Sharpless bluntly.
+
+“Or his physician,” suggested Dr. Strong. “I’ve seen cases of people
+drinking twenty to twenty-five glasses of that ‘harmless’ stuff every
+day. Of course, they were on the road to nervous smash-up. But the
+craving for it was established and they hadn’t the nerve to stop.”
+
+“The soda-fountain as a public peril,” said Mr. Clyde, with a smile.
+
+“There’s more in that than can be smiled away,” retorted the doctor
+vigorously. “What between nerve-foods that are simply disguised
+‘bracers,’ and dangerous, heart-depressing dopes, like bromo-seltzer,
+the soda-fountain does its share of damage in the community.”
+
+“What about soda-water; that is innocent, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Yes. If the syrups are pure, soda-water is a good thing in moderation.
+So are the mineral waters. But there is this to be said about
+soda-water and candy, particularly the latter—”
+
+“I’ve always said,” broke in Grandma Sharpless, “that candy-eating
+would ruin any digestion.”, “Then you’ve always been wrong, ma’am,”
+said Dr. Strong. “Candy, well and honestly made, is excellent food at
+the proper time. The trouble is, both with candy and with the heavy,
+rich soda-waters, that people are continually filling up with them
+between meals. Now the stomach is a machine with a great amount of work
+to do, and is entitled to some consideration. Clyde, what would happen
+to the machines in your factory, if you didn’t give them proper
+intervals of rest?”
+
+“They’d be very short-lived,” said Mr. Clyde. “There’s a curious thing
+about machinery which everybody knows but nobody understands: running a
+machine twenty-four hours a day for one week gives it harder wear than
+running it twelve hours a day for a month. It needs a regular rest.”
+
+“So with the machinery of digestion,” said the doctor. “The stomach and
+intestines have their hard work after meals. How are they to rest up,
+if an odd lot of candy or a slab of rich ice-cream soda come sliding
+down between whiles to be attended to? Eat your candy at the end of a
+meal, if you want it. It’s a good desert. But whatever you eat, give
+your digestion a fair chance.”
+
+“You can digest anything if you use Thingumbob Pills,” observed Mr.
+Clyde sardonically. “The newspapers say so.”
+
+“That’s the kind of doctrine that makes dyspeptics,” returned Dr.
+Strong. “The American stomach is the worst-abused organ in creation.
+Saliva is the true digestive. If people would take time to chew
+properly, half the dyspepsia-pill fakers would go out of business. If
+they’d take time to exercise properly, the other half would disappear.”
+
+“Liver pills were my regular dependence a few years ago,” remarked Mr.
+Clyde. “Since I took up hand-ball I haven’t needed them. But I suppose
+that half the business men in town think they couldn’t live without
+drugging themselves two or three times a week.”
+
+“Undoubtedly. Tell the average American any sort of a lie in print,
+about his digestion, and he’ll swallow it whole, together with the drug
+which the lie is intended to sell. Look at the Cascaret advertising.
+Its tendency is to induce, not an occasional recourse to Cascarets, but
+a steady use of them. Any man foolish enough to follow the advice of
+the advertisements would form a Cascaret habit and bring his digestion
+into a state of slavery. That sort of appeal has probably ruined more
+digestions and spoiled more tempers than any devil-dogma ever put into
+type.”
+
+“Castor-oil is good enough for me,” said Grandma Sharpless
+emphatically.
+
+“It’s good enough for anybody—that is to say, bad enough and nasty
+enough so that there isn’t much danger of its being abused. But these
+infernal sugar-coated candy cathartics get a hold on a man’s intestinal
+organization so that it can’t do its work without ‘em, and, Lord knows,
+it can’t stand their stimulus indefinitely. Then along comes
+appendicitis.”
+
+“But some of the laxative medicines advertise to prevent appendicitis,”
+said Mrs. Clyde.
+
+Dr. Strong’s face was very grim. “Yes, they advertise. Commercial
+travelers, because of their irregular habits, are great pill-guzzlers
+as a class. Appendicitis is a very common complaint among them. A
+Pittsburgh surgeon with a large practice among traveling men has kept
+records, and he believes that more than fifty per cent of the
+appendicitis cases he treats are caused by the ‘liver-pill’ and
+‘steady-cathartic’ habit. He explains his theory in this way. The man
+begins taking the laxative to correct his bad habits of life. Little by
+little he increases his dose, as the digestive mechanism grows less
+responsive to the stimulus, until presently an overdose sets his
+intestines churning around with a violence never intended by nature.
+Then, under this abnormal peristalsis, as it is called, the appendix
+becomes infected, and there’s nothing for it but the surgeon’s knife.”
+
+“Would you have people run to the doctor and pay two dollars every time
+their stomach got a little out of kilter?” asked Mrs. Sharpless
+shrewdly.
+
+“Run to the doctor; run to the minister; run to the plumber; run
+anywhere so long as you run far enough and fast enough,” answered Dr.
+Strong with a smile. “A mile a day at a good clip, or three miles of
+brisk walking would be the beginning of a readjustment. Less food more
+slowly eaten and no strong liquors would complete the cure in nine
+cases out of ten. The tenth case needs the doctor; not the
+newspaper-and-drug-store pill.”
+
+“But all patent medicines aren’t bad, are they?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+“Some have very good testimonials.”
+
+“Bought or wheedled. Any medicine which claims to _cure_ is a fraud and
+a swindle.”
+
+“Don’t tell me, young man!” said Grandma Sharpless. “You doctors are
+prejudiced against patent medicines, but we old folks have used ‘em
+long enough to know which are good and which are bad. Now I don’t claim
+but what the Indian herb remedies and the ‘ready reliefs’ and that lot
+are frauds. But my family was brought up on teething powders and
+soothing syrups.”
+
+“Then you’re fortunate,” said Dr. Strong sternly, “that none of them
+has turned out to be an opium fiend.”
+
+The instant he said it, he saw, with sharp regret, that his shaft had
+sped true to the mark. The clear, dark red of a hale old age faded from
+Grandma Sharpless’s cheeks. Mr. Clyde shot a quick glance of warning at
+him.
+
+“And speaking of Indian remedies,” went on the doctor glibly, “I
+remember as a boy—”
+
+“Stop a minute,” said Grandma Sharpless steadily. “The truth isn’t
+going to hurt me. Or, if it does hurt, maybe it’s right it should. I
+had a younger brother who died in a sanitarium for drug-habit when he
+was twenty-four. As a child he pretty nearly lived on soothing syrups;
+had to have them all the time, because he was such a nervous little
+fellow; always having earache and stomach-ache, until he was eight or
+nine years old. Then he got better and became a strong, active boy, and
+a robust man. After his college course he went to Philadelphia, and was
+doing well when he contracted the morphine habit—how or why, we never
+knew. It killed him in three years. Do you think—is it possible that
+the soothing syrups—I’ve heard they have morphine in them—had anything
+to do with his ruin?”
+
+“Why, Mrs. Sharpless,” said the other, very gently, “I can only put it
+before you in this way. Here is one of the most subtle and enslaving of
+all drugs, morphine. It is fed to a child, in the plastic and formative
+years of life, regularly. What surer way could there be of planting the
+seeds of drug-habit? Suppose, for illustration, we substitute alcohol,
+which is far less dangerous. If you gave a child, from the time of his
+second year to his eighth, let us say, two or three drinks of whiskey
+every day, and that child, when grown up, developed into a drunkard,
+would you think it strange?”
+
+“I’d think it strange if he didn’t.”
+
+“Apply the same logic to opium, or its derivative, morphine. There are
+a dozen preparations regularly used for children, containing opium, or
+morphine, such as Mrs. Winslow’s ‘Soothing Syrup,’ and Kopp’s ‘Baby
+Friend.’ This is well known, and it is also a recognized fact that the
+morphine and opium habit is steadily increasing in this country. Isn’t
+it reasonable to infer a connection between the two? Further, some of
+the highest authorities believe that the use of these drugs in
+childhood predisposes to the drink habit also, later in life. The
+nerves are unsettled; they are habituated to a morbid craving, and, at
+a later period, that craving is liable to return in a changed
+manifestation.”
+
+“But a drug-store can’t sell opium or morphine except on prescription,
+can it?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“It can _in a patent medicine_,” replied the doctor. “That’s one of the
+ugly phases of the drug business. Yet it’s possible to find honest
+people who believe in these dopes and even give testimonials to them.”
+
+“Some testimonials are hard to believe,” said Mrs. Clyde, thankfully
+accepting the chance to shift the conversation to a less painful phase
+of the topic. “Old Mrs. Dibble in our church is convinced that she owes
+her health to Hall’s Catarrh Cure.” Dr. Strong smiled sardonically.
+“That’s the nostrum which offers one hundred dollars reward for any
+case it can’t cure; and when a disgusted dupe tried to get the one
+hundred dollars, they said he hadn’t given their remedy a sufficient
+trial: he’d taken only twenty-odd bottles. So your friend thinks that a
+useless mixture of alcohol and iodide of potassium fixed her, does
+she?”
+
+“Why shouldn’t she? She had a case of catarrh. She took three bottles
+of the medicine, and her catarrh is all gone.”
+
+“All right. Let’s extend her line of reasoning to some other cases.
+While old Mr. Barker, around on Halsey Street, was very ill with
+pneumonia last month, he fell out of bed and broke his arm.”
+
+“In two places,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “I saw him walking up the street
+yesterday, all trussed up like a chicken.”
+
+“Quite recovered from pneumonia, however. Then there was little Mrs.
+Bowles: she had typhoid, you remember, and at the height of the fever a
+strange cat got into the room and frightened her into hysterics.”
+
+“But she got well,” said Mrs. Clyde. “They’re up in the woods now.”
+
+“Exactly. Moral (according to Mrs. Dibble’s experience with Hall’s
+Catarrh Cure): for pneumonia, try a broken arm; in case of typhoid, set
+a cat on the patient.”
+
+Mr. Clyde laughed. “I see,” he said. “People get well in spite of these
+patent medicines, rather than by virtue of them. _Post hoc, non propter
+hoc_, as our lawyer friends say.”
+
+“You’ve got it. The human body keeps up a sort of drug-store of its
+own. As soon as disease fastens on it, it goes to work in a subtle and
+mysterious way, manufacturing a cure for that disease. If it’s
+diphtheria, the body produces antitoxin, and we give it more to help it
+on. If it’s jaundice, it produces a special quality of gastric juices
+to correct the evil conditions. In the vast majority of attacks, the
+body drives out the disease by its own efforts; yet, if the patient
+chances to have been idiot enough to take some quack ‘cure’ the credit
+goes to that medicine.”
+
+“Or to the doctor, if it’s a doctor’s case,” suggested Grandma
+Sharpless, with a twinkle of malice.
+
+“Show me a doctor who boasts ‘I can cure you,’ whether by word of mouth
+or in print, and I’ll show you a quack,” returned the other warmly.
+
+“But what is a doctor for in a sick-room, if not to cure?” asked Mrs.
+Clyde.
+
+“What is a captain for on a ship?” countered Dr. Strong. “He can’t cure
+a storm, can he? But he can guide the vessel so that she can weather
+it. Well, our medical captains lose a good many commands; the storm is
+often too severe for human skill. But they save a good many, too, by
+skillful handling.”
+
+“Then there is no such thing as an actual cure, in medicine?”
+
+“Why, yes. In a sense there are several. Antitoxin may be called a cure
+for diphtheria. Quinine is, to some extent, a specific in malaria. And
+Ehrlich’s famous ‘606’ has been remarkably, though not unfailingly,
+successful in that terrible blood-plague, born of debauchery, which
+strikes the innocent through the guilty. All these remedies, however,
+come, not through the quack and the drug-store, but through the
+physician and the laboratory.”
+
+“May not the patent medicines, also, help to guide the physical ship
+through the storm?” asked Mrs. Clyde, adopting the doctor’s simile.
+
+“On to the rocks,” he replied quickly. “Look at the consumption cures.
+To many consumptives, alcohol is deadly. Yet a wretched concoction like
+Duffy’s Malt Whiskey, advertised to cure tuberculosis, flaunts its lies
+everywhere. And the law is powerless to check the suicidal course of
+the poor fools who believe and take it.”
+
+“Why, I thought the Pure Food Law stopped all that,” said Mrs. Clyde
+innocently.
+
+“The Pure Food Law! The life has been almost crushed out of it.
+Roosevelt whacked it over the head with his Referee Board, which
+granted immunity to the food poisoners, and afterward the Supreme Court
+and Wickersham treated it to a course of ‘legal interpretations,’ which
+generally signify a way to get around a good law.”
+
+“But the patent medicines aren’t allowed to make false claims any more,
+as I understand it,” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“That applies only to the label on the bottle. So you’ll find that the
+words ‘alcohol,’ ‘opium,’ ‘acetanilid,’ ‘chloral,’ and other terms of
+poison, have sprouted forth there, in very small and inconspicuous
+type. But there’s a free field for the false promises on sign-boards,
+in the street-cars, in the newspapers, everywhere. Look in the next
+drug-store window you pass and you’ll see ‘sure cures’ exploited in
+terms that would make Ananias feel like an amateur.”
+
+“You make out a pretty poor character for the druggists, as a class,”
+observed Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Not at all. As a class, they’re a decent, self-respecting, honorable
+lot of men.”
+
+“Then why do they stick to a bad trade?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+Dr. Strong got to his feet. “Let one of them answer,” he said. “Mr.
+Gormley, who runs the big store in the Arcade, usually passes here
+about this time, and I think I see him coming now.”
+
+“They can talk all they like,” said Grandma Sharpless emphatically, as
+the doctor walked across to the front fence, “but I wouldn’t be without
+a bottle of cough syrup in the house.”
+
+“Nor I without my headache tablets,” added Mrs. Clyde. “I’d have had to
+give up the bridge party yesterday but for them.”
+
+Mr. Clyde shot a sharp glance, first, at his wife, then at her mother.
+“Well, I’d like to see the labels on your particular brands of
+medicine,” he remarked.
+
+“There’s nothing bad in mine,” asserted Mrs. Clyde. “Mrs. Martin
+recommended them to me; she’s been taking them for years.”
+
+At this point Dr. Strong returned, bringing with him a slim, elderly
+man, whose shrewd, wide eyes peered through a pair of gold-rimmed
+glasses.
+
+“So you want me to give away the secrets of my trade,” he remarked
+good-humoredly, after the greetings. “Well, I don’t object to relieving
+my mind, once in a while. So shoot, and if I can’t dodge, I’ll yell.”
+
+“Why do you deal in patent medicines if they’re so bad?” asked Grandma
+Sharpless bluntly. “Is there such a big profit in them?”
+
+“No profit, worth speaking of,” replied Mr. Gormley. “Though you’ll
+note that I haven’t admitted they are bad—as yet.”
+
+“The bulk of your trade is in that class of goods, isn’t it?” queried
+Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Worse luck, it is. They’ve got us through their hold on the public.
+And they not only force us to be their agents, but they grind us down
+to the very smallest profit; sometimes less than the cost of doing
+business.”
+
+“But you aren’t compelled to deal in their medicines,” objected Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“Practically I am. My really profitable trade is in filling
+prescriptions. There I can legitimately charge, not only for the drugs,
+but also for my special technical skill and knowledge. But in order to
+maintain my prescription trade I must keep people coming to my store.
+And they won’t come unless I carry what they demand in the way of
+patent medicines.”
+
+“Then there is a legitimate demand for patent medicines?” said Mr.
+Clyde quickly.
+
+“Legitimate? Hardly. It’s purely an inspired demand.”
+
+“What makes it persist, then?”
+
+“The newspapers. The patent-medicine advertisers fill the daily columns
+with their claims, and create a demand by the force of repeated
+falsehood. Do you know the universal formula for the cost of patent
+cures? Here it is: Drugs, 3 per cent; manufacturing plant, 7 per cent;
+printing ink, 90 per cent. It’s a sickening business. If I could afford
+it, I’d break loose like that fellow McConnell in Chicago and put a
+placard of warning in my show window. Here’s a copy of the one he
+displays in his drug-store.”
+
+Taking a card from his pocket, Mr. Gormley held it up for the circle to
+read. The inscription was:—
+
+“Please do not ask us what _any old patent, medicine_ is worth, for you
+embarrass us, as our honest answer must be that _it is worthless_.
+    “If you mean to ask us at what price we sell it, that is an
+    entirely different proposition. When sick, consult a good
+    physician. It is the only proper course. And you will find it
+    cheaper in the end than self-medication with _worthless ‘patent’
+    nostrums._”
+
+
+“Has that killed his trade in quackery?” asked Dr. Strong.
+
+“Nothing can kill that. It has cut it down by half, though. It’s a
+peculiar and disheartening fact that the public will believe the paid
+lie of a newspaper advertisement and disregard the plain truth from an
+expert. And see here, Dr. Strong, when you doctors get together and
+roast the pharmaceutical trade, just remember that it’s really the
+newspapers and not the drug-stores that sell patent medicines.”
+
+“Are all of them so bad?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“All that claim to _cure_. They’re either frauds, appealing to the
+appetite by a stiff allowance of booze, like Swamp Root and Peruna, or
+disguised dopes,—opium, hasheesh or chloral,—masquerading as soothing
+syrups, cough medicines, and consumption cures; or artificial devices
+for giving yourself heart disease by the use of coal-tar chemicals in
+the headache powders and anti-pain pills.”
+
+“Well, you can’t make me believe, Mr. Drug-man,” said Grandma Sharpless
+with a belligerent shake of her head, “that a patent medicine which
+keeps on being in demand for years, on its own merits, hasn’t something
+good in it.”
+
+“No, ma’am, I can’t,” agreed the visitor. “I wouldn’t want to. There
+isn’t any such patent medicine.”
+
+“There’s hundreds of ‘em,” contradicted the old lady, with the
+exaggeration of the disputant who finds the ground dropping away from
+underfoot.
+
+“Not that sell on their own merits. Advertising and more advertising
+and still more advertising is all that does it. Let any one of them
+drop out of the newspapers and off the bill-boards, and the demand for
+it would be dead in a year.”
+
+“Yet, as a student of business conditions,” said Mr. Clyde, “I’m
+inclined to side with Mrs. Sharpless and believe that any line of goods
+which has come down from yesterday to to-day must have some merit.”
+
+The druggist took off his glasses, wiped them and waved them in the
+air, with a flourish.
+
+And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
+The way to dusty death,
+
+
+he quoted sonorously. “We think ourselves heirs to the wisdom of the
+ages, without stopping to consider that we’re heirs to the foolishness,
+also. We’re gulled by the printed lie about Doan’s Kidney Pills, just
+as our fathers were by the cart-tail oratory of the itinerant quack who
+sold the ‘Wonderful Indian Secrets of Life’ at one dollar per bottle.”
+
+“Well, I hesitate to admit it,” said Mrs. Clyde, with a little laugh,
+“but we always have a few of the old remedies about.”
+
+“Suppose you name some of them over,” suggested the druggist.
+
+“Usually I keep some One-Night Cough Cure in the house. That’s
+harmless, isn’t it?”
+
+The druggist glanced at Dr. Strong, and they both grinned.
+
+“It _might_ be harmless,” said the druggist mildly, “if it didn’t
+contain both morphine and hasheesh.”
+
+“Goodness!” said Mrs. Clyde, horrified. “How could one suppose—”
+
+“By reading the label carefully,” interjected Dr. Strong. “Anything
+else?”
+
+“Let me think. I’ve always considered Jayne’s Expectorant good for the
+children when they have a cold.”
+
+“Tastes differ,” observed the druggist philosophically. “I wouldn’t
+consider opium good for _my_ children inside or outside of any
+expectorant. Next!”
+
+“But the names _sound_ so innocent!” cried Mrs. Clyde. “I’m almost
+afraid to tell any more. But we always have Rexall Cholera Cure on
+hand.”
+
+“Had much cholera in the house lately?” inquired the druggist, with an
+affectation of extreme interest.
+
+“Of course it’s only for stomach-ache,” explained Mrs. Clyde. “It
+certainly does cure the pain.”
+
+“Not cure,—drug it into unconsciousness,” amended Mr. Gormley. “The
+opium in it does that. Rather a heroic remedy, opium, for a little
+stomach-ache, don’t you think?”
+
+“What have you got to say against Kohler’s One-Night Cough Cure that I
+always keep by me?” demanded Grandma Sharpless.
+
+Mr. Gormley beamed on her in deprecatory good nature. “Who? Me?
+Gracious! I’ve got nothing to say against it worse than it says against
+itself, on its label. Morphine, chloroform, and hasheesh. What more
+_is_ there to say?”
+
+“How long has this house been full of assorted poisons?” asked Mr.
+Clyde suddenly of his wife.
+
+“Now, Tom,” she protested. “I’ve always been careful about using them
+for the children. Personally, I never touch patent medicines.”
+
+But at this her mother, smarting under their caller’s criticism of her
+cough syrup, turned on her.
+
+“What do you call those headache tablets you take?”
+
+“Those? They aren’t a patent medicine. They’re Anti-kamnia, a
+physician’s prescription.”
+
+“Yes; a fine prescription they are!” said the druggist. “Did you ever
+read the Anti-kamnia booklet? For whole-souled, able-bodied,
+fore-and-aft, up-and-down stairs professional lying, it has got most of
+the patent medicines relegated to the infant class. Harmless, they say!
+I’ve seen a woman take two of those things and hardly get out of the
+door before they got in their fine work on her heart and over she went
+like a shot rabbit.”
+
+“Not dead!”
+
+“No; but it was touch and go with her.”
+
+“What’s in that; opium, too?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“No; a coal-tar chemical which puts a clamp on the heart action. One or
+another of the coal-tar drugs is in all the headache powders. There’s a
+long list of deaths from them, not to mention cases of drug-habit.”
+
+“Habit?” cried Mrs. Clyde. “Do you mean I’m in danger of not being able
+to get along without the tablets?”
+
+“If you take them steadily you certainly are. If you take them
+occasionally, you’re only in danger of dropping dead one of these
+days.”
+
+Mr. Clyde’s chin abruptly assumed a prominence which he seldom
+permitted it. “Well, that settles _that_,” he observed; and it was
+entirely unnecessary for any one present to ask any amplification of
+the remark. Mrs. Clyde looked at her mother for sympathy—and didn’t get
+any.
+
+“Whenever I see a woman come into the shop,” continued the druggist,
+“with a whitey-blue complexion and little gray’ flabby wrinkles under
+her eyes, I know without asking what _she_ wants. She’s a
+headache-powder fiend.”
+
+“That queer look they have is from deterioration of the blood,” said
+Dr. Strong. “The acetanilid or acetphenetidin or whatever the coal-tar
+derivative may be, seems to kill the red corpuscles. In extreme cases
+of this I’ve seen blood the color of muddy water.”
+
+“It certainly makes a fright of a woman. ‘Orangeine’ gets a lot of ‘em.
+You’ ve seen its advertisements in the street-cars. The owner of
+Orangeine, a Chicago man, got the habit himself: used fairly to live on
+the stuff, until pop! went his heart. He’s a living, or, rather a dead
+illustration of what his own dope will do.”
+
+“But what are you to do for a splitting headache?” queried Mrs. Clyde,
+turning to Dr. Strong.
+
+“I don’t know, unless I know what causes it,” said Dr. Strong.
+“Headache isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom, a danger signal. It’s the
+body’s way of crying for help. Drugs don’t cure a headache. They simply
+interrupt it.”
+
+“What with the headache-powders breeding the drug habit, and the
+consumption cures and cough medicines making dope fiends, and the malt
+whiskey cures and Perunas furnishing quiet joy to the temperance trade,
+I sometimes wonder what we’re coming to,” remarked Mr. Gormley.
+
+Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “But poor people who can’t
+afford a doctor have no recourse but to patent medicines,” said he.
+
+“Can’t afford a doctor!” exclaimed Dr. Strong. “Why, don’t you know
+that nostrum-taking is the most expensive form of treatment? Did you
+ever happen to see A. B. Frost’s powerful cartoon called ‘Her Last
+Dollar’? A woman, thin, bent, and ravaged with disease, is buying,
+across the counter of a country store, a bottle of some kind of ‘sure
+cure,’ from the merchant, who serves her with a smile, half-pitying,
+half-cynical, while her two ragged children, with hunger and hope in
+their pinched faces, gaze wistfully at the food in the glass cases.
+There’s the whole tragedy of a wasted life in that picture. ‘Her Last
+Dollar!’ That’s what the patent medicine is after. A doctor at least
+_tries_ to cure. But the patent medicine shark’s policy is to keep the
+sufferer buying as long as there is a dollar left to buy with. Why, a
+nostrum that advertises heavily has got to sell six bottles or seven to
+each victim before the cost of catching that victim is defrayed. After
+that, the profits. Since you’ve brought up the matter of expense, I’ll
+give you an instance from your own household, Clyde.”
+
+“Here! What’s this?” cried Mr. Clyde, sitting up straight. “More patent
+dosing?”
+
+“One of the servants,—Maggie, the nurse. I’ve got her whole medical
+history and she’s a prime example of the Dupe’s Progress. She’s run the
+gamut of fake cures.”
+
+“Something must have been the matter with her to start her off,
+though,” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“That’s the joke—or would be if it weren’t pathetic. She started out by
+having headaches. Not knowing any better, she took headache-powders.”
+
+“One for you, Myra,” remarked Mr. Clyde to his wife, in an aside.
+
+“Bad heart action and difficulty in breathing—the natural result—scared
+her into the belief that she had heart trouble. Impetus was given to
+this notion by an advertisement which she found in a weekly, a
+religious weekly (God save the mark!), advising her not to drop dead of
+heart disease. To avoid this awful fate, which was illustrated by a
+sprightly sketch of a man falling flat on the sidewalk, she was
+earnestly implored to try Kinsman’s heart remedy. She did so, and, of
+course, got worse, since the ‘remedy’ was merely a swindle. About this
+time Maggie’s stomach began to ‘act up,’ partly from the medicines,
+partly from the original trouble which caused her headaches.”
+
+“You haven’t told us what that was, Strong,” remarked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Later. Maggie now developed catarrh of the stomach, superinduced by
+reading one of old Dr. Hartman’s Peruna ads. She took seven bottles of
+Peruna, and it cheered her up quite a bit—temporarily and
+alcoholically.”
+
+“Then it was _that_ that I smelled on her breath. And I accused her of
+drinking,” said Mrs. Clyde remorsefully.
+
+“So she had been; raw alcohol, flavored with a little caramel and
+doctored up with a few drugs. Toward the close of her Peruna career,
+her stomach became pretty sensitive. Also, as she wasn’t accustomed to
+strong liquor, her kidneys were affected somewhat. In her daily paper
+she read a clarion call from Dr. Kilmer of the Swamp Root swindle (the
+real Dr. Kilmer quit Swamp Root to become a cancer quack, by the way),
+which seemed to her to diagnose her case exactly. So she ‘tanked up’
+some more on that brand of intoxicant. Since she was constantly
+drugging herself, the natural resistance of her body was weakened, and
+she got a bad cold. The cough scared her almost to death; or rather,
+the consumption cure advertisements which she took to reading did; and
+she spent a few dollars on the fake factory which turns out Dr. King’s
+New Discovery. This proving worthless, she switched to Piso’s Cure and
+added the hasheesh habit to alcoholism. By this time she had acquired a
+fine, typical case of patent-medicine dyspepsia. That idea never
+occurred to her, though. She next tried Dr. Miles’s Anti-Pain Pills
+(more acetanilid), and finally decided—having read some advertising
+literature on the subject—that she had cancer. And the reason she was
+leaving you, Mrs. Clyde, was that she had decided to go to a
+scoundrelly quack named Johnson who conducts a cancer institute in
+Kansas City, where he fleeces unfortunates out of their money on the
+pretense that he can cure cancer without the use of the knife.”
+
+“Can’t you stop her?” asked Mrs. Clyde anxiously.
+
+“Oh, I’ve stopped her! You’ll find the remains of her patent medicines
+in the ash-barrel. I flatter myself I’ve fixed _her_ case.”
+
+Grandma Sharpless gazed at him solemnly. “‘Any doctor who claims to
+cure is a quack.’ Quotation from Dr. Strong,” she said.
+
+“Nearly had me there,” admitted he. “Fortunately I didn’t use the word
+‘cure.’ It wasn’t a case of cure. It was a case of correcting a stupid,
+disastrous little blunder in mathematics.”
+
+“Mathematics, eh?” repeated Mr. Clyde. “Have you reached the point
+where you treat disease by algebra, and triangulate a patient for an
+operation?”
+
+“Not quite that. But poor Maggie suffered all her troubles solely
+through an error in figuring by an incompetent man. A year ago she had
+trouble with her eyes. Instead of going to a good oculist she went to
+one of these stores which offer examinations free, and take it out in
+the price of the glasses. The examination is worth just what free
+things usually are worth—or less. They sold her a pair of glasses for
+two dollars. The glasses were figured out some fifty degrees wrong, for
+her error of vision, which was very slight, anyway. The nervous strain
+caused by the effort of the eyes to accommodate themselves to the false
+glasses and, later, the accumulated mass of drugs with which she’s been
+insulting her insides, are all that’s the matter with Maggie.”
+
+“That is, the glasses caused the headaches, and the patent medicines
+the stomach derangement,” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“And the general break up, though the glasses may have started both
+before the nostrums ever got in their evil work. Nowadays, the wise
+doctor, having an obscure stomach trouble to deal with, in the absence
+of other explanation, looks to the eyes. Eyestrain has a most potent
+and far-reaching influence on digestion. I know of one case of chronic
+dyspepsia, of a year’s standing, completely cured by a change of
+eyeglasses.”
+
+“As a financial proposition,” said Mr. Gormley, “your nurse must have
+come out at the wrong end of the horn.”
+
+“Decidedly,” confirmed the doctor. “She spent on patent medicines about
+forty dollars. The cancer quack would have got at least a hundred
+dollars out of her, not counting her railroad fare. Two hundred dollars
+would be a fair estimate of her little health-excursion among the
+quacks. Any good physician would have sent her to an oculist, who would
+have fitted proper glasses and saved all that expense and drugging. The
+entire bill for doctor, oculist, and glasses might have been
+twenty-five dollars. Yet they defend patent medicines on the ground
+that they’re the ‘poor man’s doctor.”
+
+Mr. Gormley rose. “Poor man’s undertaker, rather,” he amended. “Well,
+having sufficiently blackguarded my own business, I think I’ll go.
+Here’s the whole thing summed up, as I see it. It pays to go to the
+doctor first and the druggist afterward; not to the druggist first and
+the doctor afterward.”
+
+Dr. Strong walked over to the gate with him. On his return Mrs. Clyde
+remarked:
+
+“What an interesting, thoughtful man. Are most druggists like that?”
+
+“They’re not all philosophers of the trade, like Gormley,” said Dr.
+Strong, “but they have to be pretty intelligent before they can pass
+the Pharmaceutical Board in this state, and put out their colored
+lights.”
+
+“I’ve often meant to ask what the green and red lights in front of a
+drug-store stand for,” said Mrs. Clyde. “What is their derivation?”
+
+“Green is the official color of medical science,” explained the doctor.
+“The green flag, you know, indicates the hospital corps in war-time;
+and the degree of M.D. is signalized by a green hood in academic
+functions.”
+
+“And the red globe on the other side of the store: what does that
+mean?”
+
+“Danger,” replied Dr. Strong grimly.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+THE MAGIC LENS
+
+
+“No good fairy had ever bestowed such a gift as this magic lens,” said
+Dr. Strong, whisking Bettina up from her seat by the window and setting
+her on his knee. “It was most marvelously and delicately made, and
+furnished with a lightning-quick intelligence of its own. Everything
+that went on around it, it reported to its fortunate possessor as
+swiftly as thought flies through that lively little brain of yours. It
+earned its owner’s livelihood for him; it gave him three fourths of his
+enjoyments and amusements; it laid before him the wonderful things done
+and being done all over the world; it guided all his life. And all that
+it required was a little reasonable care, and such consideration as a
+man would show to the horse that worked for him.”
+
+“At the beginning you said it wasn’t a fairytale,” accused Bettina,
+with the gravity which five years considers befitting such an occasion.
+
+“Wait. Because the owner of the magic lens found that it obeyed all his
+orders so readily and faithfully, he began to impose on it. He made it
+work very hard when it was tired. He set tasks for it to perform under
+very difficult conditions. At times when it should have been resting,
+he compelled it to minister to his amusements. When it complained, he
+made light of its trouble.”
+
+“Could it speak?” inquired the little auditor.
+
+“At least it had a way of making known its wants. In everything which
+concerned itself it was keenly intelligent, and knew what was good and
+bad for it, as well as what was good and bad for its owner.”
+
+“Couldn’t it stop working for him if he was so bad to it?”
+
+“Only as an extreme measure. But presently, in this case, it threatened
+to stop. So the owner took it to a cheap and poor repair-shop, where
+the repairer put a little oil in it to make it go on working. For a
+time it went on. Then, one morning, the owner woke up and cried out
+with a terrible fear. For the magic light in the magic lens was gone.
+So for that foolish man there was no work to do nor play to enjoy. The
+world was blotted out for him. He could not know what was going on
+about him, except by hearsay. No more was the sky blue for him, or the
+trees green, or the flowers bright; and the faces of his friends meant
+nothing. He had thrown away the most beautiful and wonderful of all
+gifts. Because it is a gift bestowed on nearly all of us, most of us
+forgot the wonder and the beauty of it. So, Honorable Miss Twinkles, do
+you beware how you treat the magic lens which is given to you.”
+
+“To me?” cried the child; and then, with a little squeal of
+comprehension: “Oh, I know! My eyes. That’s the magic lens. Isn’t it?”
+
+“What’s that about Bettykin’s eyes?” asked Mr. Clyde, who had come in
+quietly, and had heard the finish of the allegory.
+
+“I’ve been examining them,” explained Dr. Strong, “and the story was
+reward of merit for her going through with it like a little soldier.”
+
+“Examining her eyes? Any particular reason?” asked the father
+anxiously.
+
+“Very particular. Mrs. Clyde wishes to send her to kindergarten for a
+year before she enters the public school. No child ought to begin
+school without a thorough test of vision.”
+
+“What did the test show in Bettykin’s case?”
+
+“Nothing except the defects of heredity.”
+
+“Heredity? My sight is pretty good; and Mrs. Clyde’s is still better.”
+
+“You two are not the Cherub’s only ancestors, however,” smiled the
+physician. “And you can hardly expect one or two generations to recast
+as delicate a bit of mechanism as the eye, which has been built up
+through millions of years of slow development. However, despite the
+natural deficiencies, there’s no reason in Betty why she shouldn’t
+start in at kindergarten next term, provided there isn’t any in the
+kindergarten itself.”
+
+Mr. Clyde studied the non-committal face of his “Chinese physician,” as
+he was given to calling Dr. Strong since the latter had undertaken to
+safeguard the health of his household on the Oriental basis of being
+paid to keep the family well and sound. “Something is wrong with the
+school,” he decided.
+
+“Read what it says of itself in that first paragraph,” replied Dr.
+Strong, handing him a rather pretentious little booklet.
+
+In the prospectus of their “new and scientific kindergarten,” the
+Misses Sarsfield warmly congratulated themselves and their prospective
+pupils, primarily, upon the physical advantages of their school
+building which included a large work-and-play room, “with generous
+window space on all sides, and finished throughout in pure, glazed
+white.” This description the head of the Clyde household read over
+twice; then he stepped to the door to intercept Mrs. Clyde’s mother who
+was passing by.
+
+“Here, Grandma,” said he. “Our Chinese tyrant had diagnosed something
+wrong with that first page. Do you discover any kink in it?”
+
+“Not I,” said Mrs. Sharpless, after reading it. “Nor in the place
+itself. I called there yesterday. It is a beautiful room; everything as
+shiny and clean as a pin.”
+
+“Yesterday was cloudy,” observed the Health Master.
+
+“It was. Yet there wasn’t a corner of the place that wasn’t flooded
+with light,” declared Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“And on a clear day, with the sun pouring in from all sides and being
+flashed back from those shiny, white walls, the unfortunate inmates
+would be absolutely dazzled.”
+
+“Do you mean to say that God’s pure sunlight can hurt any one?”
+challenged Mrs. Sharpless, who was rather given to citing the Deity as
+support for her own side of any question.
+
+“Did you ever hear of snow-blindness?” countered the physician.
+
+“I’ve seen it in the North,” said Mr. Clyde. “It’s not a pleasant thing
+to see.”
+
+“Glazed white walls would give a very fair imitation of snow-glare. Too
+much light is as bad as too little. Those walls should be tinted.”
+
+“Yet it says here,” said Mr. Clyde, referring to his circular, “that
+the ‘Misses Sarsfield will conduct their institution on the most
+improved Froebelian principles.”
+
+“Froebel was a great man and a wise one,” said Dr. Strong. “His
+kindergarten system has revolutionized all teaching. But he lived
+before the age of hygienic knowledge. I suppose that no other man has
+wrought so much disaster to the human eye as he.”
+
+“That’s a pretty broad statement, Strong,” objected Air. Clyde.
+
+“Is it? Look at the evidence. North Germany is the place where Froebel
+first developed his system. Seventy-five per cent of the population are
+defective of vision. Even the American children of North German
+immigrants show a distinct excess of eye defects. You’ve seen the comic
+pictures representing Boston children as wearing huge goggles?”
+
+“Are you making an argument out of a funny-paper joke?” queried Grandma
+Sharpless.
+
+“Why not? It wouldn’t be a joke if it hadn’t some foundation in fact.
+The kindergarten system got its start in America in Boston. Boston has
+the worst eyesight of any American city; impaired vision has even
+become hereditary there. To return to Germany: if you want a shock,
+look up the records of suicides among school-children there.”
+
+“But surely that has no connection with the eyes.”
+
+“Surely it has,” controverted Dr. Strong. “The eye is the most nervous
+of all the organs; and nothing will break down the nervous system in
+general more swiftly and surely than eye-strain. Even in this country
+we are raising up a generation of neurasthenic youngsters, largely from
+neglect of their eyes.”
+
+“Still, we’ve got to educate our children,” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“And we’ve got to take the utmost precautions lest the education cost
+more than it is worth, in acquired defects.”
+
+“For my part,” announced Grandma Sharpless, “I believe in early
+schooling and in children learning to be useful. At the Sarsfield
+school there were little girls no older that Bettina, who were doing
+needlework beautifully; fine needlework at that.”
+
+“Fine needlework!” exploded Dr. Strong in a tone which Grandma
+Sharpless afterwards described as “damnless swearing.”
+
+“That’s enough! See here, Clyde. Betty goes to that kindergarten only
+over my dead job.”
+
+“Oh, well,” said Mr. Clyde, amazed at the quite unwonted excitement
+which the other exhibited, “if you’re dealing in ultimatums, I’ll drop
+out and leave the stricken field to Mrs. Clyde. This kindergarten
+scheme is hers. Wait. I’ll bring her. I think she just came in.”
+
+“What am I to fight with you about, Dr. Strong?” asked Mrs. Clyde,
+appearing at the door, a vision of trim prettiness in her furs and
+veil. “Tom didn’t tell me the _casus belli_.”
+
+“Nobody in this house,” said Dr. Strong appealing to her, “seems to
+deem the human eye entitled to the slightest consideration. You’ve
+never worn glasses; therefore you must have respected your own eyesight
+enough to—”
+
+He stopped abruptly and scowled into Mrs. Clyde’s smiling face.
+
+“Well! what’s the matter?” she demanded. “You look as if you were going
+to bite.”
+
+“What are you looking cross-eyed for?” the Health Master shot at her.
+
+“I’m not! Oh, it’s this veil, I suppose.” She lifted the heavy
+polka-dotted screen and tucked it over her hat. “There, that’s more
+comfortable!”
+
+“Is it!” said the physician with an emphasis of sardonicism. “You
+surprise me by admitting that much. How long have you been wearing that
+instrument of torture?”
+
+“Oh, two hours. Perhaps three. But, Dr. Strong, it doesn’t hurt my eyes
+at all.”
+
+“Nor your head?”
+
+“I _have_ got a little headache,” she confessed. “To think that a
+supposedly intelligent woman who has reached the age of—of—”
+
+“Thirty-eight,” said she, laughing. “I’m not ashamed of it.”
+
+“—Thirty-eight, without having to wear glasses, should deliberately
+abuse her hard-working vision by distorting it! See here,” he
+interrupted himself, “it’s quite evident that I haven’t been living up
+to the terms of my employment. One of these evenings we’re going to
+have in this household a short but sharp lecture and symposium on eyes.
+I’ll give the lecture; and I suspect that this family will furnish the
+symposium—of horrible examples. Where’s Julia? As she’s the family
+Committee on School Conditions, I expect to get some material from her,
+too. Meantime, Mrs. Clyde, no kindergarten for Betty kin, if you
+please. Or, in any case, not that kindergarten.”
+
+No further ocular demonstrations were made by Dr. Strong for several
+days. Then, one evening, he came into the library where the whole
+family was sitting. Grandma Sharpless, in the old-fashioned rocker,
+next a stand from which an old-fashioned student-lamp dispensed its
+benign rays, was holding up, with some degree of effort, a rather heavy
+book to the line of her vision. Opposite her a soft easychair contained
+Robin, other-wise Bobs, involuted like a currant-worm after a dose of
+Paris green, and imaginatively treading, with the feet of enchantment,
+virgin expanses of forest in the wake of Mr. Stewart White.
+
+Julia, alias “Junkum,” his twin, was struggling against the demon of
+ill chance as embodied in a game of solitaire, far over in a dim
+corner. Geography enchained the mind of eight-year-old Charles, also
+his eyes, and apparently his nose, which was stuck far down into the
+mapped page. Near him his father, with chin doubled down over a stiff
+collar, was internally begging leave to differ with the editorial
+opinions of his favorite paper; while Mrs. Clyde, under the direct
+glare of a side-wall electric cluster, unshaded, was perusing a
+glazed-paper magazine, which threw upon her face a strong reflected
+light. Before the fire Bettykin was retailing to her most intelligent
+doll the allegory of the Magic Lens.
+
+Enter, upon this scene of domestic peace, the spirit of devastation in
+the person of the Health Master.
+
+“The horrible examples being now on exhibit,” he remarked from the
+doorway, “our symposium on eyes will begin.”
+
+“He says we’re a hor’ble example, Susan Nipper,” said Bettina
+confidentially, to her doll.
+
+“No, I apologize, Bettykin,” returned the doctor. “You’re the only two
+sensible people in the room.”
+
+Julia promptly rose, lifted the stand with her cards on it, carried it
+to the center of the library, and planted it so that the central light
+fell across it from a little behind her.
+
+“One recruit to the side of common sense,” observed the physician.
+“Next!”
+
+“What’s wrong with me?” demanded Mr. Clyde, looking up. “Newspaper
+print?”
+
+“Newspaper print is an unavoidable evil, and by no means the worst
+example of Gutenberg’s art. No; the trouble with you is that your neck
+is so scrunched down into a tight collar as to shut off a proper blood
+supply from your head. Don’t your eyes feel bungy?”
+
+“A little. What am I going to do? I can’t sit around after dinner with
+no collar on.”
+
+“Sit up straight, then; stick your neck up out of your collar and give
+it play. Emulate the attentive turtle! And you, Bobs, stop imitating an
+anchovy. Uncurl! _Uncurl!!_”
+
+With a sigh, Robin straightened himself out. “I was so comfortable,” he
+complained.
+
+“No, you weren’t. You were only absorbed. The veins on your temples are
+fairly bulging. You might as well try to read standing on your head.
+Get a straight-backed chair, and you’re all right. I’m glad to see that
+you follow Grandma Sharpless’s good example in reading by a
+student-lamp.”
+
+“That’s my own lamp,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “Seventy years has at least
+taught me how to read.”
+
+“How, but not what,” answered the Health Master. “That’s a bad book
+you’re reading.”
+
+Grandma Sharpless achieved the proud athletic feat of bounding from her
+chair without the perceptible movement of a muscle.
+
+“Young man!” she exclaimed in a shaking voice, “do you know what book
+that is?”
+
+“I don’t care what book—”
+
+“It is the Bible.”
+
+“Is it? Well, Heaven inspired the writer, but not the printer. Text
+such as that ought to be prohibited by law. Isn’t there a passage in
+that Bible, ‘Having eyes, ye see not’?”
+
+“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[1] 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.’”
+
+ [1] 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.
+
+“Not for a number of years.”
+
+“Presumably you would find it awkward. Yet if, through some pressure of
+necessity, the human race should have to return to the quadrupedal
+method, the alteration in life would be less radical than we have
+imposed upon our vision in the last few generations.”
+
+“Sounds like flat nonsense to me,” said the downright Clyde. “We see
+just as all our ancestors saw.”
+
+“Think again. Our ancestors, back a very few generations, were an
+outdoor race living in a world of wide horizons. Their eyes could range
+over far distances, unchecked, instead of being hemmed in most of the
+time by four walls. They were farsighted. Indeed, their survival
+depended upon their being far-sighted; like the animals which they
+killed or which killed them, according as the human or the beast had
+the best eyes. Nowadays, in order to live we must read and write. That
+is, the primal demand upon the eye is that it shall see keenly near at
+hand instead of far off. The whole hereditary training of the organ has
+been inverted, as if a mountaineer should be set to diving for pearls;
+and the poor thing hasn’t had time to adjust itself yet. We employ our
+vision for close work ten times as much as we did a hundred years ago
+and ten thousand times as much as we did ten thousand years ago. But
+the influence of those ten thousand years is still strong upon us, and
+the human child is born with the eye of a savage or an animal.”
+
+“What kind of an animal’s eyes have I got?” demanded Bettina. “A
+antelope’s?”
+
+“Almost as far-sighted,” returned the Health Master, wriggling out from
+under her and catching her expertly as she fell. “And how do you think
+an antelope would be doing fine needlework in a kindergarten?”
+
+“But, Strong, few of us go blind,” said Mr. Clyde. “And of those who
+do, nearly half are needlessly so. That we aren’t all groping,
+sightless, about the earth is due to the marvelous adaptability of our
+eyes. And it is exactly upon that adaptability that we are so prone to
+impose; working a willing horse to death. In the young the muscles of
+accommodation, whereby the vision is focused, are almost incredibly
+powerful; far more so than in the adult. The Cherub, here, could force
+her vision to almost any kind of work and the eye would not complain
+much—at this time. But later on the effects would be manifest.
+Therefore we have to watch the eye very closely until it begins to grow
+old, which is at about twelve years or so. In the adult the eye very
+readily lets its owner know if anything is wrong. Only fools disregard
+that warning. But in the developing years we must see to it that those
+muscles, set to the task of overcoming generations of custom, do not
+overwork and upset the whole nervous organization. Sometimes glasses
+are necessary; usually, only care.”
+
+“In a few generations we’ll all have four eyes, won’t we?” asked Bobs,
+making a pair of mock spectacles with his circled fingers and thumbs.
+
+“Oh, let’s hope not. The cartoonists of prophecy always give the future
+man spectacles. But I believe that the tendency will be the other way,
+and that, by evolution to meet new conditions, the eye will fit itself
+for its work, unaided, in time. Meantime, we have to pay the penalty of
+the change. That’s a small price for living in this wonderful century.”
+
+“You say that half the blind are needlessly so,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Is
+that from preventable disease?”
+
+“About forty per cent, of the wholly blind. But the half-blind and the
+nervously wrecked victims of eye-strain owe their woes generally to
+sheer carelessness and neglect. By the way, eye-strain itself may cause
+very serious forms of disease, such as obstinate and dangerous forms of
+indigestion, insomnia, or even St. Vitus’s dance and epilepsy.”
+
+“But you’re not telling us anything about eye diseases, Dr. Strong,”
+said Julia.
+
+“There speaks our Committee on School Conditions, filled full of
+information,” said the Health Master with a smile. “Junkum has made an
+important discovery, and made it in time. She has found that two
+children recently transferred from Number 14 have red eyes.”
+
+“Maybe they’ve been crying,” suggested Bettykin.
+
+“They were when I saw them, acute Miss Twinkles, although they didn’t
+mean it at all. One was crying out of one eye, and one out of the
+other, which gave them a very curious, absurd, and interesting
+appearance. They had each a developing case of pink-eye.”
+
+“Horses have pink-eye, not people,” remarked Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“To be more accurate, then, conjunctivitis. People have that; a great
+many people, once it gets started. It looks very bad and dangerous; but
+it isn’t if properly cared for. Only, it’s quite contagious. Therefore
+the Committee on Schools, with myself as acting executive, accomplished
+the temporary removal of those children from school.”
+
+“And then,” the Committee joyously took up the tale, “we went out and
+trailed the pink-eye.”
+
+“We did. We trailed it to its lair in School Number 14, and there we
+found one of the most dangerous creatures which civilization still
+allows to exist.”
+
+“In the school?” said Bettykin. “Oo-oo! What was it?”
+
+“It was a Rollertowl,” replied the doctor impressively and in a
+sonorous voice.
+
+“I never heard of it,” said the Cherub, awestruck. “What is it like?”
+
+“He means a roller-towel, goosie,” explained Julia. “A towel on a
+roller, that everybody wipes their hands and faces on.”
+
+“Exactly. And because everybody uses it, any contagious disease that
+anybody has, everybody is liable to catch. I’d as soon put a
+rattlesnake in a school as a roller-towel. In this case, half the grade
+where it was had conjunctivitis. But that isn’t the worst. There was
+one case of trachoma in the grade; a poor little Italian whose parents
+ignorantly sent her to an optician instead of an oculist. The optician
+treated her for an ordinary inflammation, and now she will lose the
+sight of one eye. Meantime, if any of the others have been infected by
+her, through that roller-towel, there will be trouble, for trachoma is
+a serious disease.”
+
+“Did you throw out the roller-towel?” asked Charley with a hopeful eye
+to a fray.
+
+“No. We got thrown out ourselves, didn’t we, Junkum?”
+
+“Pretty near,” corroborated Julia. “The principal told Dr. Strong that
+he guessed he could run his school himself and he didn’t need any
+interference by—by—what did he call us, Dr. Strong?”
+
+“Interlopers. No, Cherub, an interloper is no relation to an antelope.
+It was four days ago that we left that principal and went out and
+whistled for the Fool-killer. Yesterday, the principal came down with a
+rose-pink eye of his own; the Health Officer met him and ordered him
+into quarantine, and the terrible and ferocious Rollertowl is now
+writhing in its death-agonies on the ash-heap.”
+
+“What about other diseases?” asked Mrs. Clyde after a pause.
+
+“Nothing from me. The eye will report them itself quick enough. And as
+soon as your eye tells you that anything is the matter with it, you
+tell the oculist, and you’ll probably get along all right, as far as
+diseases go. It is not diseases that I have to worry about, as your
+Chinese-plan physician, so much as it is to see that you give your
+vision a fair chance. Let’s see. Charley, you’re the Committee on Air,
+aren’t you? Could you take on a little more work?”
+
+“Try me,” said the boy promptly.
+
+“All right; we’ll make you the Committee on Air and Light, hereafter,
+with power of protest and report whenever you see your mother going out
+in a polka-dotted, cross-eyed veil, or your grandmother reading a Bible
+that needs burning worse than any heretic ever did, or any of the
+others working or playing without sufficient illumination. Here endeth
+this lecture, with a final word. This is it:—
+
+“The eye is the most nervous of all the body’s organs. Except in early
+childhood, when it has the recklessness and overconfidence of unbounded
+strength, it complains promptly and sharply of ill-usage. Now, there
+are a few hundred rules about when and how to use the eyes and when and
+how not to use them. I’m not going to burden you with those. All I’m
+going to advise you is that when your eyes burn, smart, itch, or feel
+strained, there’s some reason for it, and you should obey the warning
+and stop urging them to work against their protest. In fact, I might
+sum it all up in a motto which I think I’ll hang here in the library—a
+terse old English slang phrase.”
+
+“What is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“‘Mind your eye,’” replied the Health Master.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+THE RE-MADE LADY
+
+
+“Of all unfortunate times!” lamented Mrs. Clyde, her piquant face
+twisted to an expression of comic despair. “Why couldn’t he have given
+us a little more notice?”
+
+Impatiently she tossed aside the telegram which announced that her
+husband’s old friend, Oren Taylor, the artist, would arrive at seven
+o’clock that evening.
+
+“Don’t let it bother you, dear,” said Clyde. “I’ll take him to the club
+for dinner.”
+
+“You can’t. Have you forgotten that I’ve invited Louise Ennis for her
+quarterly—well—visitation?”
+
+Clyde whistled. “That’s rather a poser. What business have I got to
+have a cousin like Louise, anyway!”
+
+Upon this disloyal observation Dr. Strong walked into the library. He
+was a very different Dr. Strong from the nerve-shaken wanderer who had
+dropped from nowhere into the Clyde household a year previous as its
+physician on the Chinese plan of being employed to keep the family
+well. The painful lines of the face were smoothed out. There was a deep
+light of content, the content of the man who has found his place and
+filled it, in the level eyes; and about the grave and controlled set of
+the mouth a sort of sensitive buoyancy of expression. The flesh had
+hardened and the spirit softened in him.
+
+“Did you hear that, Strong?” inquired Mr. Clyde, turning to him.
+
+“I have trained ears,” answered Dr. Strong solemnly. “They’re
+absolutely impervious to any speech not intended for them.”
+
+“Open them to this: Louise Ennis is invited for dinner to-night. So is
+my old friend Oren Taylor, who wires to say that he’s passing through
+town.”
+
+“Is that Taylor, the artist of ‘The First Parting’? I shall enjoy
+meeting him.”
+
+“Well, you won’t enjoy meeting Cousin Louise,” declared Mr. Clyde. “We
+ask her about four times a year, out of family piety. You’ve been lucky
+to escape her thus far.”
+
+“Rather a painful old party, your cousin?” inquired the physician,
+smilingly, of Clyde.
+
+“Old? Twenty-two,” said Mrs. Clyde. “But she looks fifty and feels a
+hundred.”
+
+“Allowing for feminine exaggeration,” amended Clyde.
+
+“But what’s so wrong with her?” demanded the physician.
+
+“Nerves,” said Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Stomach,” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Headaches,” said Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Toe-aches,” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Too much money,” said Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Too much ego,” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Dyspepsia.”
+
+“Hypochondria.”
+
+“Chronic inertia.”
+
+“Set it to music,” suggested Dr. Strong, “and sing it as a duet of
+disease, from ablepsy to zymosis, inclusively. I shall be immensely
+interested to observe this prodigy of ills.”
+
+“You’ll have plenty of opportunity,” said Mrs. Clyde rather
+maliciously. “You’re to sit next to her at dinner to-night.”
+
+“Then put Bettykin on the other side of me,” he returned. “With that
+combination of elf, tyrant, and angel close at hand, I can turn for
+relief from the grave to the cradle.”
+
+“Indeed you cannot. Louise can’t endure children. She says they get on
+her nerves. _My_ children!”
+
+“Now you _have_ put the finishing touch to your character sketch,”
+observed Dr. Strong. “A woman of child-bearing age who can’t endure
+children—well, she is pretty far awry.”
+
+“Yet I can remember Louise when she was a sweet, attractive young
+girl,” sighed Mrs. Clyde. “That was before her mother died, and left
+her to the care of a father too busy making money to do anything for
+his only child but spend it on her.”
+
+“You’re talking about Lou Ennis, I know,” said Grandma Sharpless, who
+had entered in time to hear the closing words.
+
+“Yes,” said. Dr. Strong. “What is our expert diagnostician’s opinion of
+the case? You know I always defer to you, ma’am, on any problem that’s
+under the surface of things.”
+
+“None of your soft sawder, young man!” said the old lady, her shrewd,
+gray eyes twinkling from her shrewd, pink face. “My opinion of Louise
+Ennis? I’ll give it to you in two words. Just spoiled.”
+
+“Taking my warning as I find it,” remarked the physician, rising, “I
+shall now retire to put on some chain armor under my evening coat, in
+case the Terrible Cousin attempts to stab me with an oyster-fork.”
+
+The dinner was not, as Mrs. Clyde was forced to admit afterward, by any
+means the dismal function which she had anticipated. Oren Taylor, an
+easy, discursive, humorous talker, set the pace and was ably seconded
+by Grandma Sharpless, whose knack of incisive and pointed comment
+served to spur him to his best. Dr. Strong, who said little, attempted
+to draw Miss Ennis into the current of talk, and was rewarded with an
+occasional flash of rather acid wit, which caused the artist to look
+across the table curiously at the girl. So far as he could do so
+without rudeness, the physician studied his neighbor.
+
+He saw a tall, amply-built girl, with a slackened frame whose muscles
+had forgotten how to play their part properly in holding the structure
+firm. Her face was flaccid. Under the large but dull eyes, there was a
+bloodless puffiness. Discontent sat enthroned at the corners of the
+sensitive mouth. A faint, reddish eruption disfigured her chin. Her two
+strong assets, beautifully even teeth and a wealth of soft, fine hair,
+failed wholly to save her from being a flatly repellent woman. Dr.
+Strong noted further that her hands were incessantly uneasy, and that
+she ate little and without interest. Also she seemed, in a sullen way,
+shy. Yet, despite all of these drawbacks, there was a pathetic
+suggestion of inherent fineness about her; of qualities become decadent
+through disuse; a charm that should have been, thwarted and perverted
+by a slovenly habit of life. Dr. Strong set her down as a woman at war
+with herself, and therefore with her world.
+
+After dinner Mr. and Mrs. Clyde slipped away to see the children. The
+artist followed Dr. Strong, to whom he had taken a liking, as most men
+did, into the small lounging-room, where he lighted a cigar.
+
+“Too bad about that Miss Ennis, isn’t it?” said Taylor abruptly.
+
+His companion looked at him interrogatively.
+
+“Such a mess,” he continued. “Such a ruin. Yet so much left that isn’t
+ruined. That face would be worth a lot to me for the ‘Poet’s Cycle of
+the Months’ that I’m painting now. What a _November_ she’d make;
+‘November, the withered mourner of glories dead and gone.’ Only I
+suppose she’d resent being asked to sit.”
+
+“Illusions are the last assets that a woman loses,” agreed Dr. Strong.
+
+“To think,” pursued the painter, “of what her Maker meant her to be,
+and of how she has belied it! She’s essentially and fundamentally a
+beautiful woman; that is why I want her for a model.”
+
+‘“In the structure of her face, perhaps—”
+
+“Yes; and all through. Look at the set of her shoulders, and the lines
+of her when she walks. Nothing jerry-built about her! She’s got the
+contours of a goddess and the finish of a mud-pie. It’s maddening.”
+
+“More maddening from the physician’s point of view than from the
+artist’s. For the physician knows how needless it all is.”
+
+“Is she your patient?”
+
+“If she were I’d be ashamed to admit it. Give me military authority and
+a year’s time and if I couldn’t fix her so that she’d be proud to pose
+for your picture—Good Heavens!”
+
+From behind the drapery of the passageway appeared Louise Ennis. She
+took two steps toward the two men and threw out her hands in an appeal
+which was almost grotesque.
+
+“Is it true?” she cried, turning from one to the other. “Tell me, is it
+really true?”
+
+“My dear young lady,” groaned Taylor, “what can I say to palliate my
+unpard—”
+
+“Nevermind that! I don’t care. I don’t care anything about it. It’s my
+own fault. I stopped and listened. I couldn’t help it. It means so much
+to me. You can’t know. No man can understand. Is it true that I—that my
+face—”
+
+Oren Taylor was an artist in more than his art: he possessed the rare
+sense of the fit thing to do and say.
+
+“It is true,” he answered quietly, “that I have seen few faces more
+justly and beautifully modeled than yours.”
+
+“And you,” she said, whirling upon Dr. Strong. “Can you do what you
+said? Can you make me good-looking?”
+
+“Not I. But you yourself can.”
+
+“Oh, how? What must I do? D—d—don’t think me a fool!” She was
+half-sobbing now. “It may be silly to long so bitterly to be beautiful.
+But I’d give anything short of life for it.”
+
+“Not silly at all,” returned Dr. Strong emphatically. “On the contrary,
+that desire is rooted in the profoundest depths of sex.”
+
+“And is the best excuse for art as a profession,” said the painter,
+smiling.
+
+“Only tell me what to do,” she besought. “Gently,” said Dr. Strong. “It
+can’t be done in a day. And it will be a costly process.”
+
+“That doesn’t matter. If money is all—”
+
+“It isn’t all. It’s only a drop in the bucket. It will cost you dear in
+comfort, in indulgence, in ease, in enjoyment, in habit—”
+
+“I’ll obey like a child.” Again her hands went tremulously out to him;
+then she covered her face with them and burst into the tears of nervous
+exhaustion.
+
+“This is no place for me,” said the artist, and was about to escape by
+the door, when Mrs. Clyde blocked his departure.
+
+“Ah, you are in here,” she said gayly. “I’d been wondering—Why, what’s
+the matter? What is it?”
+
+“There has been an unfortunate blunder,” said Dr. Strong quickly. “I
+said some foolish things which Miss Ennis overheard—”
+
+“No,” interrupted the painter. “The fault was mine—” And in the same
+breath Louise Ennis cried:—
+
+“I didn’t overhear! I listened. I eavesdropped.”
+
+“Are you quite mad, all of you?” demanded the hostess. “Won’t somebody
+tell me what has happened?”
+
+“It’s true,” said the girl wildly; “every word they said. I _am_ a
+mess.”
+
+Mrs. Clyde’s arms went around the girl. Sex-loyalty raised its war
+signal flaring in her cheeks.
+
+“_Who_ said that?” she demanded, in a tone of which Dr. Strong observed
+afterward, “I never before heard a woman roar under her breath.”
+
+“Never mind who said it,” retorted the girl. “It’s true anyway. It
+wasn’t meant to hurt me. It didn’t hurt me. He is going to cure me; Dr.
+Strong is.”
+
+“Cure you, Louise? Of what?”
+
+“Of ugliness. Of hideousness. Of being a mess.”
+
+“But, my dear,” said the older woman softly, “you mustn’t take it to
+heart so, the idle word of some one who doesn’t know you at all.”
+
+“You can’t understand,” retorted the other passionately. “You’ve always
+been pretty!”
+
+“A compliment straight from the heart,” murmured the painter.
+
+The color came into Mrs. Clyde’s smooth cheek again. “What have you
+promised her, Dr. Strong?” she asked.
+
+“Nothing. I have simply followed Mr. Taylor’s lead. His is the artist
+eye that can see beauty beneath disguises. He has told Miss Ennis that
+she was meant to be a beautiful woman. I have told her that she can be
+what she was meant to be if she wills, and wills hard enough.”
+
+“And you will take charge of her case?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“That, of course, depends upon you and Mr. Clyde. If you will include
+Miss Ennis in the family, my responsibilities will automatically extend
+to her.”
+
+“Most certainly,” said Mrs. Clyde. “And now, Mr. Taylor,” she added,
+answering a look of appeal from that uncomfortable gentleman, “come and
+see the sketches. I really believe they are Whistler’s.”
+
+As they left, Dr. Strong looked down at Louise Ennis with a smile.
+
+“At present I prescribe a little cold water for those eyes,” said he.
+“And then some general conversation in the drawing-room. Come here
+tomorrow at four.”
+
+“No,” said she. “I want to begin at once.”
+
+“So as to profit by the impetus of the first enthusiasm? Very well. How
+did you come here this evening?”
+
+“In my limousine.”
+
+“Sell it.”
+
+“Sell my new car? At this time of year?”
+
+“Store it, then.”
+
+“And go about on street-cars, I suppose?”
+
+“Not at all. Walk.”
+
+“But when it rains?”
+
+“Run.”
+
+Eagerness died out of Louise Ennis’s face. “Oh, I know,” she said
+pettishly. “It’s that old, old exercise treatment. Well, I’ve tried
+that, and if you think—”
+
+She stopped in surprise, for Dr. Strong, walking over to the door, held
+the portière aside.
+
+“After you,” he said courteously.
+
+“Is that all the advice you have for me?” she persisted.
+
+“After you,” he repeated.
+
+“Well, I’m sorry,” she said sulkily. “What is it you want me—”
+
+“Pardon me,” he interrupted in uncompromising tones. “I am sure they
+are waiting for us in the other room.”
+
+“You are treating me like a spoiled child,” declared Miss Ennis,
+stamping a period to the charge with her high French heel.
+
+“Precisely.”
+
+She marched out of the room, and, with the physician, joined the rest
+of the company. For the remainder of the evening she spoke little to
+any one and not at all to Dr. Strong. But when she came to say
+good-night he was standing apart. He held out his hand, which she could
+not well avoid seeing.
+
+“When you get up to-morrow,” he said, “look in the mirror, [she winced]
+and say, ‘I can be beautiful if I want to hard enough.’ Good-bye.”
+
+Luncheon at the Clydes’ next day was given up to a family discussion of
+Miss Louise Ennis, precipitated by Mr. Clyde, who rallied Dr. Strong on
+his newest departure.
+
+“Turned beauty doctor, have you?” he taunted good-humoredly.
+
+“Trainer, rather,” answered Dr. Strong.
+
+“You might be in better business,” declared Mrs. Sharpless, with her
+customary frankness. “Beauty is only skin-deep.”
+
+“Grandma Sharpless’s quotations,” remarked Dr. Strong to the
+saltcellar, “are almost as sure to be wrong as her observations are to
+be right.”
+
+“It was a wiser man than you or I who spoke that truth about beauty.”
+
+“Nonsense! Beauty only skin-deep, indeed! It’s liver-deep anyway. Often
+it’s soul-deep. Do you think you’ve kept your good looks, Grandma
+Sharpless, just by washing your skin?”
+
+“Don’t you try to dodge the issue by flattery, young man,” said the old
+lady, the more brusquely in that she could see her son-in-law grinning
+boyishly at the mounting color in her face. “I’m as the Lord made me.”
+
+“And as you’ve kept yourself, by clean, sound living. Miss Ennis isn’t
+as the Lord made her or meant her. She’s a mere parody of it. Her basic
+trouble is an ailment much more prevalent among intelligent people than
+they are willing to admit. In the books it is listed under various
+kinds of hyphenated neurosis; but it’s real name is fool-in-the-head.”
+
+“Curable?” inquired Mr. Clyde solicitously.
+
+“There’s no known specific except removing the seat of the trouble with
+an axe,” announced Dr. Strong. “But cases sometimes respond to less
+heroic treatment.”
+
+“Not this case, I fear,” put in Mrs. Clyde. “Louise will coddle herself
+into the idea that you have grossly insulted her. She won’t come back.”
+
+“Won’t she!” exclaimed Mrs. Sharpless. “Insult or no insult, she would
+come to the bait that Dr. Strong has thrown her if she had to crawl on
+her knees.”
+
+Come she did, prompt to the hour. From out the blustery February day
+she lopped into the physician’s pleasant study, slumped into a chair,
+and held out to him a limp left hand, palm up and fingers curled.
+Ordinarily the most punctilious of men, Dr. Strong did not move from
+his stance before the fire. He looked at the hand.
+
+“What’s that for?” he inquired.
+
+“Aren’t you going to feel my pulse?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Nor take my temperature?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Nor look at my tongue?”
+
+“Certainly not. I have a quite sufficient idea of what it looks like.”
+
+The tone was almost brutal. Miss Ennis began to whimper.
+
+“I’m a m—m—mess, I know,” she blubbered. “But you needn’t keep telling
+me so.”
+
+“A mess can be cleared up,” said he more kindly, “under orders.”
+
+“I’ll do whatever you tell me, if only—”
+
+“Stop! There will be no ‘if’ about it. You will do as you are bid, or
+we will drop the case right here.”
+
+“No, no! Don’t drop me. I will. I promise. Only, please tell me what is
+the matter with me.”
+
+Dr. Strong, smiling inwardly, recalled the diagnosis he had announced
+to the Clydes, but did not repeat it.
+
+“Nothing,” he said.
+
+“But I know there must be. I have such strange symptoms. You can’t
+imagine.”
+
+Fumbling in her hand-bag she produced a very elegant little notebook
+with a gold pencil attached. Dr. Strong looked at it with fascinated
+but ominous eyes.
+
+“I’ve jotted down some of the symptoms here,” she continued, “just as
+they occurred. You see, here’s Thursday. That was a heart attack—”
+
+“Let me see that book.”
+
+She handed it to him. He carefully took the gold pencil from its socket
+and returned it to her.
+
+“Now, is there anything in this but symptoms? Any addresses that you
+want to keep?”
+
+“Only one: the address of a freckle and blemish remover.”
+
+“We’ll come to that later. Meantime—” He tossed the book into the heart
+of the coal fire where it promptly curled up and perished.
+
+“Why—why—why—” gasped the visitor,—“how dare you? What do you mean?
+That is an ivory-bound, gold-mounted book. It’s valuable.”
+
+“I told you, I believe, that the treatment would be expensive. This is
+only the beginning. Of all outrageous, unforgivable kinds of
+self-coddling, the hypochondria that keeps its own autobiography is the
+worst.”
+
+Regrettable though it is to chronicle, Miss Ennis hereupon emitted a
+semi-yelp of rage and beat the floor with her high French heels.
+Instantly the doctor’s gaze shifted to her feet. Just how it happened
+she could not remember, but her right foot, unprotected, presently hit
+the floor with a painful thump, while the physician contemplated the
+shoe which he had deftly removed therefrom.
+
+“Two inches and a half at least, that heel,” he observed. “Talk about
+the Chinese women torturing their feet!” He laid the offending article
+upon the hearth, set his own soundly shod foot upon it, and tweaked off
+two inches of heel with the fire-tongs. “Not so pretty,” he remarked,
+“but at least you can walk, and not tittup in that. Give me the other.”
+
+Shocked and astounded into helplessness, she mechanically obeyed. He
+performed his rough-and-ready repairs, and handed it back to her.
+
+“Speaking of walking,” he said calmly, “have you stored your automobile
+yet?”
+
+“No! I—I—I—”
+
+“After to-morrow I don’t want you to set foot in it. Now, then, we’re
+going to put you through a course of questioning. Ready?”
+
+Miss Ennis settled back in her chair, with the anticipatory expression
+of one to whom the recital of her own woe is a lingering pleasure.
+“Perhaps if I told you,” she began, “just how I feel—”
+
+“Never mind that. Do you drink?”
+
+“No!” The answer came back on the rebound. “Humph!” Dr. Strong leaned
+over her. She turned her head away.
+
+“You asked me as if you meant I was a drunkard,” she complained. “Once
+in a while, when I have some severe nervous strain to undergo, I need a
+stimulant.”
+
+“Oh. Cocktail?”
+
+“Yes. A mild one.”
+
+“A mild cocktail! That’s a paradox I’ve never encountered. How often do
+you take these mild cocktails?”
+
+“Oh, just occasionally.”
+
+“Well, a meal is an occasion. Before meals?”
+
+“Sometimes,” she admitted reluctantly.
+
+“You didn’t have one here last night.”
+
+“No.”
+
+“And you ate almost nothing.”
+
+“That is just it, you see. I need something: otherwise I have no
+appetite.”
+
+“In other words, you have formed a drink habit.”
+
+“Oh, Dr. Strong!” It was half reproach, half insulted innocence, that
+wail.
+
+“After a cocktail—or two—or three,” he looked at her closely, but she
+would not meet his eyes, “you eat pretty well?”
+
+“Yes, I suppose so.”
+
+“And then go to bed with a headache because you’ve stimulated your
+appetite to more food than your run-down mechanism can rightly handle.”
+
+“I do have a good many headaches.”
+
+“Do anything for them?”
+
+“Yes. I take some harmless powders, sometimes.”
+
+“Harmless, eh? A harmless headache powder is like a mild cocktail. It
+doesn’t exist. So you’re adding drug habit to drink habit. Fortunately,
+it isn’t hard to stop. It has begun to show on you already, in that
+puffy grayness under the eyes. All the coal-tar powders vitiate the
+blood as well as affect the heart. Sleep badly?”
+
+“Very often.”
+
+“Take anything for that?”
+
+“You mean opiates? I’m not a fool, Doctor.”
+
+“You mean you haven’t gone quite that far,” said the other grimly.
+“You’ve started in on two habits; but not the worst. Well, that’s all.
+Come back when you need to.”
+
+Miss Ennis’s big, dull eyes opened wide. “Aren’t you going to give me
+anything? Any medicine?”
+
+“You don’t need it.”
+
+“Or any advice?”
+
+Dr. Strong permitted himself a little smile at the success of his
+strategy. “Give it to yourself,” he suggested. “You showed, in flashes,
+during the dinner talk last night, that you have both wit and sense,
+when you choose to use them. Do it now.”
+
+The girl squirmed uncomfortably. “I suppose you want me to give up
+cocktails,” she murmured in a die-away voice.
+
+“Absolutely.”
+
+“And try to get along with no stimulants at all?”
+
+“By no means. Fresh air and exercise ad lib.”
+
+“And to stop the headache powders?”
+
+“Right; go on.”
+
+“And to stop thinking about my symptoms?”
+
+“Good! I didn’t reckon on your inherent sense in vain.”
+
+“And to walk where I have been riding?”
+
+“Rain or shine.”
+
+“What about diet?”
+
+“All the plain food you want, at any time you really want it, provided
+you eat slowly and chew thoroughly.”
+
+“A la Fletcher?”
+
+“Horace Fletcher is one of those fine fanatics whose extravagances
+correct the average man’s stolid stupidities. I’ve seen his fad made
+ridiculous, but never harmful. Try it out.”
+
+“And you won’t tell me when to come back?”
+
+“When you need to, I said. The moment the temptation to break over the
+rules becomes too strong, come. And—eh—by the way—eh—don’t worry about
+your mirror for a while.” Temporarily content with this, the new
+patient went away with new hope. Wiping his brow, the doctor strolled
+into the sitting-room where he found the family awaiting him with
+obvious but repressed curiosity.
+
+“It isn’t ethical, I suppose,” said Mr. Clyde, “to discuss a patient’s
+case with outsiders?”
+
+“You’re not outsiders. And she’s not my patient, in the ordinary sense,
+since I’m giving my services free. Moreover, I need all the help I can
+get.”
+
+“What can _I_ do?” asked Mrs. Clyde promptly. “Drop in at her house
+from time to time, and cheer her up. I don’t want her to depend upon me
+exclusively. She has depended altogether too much on doctors in the
+past.”
+
+Mr. Clyde chuckled. “Did she tell you that the European medical faculty
+had chased her around to every spa on the Continent? Neurasthenic
+dyspepsia, they called it.”
+
+“Pretty name! Seventy per cent of all dyspeptics have the seat of the
+imagination in the stomach. The difficulty is to divert it.”
+
+“What’s your plan?”
+
+“Oh, I’ve several, when the time comes. For the present I’ve got to get
+her around into condition.”
+
+“Spoiled mind, spoiled body,” remarked Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“Exactly. And I’m going to begin on the body, because that is the
+easiest to set right. Look out for an ill-tempered cousin during the
+next fortnight.”
+
+His prophecy was amply confirmed by Mrs. Clyde, who made it her
+business, amid multifarious activities, to drop in upon Miss Ennis with
+patient frequency. On the tenth day of the “cure,” Mrs. Clyde reported
+to the household physician:—
+
+“If I go there again I shall probably _slap_ her. She’s become simply
+unbearable.”
+
+“Good!” said Dr. Strong. “Fine! She has had the nerve to stick to the
+rules. We needn’t overstrain her, though. I’ll have her come here
+tomorrow.”
+
+Accordingly, at six o’clock in the evening of the eleventh day, the
+patient stamped into the office, wet, bedraggled, and angry.
+
+“Now look!” she cried. “You made me store my motor-car. All the
+street-cars were crowded. My umbrella turned inside out. I’m a perfect
+drench. And I know I’ll catch my death of cold.” Whereupon she laid a
+pathetic hand on her chest and coughed hollowly.
+
+“Stick out your foot,” ordered Dr. Strong. And, as she obeyed: “That’s
+well. Good, sensible storm shoes. I’ll risk your taking cold. How do
+you feel? Better?”
+
+“No. Worse!” she snapped.
+
+“I suppose so,” he retorted with a chuckle.
+
+“What is more,” she declared savagely, “I look worse!”
+
+“So your mirror has been failing in its mission of flattery. Too bad.
+Now take off your coat, sit right there by the fire, and in an hour
+you’ll be dry as toast.”
+
+“An hour? I can’t stay an hour!”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“It’s six o’clock. I must go home. Besides,” she added unguardedly,
+“I’m half starved.”
+
+“_Indeed!_ Had a cocktail to-day?”
+
+“No. Certainly not.”
+
+“Yet you have an appetite. A bad sign. Oh, a very bad sign—for the
+cocktail market.”
+
+“I’m so tired all the time. And I wake up in the morning with hardly
+any strength to get out of bed—”
+
+“Or the inclination? Which?” broke in the doctor.
+
+“And my heart gives the queerest jumps and—”
+
+“Thought we’d thrown that symptom-book into the fire. Stand up,
+please.”
+
+She stood. Dr. Strong noted with satisfaction how, already, the lithe
+and well-set figure had begun to revert to its natural pose, showing
+that the muscles were beginning to do their work. He also noted that
+the hands, hitherto a mere _mélange_ of nervously writhing fingers,
+hung easily slack.
+
+“Your troubles,” he said pleasantly, “have only just begun. I think
+you’re strong enough now to begin work.”
+
+“I’m not,” she protested, half weeping. “I feel faint this minute.”
+
+“Good, healthy hunger. Of course, if a glance in your mirror convinces
+you that you’ve had enough of the treatment—”
+
+Miss Ennis said something under her breath which sounded very much like
+“Brute!”
+
+“Have you ever had a good sweat?” he asked abruptly.
+
+Her lips curled superciliously. “I’m not given to perspiration, I’m
+thankful to—”
+
+“Did I say ‘perspire’?” inquired he. “I understood myself to say
+‘sweat.’ Have you ever—”
+
+“No.”
+
+“High time you began. Buy yourself the heaviest sweater you can
+find—you may call it a ‘perspirationer’ if you think the salesman will
+appreciate your delicacy—and I’ll be around to-morrow and set up a
+punching-bag for you.”
+
+“What is that?”
+
+“A device which you strike at. The blow forces it against a board and
+it returns and, unless you dodge nimbly, impinges upon your
+countenance. In other words, whacks you on the nose. Prizefighters use
+it.”
+
+“I suppose you want me to be like a prizefighter.”
+
+“The most beautiful pink-and-white skin and the clearest eye I’ve ever
+seen belonged to a middleweight champion. Yes, I’d like to see you
+exactly like him in that respect. One hour every day—”
+
+“I simply can’t. I shan’t have time. With the walking I do now I’m busy
+all the morning and dead tired all the afternoon; and in the evening
+there is my bridge club—”
+
+“Ah, you play bridge. For money?”
+
+“Naturally we don’t play for counters.”
+
+“Well, I’d give it up.”
+
+“You are not employed as a censor of my morals, Dr. Strong.”
+
+“No; but I’ve undertaken to censor your nerves. And gambling, for a
+woman in your condition, is altogether too much of a strain.”
+
+The corners of Miss Ennis’s mouth quivered babyishly. “I’m sure, then,
+that working like a prizefighter will be too much strain. You’re
+wearing me out.”
+
+“I’m a cruel tyrant,” mocked Dr. Strong; “and worse is to come. We’ll
+clear out a room in your house and put in not only the punching-bag,
+but also pulleys and a rowing-machine. And I’ll send up an athletic
+instructor to see that you use them.”
+
+“I won’t have him. I’ll send him away!”
+
+“By advice of your mirror?”
+
+Miss Ennis frankly and angrily wept.
+
+“Now I’ll tell you a secret about yourself.” Miss Ennis stopped
+weeping.
+
+“Ninety-nine cases out of a hundred I couldn’t handle as I am handling
+your case. They would need a month’s rest and building up before they’d
+be fit for real work. But you are naturally a powerful, muscular woman
+with great physical endurance and resiliency. What I am trying to do is
+to take advantage of your splendid equipment to pull you out.”
+
+“What would you do with the ordinary case?” asked the girl, interested.
+
+“Oh, put her to bed, perhaps. Perhaps send her away to the woods. Maybe
+set a nurse over her to see that she didn’t take to writing her
+symptoms down in a book. Keep her on a rigid diet, and build her up by
+slow and dull processes. You may thank your stars that—”
+
+“I don’t thank my stars at all!” broke in the patient, as her besetting
+vice of self-pity asserted itself. “I’d much rather do that than be
+driven like a galley-slave. I’m too tired to get any pleasure out of
+anything—”
+
+“Even bridge?” interposed the tormentor softly.
+
+“—and when night comes I fall into bed like a helpless log.”
+
+“That’s the best news I’ve heard yet. You’re progressing. Now take that
+new appetite of yours home to dinner. And don’t spoil it by eating too
+fast. Good-night.”
+
+Fully a fortnight later Grandma Sharpless met Dr. Strong in the hallway
+as he came in from a walk.
+
+“What have you been doing to Louise Ennis?” she demanded.
+
+“Lots of things. What’s wrong now? Another fit of the sulks?”
+
+“Worse,” said the old lady in a stage whisper. “She’s got _paint_ on
+her face.”
+
+Dr. Strong laughed. “Really? It might be worse. In fact, as a symptom,
+it couldn’t be better.”
+
+“Young man, do you mean to tell me that face-paint is a good thing for
+a young woman?”
+
+“Oh, no. It’s vulgar and tawdry, as a practice. But I’m glad to know
+that Miss Ennis has turned to it, because it shows that she recognizes
+her own improvement and is trying to add to it.”
+
+“But the stuff will ruin her skin,” cried the scandalized old lady.
+“See what dreadful faces women have who use it. Look at the actresses—”
+
+“Well, look at them!” broke in the physician. “There is no class of
+women in the world with such beautiful skin as the women of the stage.
+And that in spite of hard work, doubtful habits of eating, and
+irregular hours. Do you know why?”
+
+“I suppose you’ll tell me that paint does it,” said Mrs. Sharpless with
+a sniff.
+
+“Not the paint itself. But the fact that in putting it on and taking it
+off, they maintain a profound cleanliness of skin which the average
+woman doesn’t even understand. The real value of the successful
+skin-lotions and creams so widely exploited lies in the massage which
+their use compels.”
+
+“Aside from the stuff on her face,” remarked Mrs. Sharpless, “Louise
+looks like another woman, and acts like one. She came breezing in here
+like a young cyclone.”
+
+“Which means trouble,” sighed Dr. Strong. “Now that her vitality is
+returning, it will demand something to feed on. Well, we shall see.”
+
+He found his patient standing—not sitting, this time—before the
+fireplace, with a face of gloom. Before he could greet her, she burst
+out:—
+
+“How long am I to be kept on the grind? I see nobody. I have nothing to
+amuse me. I’ve had a row with father.” Dr. Strong smiled. “The servants
+are impertinent.” The smile broadened. “The whole world is hateful!”
+The doctor’s face was now expanded into a positive grin. “I despise
+everything and everybody! I’m bored.”
+
+“Passing that over for the moment for something less important,” said
+Dr. Strong smoothly, “where do you buy your paint?”
+
+“I don’t paint!” retorted the girl hotly.
+
+“Well, your rouge. Your skin-rejuvenator. Your essence of bloom of
+youth or whatever poetic name you call it by. Let me see the box.”
+Mutiny shone from the scowling face, but her hand went to her reticule
+and emerged with a small box. It passed to the physician’s hand and
+thence to the fire. “I’ll use paint if I want to,” declared the girl.
+“Undoubtedly. But you’ll use good paint if you use any. Get a
+theatrical paper, read the ads, and send for the highest grade of
+grease-paint. I won’t say anything about the vulgarity of the practice
+because I’m not censoring your manners. I’ll only state that three
+months from now you won’t want or need paint. Did you get this stuff,”
+he nodded toward the fireplace whence issued a highly perfumed smoke,
+“from that address in your deceased symptom-book?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“That was the firm which advertised to remove pimples, wasn’t it?”
+
+Miss Ennis shrank. “Pimple is an inexcusable word,” she protested.
+
+“Word? We’re dealing in realities now. And pimples were an inexcusable
+reality in your case, because they were the blossoms of gluttony,
+torpor, and self-indulgence.”
+
+He leaned forward and looked closely at her chin. The surface, once
+blotched and roughened, was now of a smooth and soft translucency. “You
+once objected to the word ‘sweat,’” he continued. “Well, it has
+eliminated the more objectionable word ‘pimple’ from your reckoning.
+And it has done the job better than your blemish-remover—-which leaves
+scars.”
+
+Her hand went to her temple, where there was a little group of
+silvery-white patches on the skin. “Can’t you fix that?” she asked
+anxiously.
+
+“No. Your ‘remover’ was corrosive sublimate. It certainly removed the
+blemish. It would also have removed your entire face if you had used
+enough of it. Nothing can restore what the liquid fire has burned away.
+That’s the penalty you pay for foolish credulousness. Fortunately, it
+is where it won’t show much.”
+
+Gloom surged back into her face. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she
+fretted. “I’m still a mess in looks even if I don’t feel so much like
+one.”
+
+“One half of looks is expression,” stated the doctor didactically. “I
+don’t like yours. What’s your religion?”
+
+His patient stared. “Why, I’m a Presbyterian, I suppose.”
+
+“Humph! You suppose! It doesn’t seem to have struck in very hard. Any
+objection to going to a Christian Science church?”
+
+“Christian Science! I thought the regular doctors considered it the
+worst kind of quackery.”
+
+“The regular doctors,” returned Dr. Strong quickly, “once considered
+anaesthesia, vaccination, and the germ theory as quackery. We live and
+learn, like others. There’s plenty of quackery in Christian Science,
+and also quite a little good. And nowadays we’re learning to accept the
+good in new dogmas, and discard the bad.”
+
+“And you really wish me to go to the Christian Science church?”
+
+“Why not? You’ll encounter there a few wild fanatics. I’ll trust your
+hard common sense to guard you against their proselytizing. You’ll also
+meet a much larger number of sweet, gentle, and cheerful people, with a
+sweet, helpful, and cheerful philosophy of life. That’ll help to cure
+you.”
+
+“And what will they cure me of, since you say I have no disease?”
+
+“They’ll cure you of turning your mouth down at the corners instead of
+up.”
+
+At this, the mouth referred to did, indeed, turn up at the corners, but
+in no very pleasant wise.
+
+“You think they’ll amuse me?” she inquired contemptuously.
+
+“Oh, as for amusement, I’ve arranged for that. You’re bored. Very well,
+I expected it. It’s a symptom, and a good one, in its place. I’ll get
+you a job.”
+
+“Indeed! And if I don’t want a job?”
+
+“No matter what you want. You need it.”
+
+“Settlement work, I suppose.”
+
+“Nothing so mild. Garbage inspection.”
+
+“What!” Louise Ennis closed her eyes in expectation of a qualm of
+disgust. The qualm didn’t materialize. “What’s the matter with me?” she
+asked in naïve and suppressed chagrin. “I ought to feel—well,
+nauseated.”
+
+“Nonsense! Your nerves and stomach have found their poise. That’s all.”
+
+“But what do I know about garbage?”
+
+“You know it when you see it, don’t you? Now, listen. There has been a
+strike of the city teamsters. Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer, wants
+volunteers to inspect the city and report on where conditions are bad
+from day to day. You’ve got intelligence. You can outwalk nine men out
+of ten. And you can be of real service to the city. Besides, it’s
+doctor’s orders.”
+
+The story of Louise Ennis’s part in the great garbage strike, and of
+her subsequent door-to-door canvass of housing conditions, has no place
+in this account. After the start, Dr. Strong saw little of her; but he
+heard much from Mrs. Clyde, who continued her frequent visits to the
+Ennis household; not so much, as she frankly admitted, for the purpose
+of furnishing bulletins to Dr. Strong, as because of her own growing
+interest in and affection for the girl. And, as time went on, Strong
+noticed that, on the occasions when he chanced to meet his patient on
+the street, she was usually accompanied by one or another of the
+presentable young men of the community, a fact which the physician
+observed with professional approval rather than personal gratification.
+
+“It isn’t her health alone,” said Mrs. Clyde, when they were discussing
+her, one warm day in the ensuing summer. “These six months seem to have
+made a new person of her. Trust the children to find out character.
+Bettykins wants to spend half her time with Cousin Lou.”
+
+“You’ve surely worked a transformation, Strong,” said Clyde. “But, of
+course, the raw material was there. You couldn’t do much for the
+average homely woman.”
+
+“The average woman isn’t homely,” said Mrs. Clyde. “She’s got good
+looks either spoiled or undeveloped.”
+
+“Perfectly true,” confirmed Dr. Strong. “Any young woman whose face
+isn’t actually malformed can find her place in the eternal scheme of
+beauty if she tries. Nature works toward beauty in all matters of sex.
+Where beauty doesn’t exist it is merely an error in Nature’s game.”
+
+“Then the world is pretty full of errors,” said Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“Most of them aren’t Nature’s errors. They are the mistakes of the
+foolish human. Take almost any woman, not past the age of development,
+build up her figure to be supple and self-sustaining; give her a clear
+eye, quick-moving blood, fresh skin, and some interest in the game of
+life that shall keep mind and body alert—why, the radiant force of her
+abounding health would make itself felt in a blind asylum. And all this
+she can do for herself, with a little knowledge and a good deal of
+will.”
+
+“But that isn’t exactly beauty, is it?” asked Clyde, puzzled.
+
+“Isn’t it? In the soundest sense, I think it is. Anyway, put it this
+way: No woman who is wholly healthy, inside and out, can fail to be
+attractive.”
+
+“I wish that painter-man could see Louise now, as an example,” said
+Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“Oren Taylor?” said Mr. Clyde. “Why, he can. He goes East next week,
+and I’ll wire him to stop over.”
+
+Oren Taylor arrived late on a warm afternoon. As he crossed the lawn,
+Louise Ennis was playing “catch” with Manny Clyde. Her figure swung and
+straightened with the lithe muscularity of a young animal. Her cheek
+was clear pink, deepening to the warmer color of the curved lips. The
+blue veins stood out a little against the warm, moist temples from
+which she brushed a vagrant lock of hair. Her eyes were wide and
+lustrous with the eager effort of the play, for the boy was throwing
+wide in purposeful delight over her swift gracefulness.
+
+“Great Heavens!” exclaimed the artist, staring at her. “Who did that?”
+
+“Strong did that,” explained Clyde; “as per specifications.”
+
+“A triumph!” declared Taylor. “A work of art.”
+
+“Oh, no,” said Dr. Strong; “a renewal of Nature.”
+
+“In any case, a lady remade and better than new. My profound
+felicitations, Dr. Strong.” He walked over to the flushed and lovely
+athlete. “Miss Ennis,” he said abruptly, “I want your permission to
+stay over to-morrow and sketch you. I need you in my ‘Poet’s Cycle of
+the Months.’”
+
+“How do you do, Mr. Taylor?” she returned demurely. “Of course you can
+sketch me, if it doesn’t interfere with my working hours.” A quick
+smile rippled across her face like sunlight across water. “The same
+subject?” she asked with mischievous nonchalance.
+
+“No. Not even the same season,” he replied emphatically, coloring, as
+he bethought him of his “November, the withered mourner of glories dead
+and gone.”
+
+“What part am I to play now?”
+
+“Let Dr. Strong name it,” said Taylor with quick tact. “He has prepared
+the model.”
+
+The girl turned to the physician, a little deeper tinge of color in her
+face.
+
+“Referred to Swinburne,” said Strong lightly, and quoted:—
+
+“When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces,
+The mother of months in valley and plain
+Fills the shadows and windy places
+With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.”
+
+
+“Atalanta,” said Oren Taylor, bowing low to her; “the maiden spirit of
+the spring.”
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+THE RED PLACARD
+
+
+“Well?” questioned Mrs. Clyde, facing the Health Master haggardly, as
+he entered the library.
+
+“Oh, come!” he protested with his reassuring smile. “Don’t take it so
+tragically. You’ve got a pretty sick-looking boy there. But any
+thoroughgoing fever makes a boy of nine pretty sick.”
+
+“What fever?” demanded the mother. “What is it?”
+
+“Let’s start with what it isn’t—and thank Heaven. It isn’t typhoid. And
+it isn’t diphtheria.”
+
+“Then it’s—it’s—;”
+
+“It’s scarlet fever,” broke in her mother, Mrs. Sharpless, who had
+followed the doctor into the room. “That’s what it is.”
+
+Mrs. Clyde shuddered at the name. “Has he got the rash?”
+
+“No. But he will have to-morrow,” stated the old lady positively.
+
+“Do you think so, too, Dr. Strong?” Mrs. Clyde appealed.
+
+“I’ll accept Grandma Sharpless’s judgment,” answered the physician.
+“She has seen more scarlet fever in her time than I, or most
+physicians. And experience is the true teacher of diagnosis.”
+
+“But you can’t be sure!” persisted Mrs. Clyde. “How can you tell
+without the rash?”
+
+“Not in any way that I could put into words,” said her mother. “But
+there’s something in the look of the throat and something about the
+eyes and skin—Well, I can’t describe it, but I know it as I know my own
+name.”
+
+“There speaks the born diagnostician,” observed the Health Master. “I’m
+afraid the verdict must stand.”
+
+“Then—then,” faltered Mrs. Clyde, “we must act at once. I’ll call up my
+husband at the factory.”
+
+“What for?” inquired Dr. Strong innocently. “Why, to let him know, of
+course.”
+
+“Don’t. When I undertook to act as Chinese-plan physician to the Clyde
+household, I was not only to guard the family against illness as well
+as I could, but also to save them worry. This is Saturday. Mr. Clyde
+has had a hard, trying week in the factory. Why break up his day?”
+
+Mrs. Clyde drew a long breath and her face lightened. “Then it isn’t a
+serious case?”
+
+“Scarlet fever is always serious. Any disease which thoroughly poisons
+the system is. But there’s no immediate danger; and there shouldn’t be
+much danger at any time to a sturdy youngster like Charley, if he’s
+well looked after.”
+
+“But the other children!” Mrs. Clyde turned to Mrs. Sharpless. “Where
+can we send them, mother?”
+
+“Nowhere.” It was the doctor who answered.
+
+“Surely we can’t keep them in the house!” cried Mrs. Clyde. “They would
+be certain to catch it from Charley.”
+
+“By no means certain. Even if they did, that would not be the worst
+thing that could happen.”
+
+“No? What would, then?” challenged Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“That they should go out of this house, possibly carrying the poison
+with them into some other and defenseless community.” Dr. Strong spoke
+a little sternly.
+
+Neither woman replied for a moment. When Mrs. Clyde spoke, it was with
+a changed voice. “Yes. You are right. I didn’t think. At least I
+thought only of my own children. It’s hard to learn to think like a
+mother of all children.”
+
+“It’s as near to the divine as any human can come,” returned the Health
+Master gently. “However, I think I can promise you that, if the twins
+and Bettykin haven’t been touched with the poison already, they shan’t
+get it from Charley. We’ll organize a defense—provided only the enemy
+hasn’t established itself already. Now the question is, where did the
+poison come from? We’ll have Junkum in and see if she can help us find
+out.” Julia, the more efficient of the eleven-year-old twins, a shrewd
+and observing youngster, resembling, in many respects, her grandmother,
+came at the doctor’s summons and was told what had befallen Charley.
+
+“Oh!” said Junkum. Then, “Can I nurse him?”
+
+“I should think not!” burst out her mother and grandmother in a breath.
+
+“Later on you can help,” said Dr. Strong. “In fact, I shall probably
+need your help. Now, Junkum, you remember I told you children a month
+ago that there was scarlet fever about and warned you to guard your
+mouths and noses with special care. Can you recall whether Charley has
+been careless?”
+
+Miss Julia took the matter under consideration. “We’ve all been, I
+guess,” she said. “Clara Wingate gave a party last week and there was
+bobbing for apples, and everybody had their faces in the same tub of
+water.”
+
+“Yes; and Irving Wingate has since come down with scarlet fever,” added
+Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Enough said!” asserted the Health Master. “I can’t think of any better
+way to disseminate germs than an apple-bobbing contest. It beats even
+kissing games. Well, the mischief is done.”
+
+“Then they’ll all have it,” said Mrs. Clyde miserably.
+
+“Oh, let’s hope not. Nothing is more mysterious than the way contagion
+hits one and misses others. I should say there was at least an even
+chance of the rest escaping. But we must regard them as suspects, and
+report the house for quarantine.”
+
+“Ugh!” shuddered Mrs. Clyde. “I hate that word. And think of my husband
+coming home to find a flaming red placard on the house!”
+
+“We’ll give him warning before he leaves the factory. And now for our
+campaign. Item 1: a trained nurse. Item 2: a gas-range.”
+
+“The trained nurse, certainly,” agreed Mrs. Clyde. “But why the
+gas-range? Isn’t Charley’s room warm enough?”
+
+“Quite. The stove isn’t for warmth; it’s for safety. I’m going to
+establish a line of fire beyond which no contagion can pass. We’ll put
+the stove in the hall, and keep on it a tin boiler full of water just
+at the simmering point. Everything which Charley has used or touched
+must go into that or other boiling water as soon as it leaves the room:
+the plates he eats from, the utensils he uses; his handkerchiefs,
+night-clothes, towels—everything.”
+
+“That will be a hard regimen to keep up,” Mrs. Clyde objected.
+
+“Martial law,” said the Health Master positively. “From the moment the
+red placard goes up, we’re in a state of siege, and I’m in command. The
+rules of the camp will be simple but strict. Whoever violates any of
+them will be liable to imprisonment in the strictest quarantine. We’ll
+have a household conference to-night and go over the whole matter. Now
+I’m going to telephone the Health Department and ask Dr. Merritt to
+come up and quarantine us officially.”
+
+“But what of Charley?” exclaimed Mrs. Clyde. “You’re not going to keep
+me away from my boy?”
+
+“Not when you put it in that way and use that tone,” smiled Dr. Strong.
+“I probably couldn’t if I tried. Under official quarantine rules you’ll
+have to give up going anywhere outside the house. Under our local
+martial law you’re not to touch Charley or anything that he handles,
+nor to kiss the other children. And you’re to wash your hands every
+time you come out of the sick-room, though it’s only to step beyond the
+door.”
+
+“It is an order,” said the mother gravely. “Will he be very ill, do you
+think?”
+
+“So far the cases have been mild. His is likely to be, too. But it’s
+the most difficult kind of case to handle.”
+
+“I don’t see that at all,” said Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“You will, when he becomes convalescent. Then is when my troubles will
+begin. For the present the bulk of the work inside the sick-room will
+be upon the trained nurse and Mrs. Clyde. I’ll have my troubles
+outside, watching the rest of the family.”
+
+Not since Dr. Strong came to the Clydes’ as guardian of their health
+had there been an emergency meeting called of the Household Protective
+Association, as the Health Master termed the organization which he had
+formed (mainly for educative purposes) within the family. That evening
+he addressed a full session, including the servants, holding up before
+them the red placard which the Health Department had sent, and
+informing them of the quarantine.
+
+“No school?” inquired the practical-minded Bobs, “Hooray!”
+
+“No school for you children, until further notice,” confirmed the
+physician.
+
+“And no business for me, I suppose,” said Mr. Clyde, frowning.
+
+“Oh, yes. You can come and go as you please, so long as you keep away
+from Charley’s room. Every one is barred from Charley’s room until
+further instructions, except Mrs. Clyde; and she is confined within
+military bounds, consisting of the house and yard. And now for the most
+important thing—Rosie and Katie,”—the cook and the maid—“pay particular
+heed to this—nothing of any kind which comes from the sick-room is to
+be touched until it is disinfected, except under my supervision. When
+I’m not in the house, the nurse’s authority will be absolute. Now for
+the clinic; we’ll look over the throats of the whole crowd.”
+
+Throat inspection appeared to be the Health Master’s favorite pursuit
+for the next few days.
+
+“I don’t dare open my mouth,” protested Bobs, “for fear he’ll peek into
+it and find a spot.”
+
+“Dr. Strong spends a lot more time watching us than he does watching
+Charley,” remarked Junkum. “Who’s the sick one, anyway—us or him?” she
+concluded, her resentment getting the better of her grammar.
+
+“Ho!” jeered Bobs, and intoned the ancient couplet, made and provided
+for the correction of such slips:—
+
+“Her ain’t a-callin’ we,
+Us don’t belong to she.”
+
+
+“Anyhow, I ain’t sick,” asseverated Bettina; “but he shut me up in my
+room for a day jus’ because my swallow worked kinda hard.”
+
+“If I’m going to have scarlet fever I want to have scarlet fever and
+get done with it!” declared.
+
+Bobs. “I’m getting tired of staying out of school. Charley’s having all
+the fun there is out of this, getting read to all the time by that
+nurse and Mother.”
+
+Meantime nothing of interest was happening in the sick-room.
+Interesting phases seldom appear in scarlet fever, which is well,
+since, when they do appear, the patient usually dies. Not at any time
+did Charley evince the slightest tendency to forsake a world which he
+had found, on the whole, to be a highly satisfactory place of
+residence. In fact, he was going comfortably along through a typically
+light onset of the disease; and was rather less ill than he would have
+been with a sound case of measles. Already the furrows in Mrs. Clyde’s
+forehead had smoothed out, and Grandma Sharpless had ceased waking, in
+the dead of night, with a catch at her heart and the totally unfounded
+fear that she had “heard something,” when one morning Charley awoke,
+scratched a tiny flake of skin off his nose, yawned, and emitted a
+hollow groan.
+
+“What is it, Charley boy?” asked his mother.
+
+“I’m tired of staying in bed,” announced the young man.
+
+“How do you feel?”
+
+The patient sat up, the better to consider the matter. “I feel,” he
+stated in positive accents, “like a bucket of oyster stew, a steak as
+big as my head, with onions all over it, a whole apple pie, a platter
+of ice-cream, and a game of baseball.”
+
+Mrs. Clyde laughed happily. “I’ll tell the Health Master,” she said.
+She did, and Dr. Strong came up and looked the patient over carefully.
+
+“You lie back there, young fellow,” he ordered, “and play sick, no
+matter how well you feel, until I tell you different.”
+
+“How about that beefsteak and pie, Doctor?” inquired the boy wistfully.
+
+“Mere prospects,” retorted the hard-hearted physician. “But you can
+have some ice-cream.” Conclave of the elders that evening to consider
+the situation was opened by Dr. Strong.
+
+“We’ve now reached the critical point,” he began.
+
+“Critical?” gasped Mrs. Clyde, whose nerves had been considerably
+stretched in the ten days of sick-room work. “Isn’t he getting well?”
+
+“He’s getting well quite as quickly as I want him to. Perhaps a little
+more quickly. The fever is broken and he is beginning to peel.”
+
+“Then what’s the difficulty?” inquired Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Just this. Charley is a sturdy boy. The light attack he’s had hasn’t
+begun to exhaust his vitality. From now on, he is going to be a bundle
+of energy, without outlet.”
+
+“From now on till when?” It was Grandma Sharpless who wanted to know.
+
+“Two weeks anyway. Perhaps more.”
+
+“Are you going to keep that poor child in bed for two weeks after he’s
+practically well?” said the mother.
+
+“For three weeks if the whole family will help me. It’s not going to be
+easy.”
+
+“Isn’t that a little extreme, Strong?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Only the precaution of experience. The danger-point in scarlet fever
+isn’t the illness; it’s the convalescence. People think that when a
+child is cured of a disease, he is cured of the effects of the disease
+also. That mistake costs lives.”
+
+“Because the poison is still in the system?”
+
+“Rather, the effects of the poison. Though the patient may feel quite
+well, the whole machinery of the body is out of gear. What do you do
+when your machinery goes wrong, Clyde?”
+
+“Stop it, of course.”
+
+“Of course,” repeated the Health Master. “Obviously we can’t stop the
+machinery of life, but we can ease it down to its lowest possible
+strain, until it has had a chance to readjust itself. That is what I
+want to do in Charley’s case.”
+
+“How does this poison affect the system?”
+
+“If I could discover that, I’d be sure of a place in history. All we
+know is that no organ seems to be exempt from its sudden return attack
+long after the disease has passed. If we ever get any complete records,
+I venture to say that we’ll find more children dying in after years
+from the results of scarlet fever than die from the immediate disease
+itself, not to mention such after-effects as deafness and blindness.”
+
+“I’ve noticed that,” said Grandma Sharpless, “when we lived in the
+country. And I remember a verse on the scarlet-fever page of an old
+almanac:—
+
+If they run from nose or ear,
+Watch your children for a year.
+
+
+But I always set down those cases to catching cold.”
+
+“Most people do. It isn’t that. It’s overstrain put on a poisoned
+system. And it’s true not of scarlet fever alone, but of measles, and
+diphtheria, and grippe; and, in a lesser degree, of whooping-cough and
+chicken pox.”
+
+“You’ve seen such cases in your own practice?” asked Mr. Clyde, and
+regretted the question as soon as he had put it, for there passed over
+Dr. Strong’s face the quick spasm of pain which anything referring back
+to the hidden past before he had come to the Clyde house always
+brought.
+
+“Yes,” he replied with an effort. “I have had such cases, and lost
+them. I might even say, killed them in my ignorance.”
+
+“Oh, no, Dr. Strong!” said Mrs. Clyde in quick sympathy. “Don’t say
+that. Being mistaken isn’t killing.”
+
+“It is, sometimes, for a doctor. I remember one little patient who had
+a very light case of scarlet fever. I let her get up as soon as the
+fever broke. Three months later she developed a dropsical tendency. And
+one day she fell dead across the doll she was playing with. The
+official cause of death said heart disease. But I knew what it was. The
+next case was not so wholly my fault. The boy was a spoiled child, who
+held his parents in enslavement. They hadn’t the strength of character
+to keep him under control. He insisted on riding his bicycle around the
+yard, three days after he was out of bed. Against his willfulness my
+protests were of no account. What I should have done is to have thrown
+up the case; but I was young and the people were my friends. Well; that
+boy made, apparently, a complete recovery. A few weeks later I was sent
+for again. There was some kidney trouble. I knew, before the analysis
+was made, what it would show: nephritis. The poison had struck to the
+kidneys like a dagger. The poor little chap dragged along for some
+months before he died; and his mother—God forgive me if I did wrong in
+telling her the truth, as I did for the protection of their other
+child—almost lost her reason.”
+
+“And such cases are common?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Common enough to be fairly typical. Afterward, I cited the two
+instances in a talk before our medical society. My frankness encouraged
+some of the other men to be frank; and the list of fatalities and
+permanent disabilities, following scarlet fever and measles, which was
+brought out at that meeting, nearly every case being one of rushing the
+convalescence—well, it reformed one phase of medical procedure in—in
+that city and county.”
+
+“That settles it for Charley,” decided Mr. Clyde. “He stays in bed
+until you certify him cured, if I have to hire a vaudeville show to
+keep him amused.”
+
+“My boy is not a spoiled child!” said Mrs. Clyde proudly. “I can handle
+him.”
+
+“Maybe he wasn’t before,” remarked Grandma Sharpless dryly; “but I
+think you’ll have your hands full now.”
+
+“Therefore,” said Dr. Strong, “I propose to enlist the services of the
+whole family, including the children.”
+
+“What! Let the others go to see Charley when he’s peeling?” protested
+Mrs. Sharpless. “They’ll all catch it.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“Why, from the skin-flakes. That’s the way scarlet fever spreads.”
+
+“Is it?” said the Health Master mildly. “Then perhaps you’ll explain to
+me why doctors aren’t the greatest danger that civilization suffers
+from.”
+
+“I suppose they disinfect themselves,” said the old lady, in a rather
+unconvinced tone.
+
+“Let’s see how much that would amount to. The fine flakes of skin are
+likely to be pretty well disseminated in a sick-room. According to the
+old theory, every one of them is a potential disease-bearer. Now, a
+doctor could hardly be in a sickroom without getting some of them on
+his clothes or in his hair, as well as on his hands, which, of course,
+he thoroughly washes on leaving the place. But that’s the extent of his
+disinfection. Why don’t the flakes he carries with him spread the fever
+among his other patients?”
+
+“Don’t ask _me!_” said Clyde. “I’m not good at puzzles.”
+
+“Many doctors still hold to the old theory. But I’ve never met one who
+could answer that argument. Some of the best hospitals in the world
+discharge patients without reference to the peeling of the skin, and
+without evil results.”
+
+“How is scarlet fever caught, then?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“From the discharge from the inflamed nose and throat, or from the ears
+if they are affected. Anything which comes in contact with this
+poisonous mucus is dangerous. Thus, of course, the skin-flakes from the
+lips or the hands which had been in contact with the mouth or nose
+might carry the contagion, just as a fork or a tooth-brush or a
+handkerchief might. Now, I’ll risk my status in this house on the
+safety of letting the other children visit Charley under certain
+restrictions.”
+
+“That settles it for me,” said Mr. Clyde, whose faith in his friend,
+while not unquestioning, was fundamental; and the two women agreed,
+though not without misgivings. Thereupon Bobs, Julia, and Bettina were
+sent for, and the Health Master announced that Charley would hold a
+reception on the following afternoon. There were shouts of acclamation
+at the prospect.
+
+“But first,” added Dr. Strong, “there will be a rehearsal in the
+playroom, to-morrow morning.”
+
+“What do we need a rehearsal for to see Charley?” inquired Julia.
+
+“To guard yourselves, Miss Junkum,” returned the doctor. “Possibly you
+don’t know everything about scarlet fever that you should know. Do you,
+Cherubic Miss Toots,” he added, turning upon Bettina, “know what a
+contagious disease is?”
+
+“I know,” said the diminutive maiden gravely, “that if you leave
+Charley’s door open the jerrums will fly out and bite people.”
+
+“Which fairly typifies the popular opinion concerning disease bacilli,”
+observed Dr. Strong.
+
+“I saw a jerrum once,” continued the infant of the family. “It was
+under a stone in a creek. It had horns and a wiggly tail. Just like the
+Devil,” she added with an engaging smile.
+
+“Betty’s been looking at the pictures in the comic supplements,”
+explained her elder sister.
+
+“Popular education by the press!” commented Dr. Strong. “Well, I
+haven’t time for an exposition of the germ theory now. The point is
+this: Can you children stay an hour in Charley’s room without putting a
+lot of things in your mouths?”
+
+“Why, I never put anything in my mouth. You taught us better than
+that,” said Julia reproachfully.
+
+The doctor was little impressed by the reproach. “Humph!” he grunted.
+“Well, suppose you stop nibbling at your hair”—Julia’s braid flew back
+over her shoulder—“and consider that, when you put your fingers in your
+mouth, you may be putting in, also, a particle of everything that your
+fingers have touched. And in Charley’s room there might be jerrums, as
+Twinkles calls them, from his mouth which would be dangerous. Rehearsal
+at noon tomorrow.”
+
+Expectant curiosity brought the children early to the playroom whither
+they found that the Health Master had preceded them.
+
+“When’s it going to begin?” asked Bettina.
+
+“Presently,” replied the master of ceremonies. “We’re going to pretend
+that this is Charley’s room. Just at present I’m busy with some work.”
+He shook a notebook at them. “Go ahead and amuse yourselves till I get
+through.”
+
+Julia the observant noted three hues of crayon on the stand beside the
+doctor. “Are you going to make a sketch?” she inquired.
+
+“Never you mind. You attend to your affairs and I’ll attend to mine.”
+
+“Dr. Strong is a-goin’ to make a picture of a jerrum,” Bettina informed
+her favorite doll, Susan Nipper, imprinting a fervent kiss on the pet’s
+flattened face. “Come on an’ let’s read the paper.”
+
+Dr. Strong made a note in his book, with a pencil.
+
+“Want to play catch, Junkum?” suggested Bobs to his twin.
+
+“All right,” said Julia, seizing upon a glove, while Bobs, in his rôle
+of pitcher, professionally moistened the ball.
+
+Dr. Strong made another note.
+
+For half an hour they disported themselves in various ways while the
+Health Master, whose eyes were roving everywhere, made frequent entries
+in his book.
+
+“All out now,” he ordered finally. “Come back in five minutes.”
+
+Before the time was up, they were clustered at the door. Dr. Strong
+admitted them.
+
+“Does the rehearsal begin now?” asked Bobs.
+
+“It’s all over,” said the physician. “Look around you.”
+
+“Ow-w-w!” wailed Bettina. “Look at Susan Nipper’s nose!”
+
+That once inconspicuous feature had turned a vivid green.
+
+“And the baseball is red,” cried Bobs.
+
+“So’s my glove,” announced Julia.
+
+Walking over to her, the Health Master caught her left hand and smeared
+it with blue crayon. For good measure he put a dab on her chin.
+
+“My story-book is all blue, too,” exclaimed the girl. “What’s it for?”
+
+“Just by way of illustration,” explained the doctor. “The mouths of all
+of us contain germs of one kind or another. So I’ve assumed that Bob’s
+mouth has red, and Junkum’s blue, and Miss Twinkle’s green. Every chalk
+mark shows where you’ve spread your germs.”
+
+“Then the red on the ball is where I wet my fingers for that in-curve,”
+said Bobs.
+
+“And on my glove is where I caught it,” said Julia. “But what’s the
+blue doing on my left hand?”
+
+“I know,” announced Bobs triumphantly. “You got that slow drop on the
+end of your finger and jammed your finger in your mouth.”
+
+“It hurt,” defended Julia. “Look at the walls—and the Indian clubs—and
+the chair.”
+
+Crayon marks were everywhere.[2] In some places it was one color; in
+others another; in many, a crazy pattern of red, blue, and green.
+
+ [2] For this ingenious example of the crayon marks I am indebted to
+ Dr. Charles V. Chapin, Health Officer of Providence, Rhode Island, and
+ a distinguished epidemiologist.
+
+
+“And if I carried it out,” said the doctor, “your faces would all be as
+bad.”
+
+“I don’t care!” murmured Betty to Susan Nipper; “I _will_ kiss you even
+if you do turn green.”
+
+“But you mustn’t kiss Charley,” interposed Dr. Strong. “If you’ve had
+enough rehearsal, we’ll go and make our call right after luncheon.”
+
+Entering the sick-room, the three visitors stood a little abashed and
+strange. Their hearty, rough-and-tumble brother looked strangely drawn
+and brighteyed.
+
+“Hello, kids!” said he, airily. “Make yourselves at home.”
+
+Bettykin was the first to break the ice. “Did it hurt, Charley?” she
+asked, remembering her own experience with adenoids.
+
+“Nope,” said the convalescent. “Only thing that hurts is being kept in
+bed when I want to be up and around. What’s new?”
+
+Much was new, there in the room, and the children took it in,
+wide-eyed. Although it was early May, the windows were screened. All
+the hangings and curtains had been taken out of the room, which looked
+bare and bright. On the door of the bathroom was a huge roller-towel of
+soft, cloth-like paper, perforated in lengths so as to be easily
+detachable, and below it a scrap-basket, with a sign: “Throw Paper
+Towels in Here to be Burned after Using.” Between the two windows was a
+larger sign:—
+
+Keep your Fingers Away from Your Mouth and Nose.
+Don’t Handle Utensils Lying About.
+Don’t Open an Unscreened Window.
+After Touching Anything which may have been Contaminated Wash Your
+Hands at Once.
+Use the Paper Towels; They’re the Only Safe Kind.
+One Dollar Reward to Any One Discovering a Fly in the Room.
+Wash Your Hands Immediately After Leaving the Room.
+Keep Outside the Dead-line.
+
+
+PENALTIES
+
+
+For First Violation of Rules—Offender Reads to Patient One Hour. Second
+Violation—Banishment for Balance of Day.
+
+
+“The dead-line is that thing, I suppose,” said Junkum, pointing to a
+tape stretched upon standards around the bed at a distance of a yard.
+
+“Is it a game?” questioned the hopeful Bettina. “No, Bettykin. It’s a
+germ-cage. No germs can get out of that unless they’re carried out by
+somebody or something. And, in that case, they’re boiled to death on
+the gas-stove outside.”
+
+At this moment Charley called for a drink of water. After he had
+emptied the glass, his mother took it out and dropped it into the
+disinfecting hot bath. Then she washed her hands, dried them on a strip
+of the paper towel and dropped that in the basket.
+
+“I see,” said Julia, the observant. “Nothing gets any scarlet fever on
+it except what Charley touches. And everything he touches has to be
+washed as soon as it comes out of the dead-line.”
+
+“Exactly. We’ll make a trained nurse of you, yet, Junkum,” approved the
+Health Master.
+
+“Then,” said Julia slowly, “I think Bobs ought to wash his hands now.
+Mother opened the door after handling Charley’s glass, and when he went
+to watch her wash the glass, he put his hand on the knob.”
+
+“One mark against Bobs,” announced the doctor. “The rigor of the game.”
+
+A game it proved to be, with Charley for umpire, and a very keen
+umpire, as he was the beneficiary of the penalties. For some days
+Charley quite fattened on literature dispensed orally by the
+incautious. Presently, however, they became so wary that it was hard to
+catch them.
+
+Then, indeed, was the doctor hard put to it to keep the invalid amused.
+The children invented games and charades for him. A special telephone
+wire was run to his room so that he might talk with his friends. Bobs
+won commendations by flying a kite one windy day and passing the twine
+up through Charley’s window, whereby the bedridden one spent a happy
+afternoon “feeling her pull.” And the next day Betty won the first and
+only dollar by discovering a small and early fly which, presumably, had
+crawled in by the hole bored for the kite twine. As to any
+encroachments upon the physical quiet of his patient or the protective
+guardianship surrounding him, the Health Master was adamant, until, on
+a day, after examining the prisoner’s throat and nose, and going over
+him, as Mr. Clyde put it, “like a man buying a horse that’s cheaper
+than he ought to be,” he sent for the Health Officer.
+
+“It’s a clean throat,” said Dr. Merritt. “Never mind the desquamating
+skin. We’ll call it off.”
+
+Whereupon Charley was raised from his bed, and having symbolically
+broken the tape-line about his bed, headed a solemn and slow procession
+of the entire family to the front porch where he formally took down the
+red placard and tore it in two. The halves still ornament the playroom,
+as a memento.
+
+After this memorable ceremony, Mrs. Clyde retired to the library and,
+quite contrary to her usually self-restrained nature, dissolved into
+illogical tears, in which condition she was found by the rest.
+
+“I—I—I don’t know what’s the matter,” she sobbed, in response to her
+husband’s inquiry. “It’s just because I hated the very thought of that
+abominable red sign so,—as if we were unclean—like lepers.”
+
+“Well, we’re not lepers and if we can continue in that blessed state,”
+remarked Dr. Strong cheerfully, “we can escape most of the ills that
+flesh is heir to. After all, from a scientific point of view, contagion
+is merely the Latin synonym for a much shorter and uglier word.”
+
+“Which is—” queried Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Dirt,” said the Health Master.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS
+
+
+“Hopeless from the first,” said old Mrs. Sharpless, with a sigh, to her
+daughter.
+
+Mrs. Clyde nodded. “I suppose so. And she has so much to live for,
+too.”
+
+“What’s this that’s hopeless from the first?” asked the Health Master,
+looking up from the novel which he was enjoying in what he called his
+“lazy hour,” after luncheon.
+
+“Mrs. Westerly’s case,” said the younger woman. “Even now that she’s
+gone to the hospital, the family won’t admit that it’s cancer.”
+
+“Ah, of the liver, I suppose,” commented the physician.
+
+“Why on earth should you suppose that?” demanded Mrs. Sharpless
+suspiciously.
+
+“Why, because cancer of the liver is the only form which could possibly
+be regarded as hopeless from the first.”
+
+“All cancer, if it is really cancer, is hopeless,” declared the old
+lady with vigorous dogmatism. “Don’t tell me. I’ve seen too many cases
+die and too few get well.”
+
+“Were those ‘few’ hopeless, too?” inquired Dr. Strong with bland
+slyness.
+
+“I guess they weren’t cancer, at all,” retorted Mrs. Sharpless; “just
+doctors’ mistakes.”
+
+“Doctors do make mistakes,” admitted the representative of the
+profession, “and cancer is one of the diseases where they are most
+commonly at fault. But the error isn’t of the kind that you suggest,
+Grandma Sharpless. Where they go wrong so often is in mistaking cancer
+for some less malignant trouble; not in mistaking the less malignant
+forms for cancer. And that wastes thousands of lives every year which
+might have been saved.”
+
+“How could they have been saved?” asked the old lady combatively.
+
+“Let me do the questioning for a minute, and perhaps we’ll get at that.
+Now, these many cases that you’ve known: were most of the fatal ones
+recent?”
+
+“Not very,” she replied, after some consideration. “No; most of them
+were from ten years ago, back.”
+
+“Exactly. Now, the few that recovered: when did these occur?”
+
+“Within a few years.”
+
+“None of the old cases recovered?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“But a fair proportion of the more recent ones have?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“All these were operated on, weren’t they?”
+
+“Yes; I believe they were. But not all that were operated on lived.”
+
+“Did a single one of those not operated on live?”
+
+“Not so far as I can remember.”
+
+“Well, there we have the truth about cancer in a few words; or, anyway,
+a good part of the truth. Up to twenty years ago or so, cancer was
+practically incurable. It always returned after operation. That was
+because the surgeon thought he needed only to cut out the cancer. Now
+he knows better; he knows that he must cut out all the tissue and the
+glands around the obvious cancer, and thus get the root of the growth
+out of the system.”
+
+“And that cures?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“In a great majority of cases, _if it is done early enough_.” The
+Health Master dropped his book and beat time with an emphatic
+forefinger to his concluding words.
+
+“But Agnes Westerly’s is cancer of the breast,” said Mrs. Clyde, as if
+that clinched the case against the patient.
+
+“Just about the most favorable locality.”
+
+“I thought it was the worst.”
+
+“Where on earth do intelligent women collect their superstitions about
+cancer?” cried Dr. Strong. “Carcinoma of the breast is the commonest
+form among women, and the easiest to handle. Show me a case in the
+first stages and, with a good surgical hospital at hand, I’d almost
+guarantee recovery. It’s simply a question of removing the entire
+breast, and sometimes the adjacent glands. Ninety per cent of the early
+cases should get well.”
+
+“But the operation itself is so terrible,” shuddered Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Terrible? Unpleasant, I’ll admit. But if you mean terrible in the
+sense of dangerous, or even serious, you’re far wrong again. The
+percentage of mortality from the operation itself is negligible. But
+the percentage of mortality without operation is 100 out of 100. So the
+choice is an easy one.”
+
+“They seem to hold out little hope for Agnes Westerly.”
+
+“Let’s hear about the circumstances,” suggested Dr. Strong.
+
+“About two years ago—”
+
+“That’s a bad beginning,” interrupted the physician, shaking his head.
+
+“—She noticed a small lump in her right breast. It didn’t trouble her
+much—”
+
+“It seldom does at the start.”
+
+“—And she didn’t want to alarm her husband; so she said nothing about
+it. It kept getting a little larger very slowly, but there was no
+outside sore; so she thought it couldn’t be serious. If it were, she
+thought, it would pain her.”
+
+“That fatal mistake! Pain is a late symptom in cancer—usually too
+late.”
+
+“It was curious the way she finally came to find out. She read an
+advertisement in the paper, headed, ‘Any Lump in Woman’s Breast is
+Cancer.’”
+
+“Yes; I know that advertisement. It’s put out by a scoundrel named
+Chamlee. Surely, she didn’t try his torturing treatment?”
+
+“Oh, no. Agnes is too intelligent for that. But it frightened her into
+going to her doctor. He told her that a radical operation was her only
+chance. She was terribly frightened,—more afraid of the knife than of
+the disease, she told me,—and she insisted on delay until the pain grew
+intolerable. And now, they say, there’s only a slight chance. Isn’t it
+pitiful?”
+
+“Pitiful, and typical. Mrs. Westerly, if she dies, is a type of
+suicide, the suicide of fear and ignorance. Two years’ waiting! And
+every day subtracting from her chance. That’s the curse of cancer; that
+people won’t understand the vital necessity of promptness.”
+
+“But is it true that any lump in a woman’s breast is cancer?” asked
+Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“No; it’s a lie; a damnable lie, circulated by that quack to scare
+foolish women into his toils. Most of such lumps are non-malignant
+growths. This is true, though: that any lump in a woman’s breast is
+suspicious. It may be cancer; or it may develop into cancer. The only
+course is to find out.”
+
+“How?”
+
+‘“With the knife.”
+
+“Isn’t that rather a severe method for a symptom that may not mean
+anything?”
+
+“Not too severe, considering the danger. Whatever the lump may be, it
+has no business there in the breast, any more than a bullet has. If it
+is only a small benign tumor, the process of taking it out is very
+simple, and there is nothing further to do. While the patient is still
+under the anaesthetic, a microscopical examination of the tissue, which
+can be made in a few minutes in a well-equipped hospital, will
+determine whether the growth is malignant. If so, the whole breast is
+taken off, and the patient, in all probability, saved. If not, sew up
+the wound, and the subject is none the worse. Much the better, in fact,
+for the most innocent growth may develop cancer by irritation. Thirty
+per cent, or more, of breast cancers develop in this way.”
+
+“But irritation alone won’t cause cancer, will it?” asked Mrs. Clyde,
+her restlessly inquiring mind reaching back, as was typical of her
+mental processes, toward first causes.
+
+“No. There must be something else. What that something is, we don’t
+know. But we are pretty certain that it doesn’t develop unless there is
+irritation of some kind.”
+
+“Isn’t cancer a germ disease?”
+
+“Nobody knows. Some day we may—probably shall—find out. Meantime we
+have the knowledge of how to prevent it.”
+
+“How to prevent a disease you don’t know the nature of?” said Mrs.
+Sharpless incredulously. “That sounds like nonsense.”
+
+“Does it? What about smallpox? We haven’t any idea of what smallpox
+really is; but we are able to control it with practical certainty
+through vaccination.”
+
+“Doctors don’t vaccinate for cancer,” remarked the practical-minded old
+lady.
+
+“They have tried serums, but that is no use. As I said, the immediate
+occasion of cancer is irritation. There is overwhelming proof that an
+unhealing sore or irritation at any point is likely to result in the
+development of a cancer at that point, and at least a highly probable
+inference that, without such irritation, the disease would not
+develop.”
+
+“Then why not get rid of the irritation?”
+
+“Ah, there’s the point. That’s where the tremendous life-saving could
+be effected. Take a very simple instance, cancer of the lip. In a
+thousand cases recorded by one of the Johns Hopkins experts, there
+wasn’t one but had developed from a small sore, at first of innocent
+nature. It isn’t too much to say that this particular manifestation of
+cancer is absolutely preventable. If every person with a sore on the
+lip which doesn’t heal within three weeks were to go to a good surgeon,
+this hideous and defacing form of tumor would disappear from the earth.
+As for carcinoma of the tongue, one of the least hopeful of all
+varieties, no careful person need ever develop it. Good dentistry,
+which keeps the mouth free of jagged tooth-edges, is half the battle.
+The other half is caution on the part of smokers. If a white patch
+develops in the mouth, tobacco should be given up at once. Unless the
+patch heals within a few weeks, the patient should consult a physician,
+and, if necessary, have it removed by a minor operation. That’s all
+there is to that.”
+
+“But if the irritant sore is internal?” inquired Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“To the watchful it will give evidence of its presence, usually in
+time. If it is in the intestines or stomach, there is generally some
+uneasiness, vague, perhaps, but still suspicious, to announce the
+danger. Surgical records covering a long period show that eighty per
+cent of stomach cancers were preceded by definite gastric symptoms of
+more than a year’s duration. If it is in the uterus, there are definite
+signs which every woman ought to be taught to understand. And here, to
+go back to the matter of cure, even if the discovery isn’t made until
+cancer has actually developed, there is an excellent chance in the
+early stages. Cancer of the stomach used to be sure doom to a hideous
+death. Now, taking the cases as they come, the desperate chances with
+the early cases, more than a quarter are saved in the best surgical
+hospitals. Where the growth is in the womb or the intestines, with
+reasonably early discovery, a generous half should be repaired and
+returned to active life as good as new.”
+
+“That doesn’t seem possible,” said Mrs. Sharpless flatly.
+
+“Simply because you’ve been steeped in the fatalism which surrounds
+cancer. That fatalism, which is so hard to combat, is what keeps women
+from the saving hope of the knife. ‘I’ve got to die anyway,’ they say,
+‘and I’m not going to be carved up before I die.’ And so they throw
+away what chance they have. Oh, if only I had control of the newspapers
+of this city for one day a week or a month,—just for a half-column
+editorial,—what a saving of life I could effect! A little simple advice
+in straight-out terms would teach the people of this community to avoid
+poor Mrs. Westerly’s fate.”
+
+“And drive ‘em all into the hands of the doctors,” said Mrs. Sharpless
+shrewdly. “A fine fattening of fees for your trade, young man.”
+
+“Do you think so? Do you think that cancer _ever_ fails to come to the
+physician at last? And do you think the fee is less because the surgeon
+has to do twice the amount of work with a hundredth of the hope of
+success?”
+
+“No-o-o,” admitted the old lady, with some hesitancy; “I didn’t think
+of it in that light.”
+
+“Few do. Oh, for the chance to teach people to think straight about
+this! Publicity is what we need so bitterly, and the only publicity
+goes to the quacks who pay for it, because the local newspapers don’t
+want to write about ‘unpleasant topics,’ forsooth!”
+
+“Do you want a chance for some publicity in a small way?” asked Mrs.
+Clyde.
+
+“Do I! Show me the chance.”
+
+“The Mothers’ Association meets here this afternoon. We haven’t much
+business on hand. Come in and talk to us for an hour.”
+
+“Fine!” said the Health Master, with enthusiasm. “Half of that time
+will do me. How many will be there?”
+
+“About sixty.”
+
+“Very well. Just have me introduced with the statement that I’m going
+to talk informally on a subject of importance to all of you; and then
+help me out with a little object lesson. I’ll want sixty sealed
+envelopes for the members to draw.”
+
+“Are you conducting a lottery, young man?” queried Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“In a way. Rather I’m arranging an illustration for the great lottery
+which Life and Death conduct.”
+
+
+Two hours later, the business of the meeting having been concluded,
+Mrs. Clyde asked, from the assembled mothers, the privilege of the
+floor for Dr. Strong, and this being granted, aroused the curiosity of
+the meeting by requesting each member to draw an envelope from the
+basket which she carried around, while the presiding officer introduced
+the speaker.
+
+“Let me begin,” said the Health Master, “with an ungallant assumption.
+I’m going to assume that I’m talking to a gathering of middle-aged
+women. That being the case, I’m going on to a very unpleasant
+statement, to wit, that one out of every eight women here may
+reasonably expect to die of cancer in some form.”
+
+A little subdued flutter passed through the room, and the name of Agnes
+Westerly was whispered.
+
+“Yes; it is Mrs. Westerly’s case which is responsible for my being
+here,” said Dr. Strong, who had abnormally keen hearing. “I would like
+to save at least part of the eight out of your number, who are
+statistically doomed, from this probable fate. To bring the lesson home
+to you, I have had each of you draw an envelope. Eight of these
+represent death by cancer.”
+
+Every eye in the room turned, with rather ghastly surmise, to the
+little white squares. But old Mrs. Sharpless rose from her place,
+marched upon the Health Master, as one who leads a charge, and in low
+but vehement tones protested: “I won’t be a party to any such nonsense.
+The idea! Scaring some woman that’s as well as you are into nervous
+collapse with your black dot or red cross or whatever you’ve got inside
+these envelopes.”
+
+“Oh, Grandma Sharpless, Grandma Sharpless! Have you known me all this
+time not to trust me further than that?” whispered the Health Master.
+“Wait and see.”
+
+A little woman near the rear of the room spoke up with a fine bravado:
+“I’m not afraid. It can’t give me cancer.” Then a pause, and a sigh of
+relief, which brought out a ripple of nervous laughter from the rest,
+as she said, “There’s nothing in mine.”
+
+“Nor in mine,” added a young and pretty woman, in the second row, who
+had furtively and swiftly employed a hatpin to satisfy her curiosity.
+
+“Nor mine!”—“Nor mine!” added a dozen voices, in varying tones of
+alleviated suspense.
+
+“Not in any of them,” said Dr. Strong, smiling. “My little design was
+to arouse you collectively to a sense of the danger, not to frighten
+you individually into hysterics.” (At this point Mrs. Sharpless sat
+down abruptly and fanned a resentful face.) “The ugly fact remains,
+however: one out of every eight here is marked for death by the most
+dreadful of diseases, unless you do something about it.”
+
+“What can we do?” inquired the minister’s wife, in the pause that
+followed this statement.
+
+“Educate yourselves. If, in the process, you educate others, so much
+the better. Now I propose to tell you all about cancer in half an hour.
+Does that sound like a large contract? When I say ‘all,’ I mean all
+that it is necessary for you to know in order to protect yourselves.
+And, for good measure, I’ll answer any questions—if I can—within the
+limit of time.”
+
+“What _is_ cancer?” asked a voice.
+
+“Ah! There is one that I can’t answer. No one knows. If I told you that
+it was a malignant tumor, that would be true, but it wouldn’t be an
+answer, because we don’t know the real nature and underlying cause of
+the tumor. Whether it is caused by a germ, science has not yet
+determined. But though we know nothing of the fundamental cause of the
+disease, we do understand, definitely, what is the immediate causative
+influence. It practically always arises from some local sore or
+irritation. Therefore—and here is my first important point—it is
+preventable.”
+
+“That would be only theoretically, wouldn’t it, Dr. Strong?” asked the
+little woman who had first braved the venture of the sealed envelope.
+“One can’t get through life without bumps and scratches.”
+
+“True. But ordinary bumps or scratches properly looked after don’t
+cause cancer. The sore must be an unhealing one, or the irritation a
+continued condition, in order to be dangerous. Remember this: any sort
+of a sore, inflammation, or scarification, external or internal, which
+continues more than a few weeks, is an invitation to cancer. Therefore,
+get rid of it.”
+
+“But suppose the injury is in the stomach, where it can’t be got at?”
+asked a member.
+
+“Why can’t it be got at?” demanded Dr. Strong.
+
+“How can it be got at?” retorted the questioner.
+
+“By opening up the stomach and examining it.”
+
+“Well, I don’t want anybody to open up my stomach just to see what is
+inside it!” declared Mrs. Sharpless vigorously.
+
+“Very likely not. Perhaps you’d feel different if you’d had steady pain
+or indigestion for two or three years.”
+
+“Does that mean cancer?” asked a tall, sallow woman anxiously.
+
+“Not by any means necessarily. But it may well mean gastric ulcer, and
+that may develop into cancer. Three fourths of the cases of carcinoma
+of the stomach which come into the surgeon’s hands have developed from
+gastric ulcer.”
+
+“Is there no cure but the knife?” inquired Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Not for the cancer. For the gastric ulcer, yes. Careful medical care
+and diet often cure it. The trouble is that patients insist on diet and
+drugs in cases where they have proved themselves ineffectual. Those
+cases should come to the surgeon. But it will take long to educate the
+public to the significance of long-continued abdominal pain or
+indigestion. The knife is the last thing they are willing to think of.”
+
+“But stomach operations are terribly dangerous, aren’t they?” inquired
+a member.
+
+“Not any more. They were once. The operation for gastric ulcer in the
+early stage is simple. Even developed cancer of the stomach can be
+cured by the knife in from twenty-five to thirty per cent of the cases.
+Without the knife, it is sure death. I’m glad we got to the stomach
+first, because that is the most obscure and least hopeful of the common
+locations of the growth. In carcinoma of the breast, the most prevalent
+form among women, there is one simple, inclusive rule of prevention and
+cure. Any lump in the breast should be regarded, as Blood-good of Johns
+Hopkins puts it, ‘as an acute disease.’ It should come out immediately.
+If such growths come at once to the surgeon, prevention and cure
+together would save probably ninety per cent of those who now die from
+this ‘creeping death,’ as our parents called it.
+
+“Now, I’ll ask you to imagine for the moment that I am conducting a
+clinic, for I’m not going to mince words in speaking of cancer of the
+womb, the next commonest form. Any persistent irritation there is a
+peril. If there is a slight, steady, and untimely discharge, that’s a
+danger signal. The woman should at once have a microscopical
+examination made. This is simple, almost painless, and practically a
+sure determination of whether there is cancer or not. The thing to do
+is to find out.”
+
+“But if it is cancer, is there any chance?” asked the lady of the
+hatpin.
+
+“Would you regard tuberculosis as hopeless?”
+
+“Of course not.”
+
+“Your parents would have. But you have profited by popular education.
+If the public understood what to do in cancer as thoroughly as they
+know about tuberculosis, we’d save almost if not quite as many victims
+from the more terrible disease. Fatalism is as out of place in the one
+as in the other. The gist of the matter is taking the thing in time.
+Let me read you what the chairman of the Cancer Campaign Committee of
+the Congress of Surgeons of North America, Dr. Thomas S. Cullen, of
+Baltimore, says: ‘Surgeons are heartsick to see the many cancer
+patients begging for operations when the disease is so far advanced
+that nothing can be done. Cancer is in the beginning a local process
+and not a blood disease, and in its early stages can be completely
+removed. When the cancer is small the surgeon can, with one fourth the
+amount of labor, accomplish ten times the amount of good.’”
+
+“Does that always mean the knife?” asked a timid-looking woman.
+
+“Always. There is no other hope, once the malignant growth has begun.
+But the knife is not so terrible. In fact, in the early stages it is
+not terrible at all. Modern surgery has reduced pain to a minimum. The
+strongest argument against dread is a visit to a well-equipped surgical
+hospital, where one can see patients sitting up in bed and enjoying
+life a few days after a major operation. Even at the worst, the knife
+is less terrible than death, its certain alternative.”
+
+“Why do you call it the certain alternative?” asked the minister’s
+wife. “I have seen facial cancer cured by concentrated ray treatment.”
+
+“That wasn’t cancer; it was lupus,” replied Dr. Strong; “a wholly
+different thing. True cancer of the face in its commonest location, the
+lips, is the most frequently cured of any form, but only by operation.
+Now here’s an interesting and suggestive point; taking lip-cancer
+patients as they come to us, we get perhaps sixty-five per cent of
+complete cures. With cancer of the womb, we get in all not more than
+forty per cent of recoveries. Perhaps some of you will be able to
+suggest the explanation for this contrast.”
+
+“Because cancer of the lip isn’t as deadly a disease,” ventured some
+one.
+
+“Cancer is cancer, wherever it is located. Unless it is removed it is
+always and equally deadly.”
+
+“Then it is because the internal operation is so much more dangerous,”
+offered another member.
+
+“No; uterine operations are easy and simple. It is simply because the
+sore on the face is obvious, plain, unmistakable evidence of something
+wrong; and the patient ordinarily gets into the surgeon’s hands early;
+that is, before the roots of the growth have spread and involved life
+itself. The difference in mortality between carcinoma of the lip and
+carcinoma of the womb is the difference between early operation and
+delayed operation. If uterine cancer or breast cancer were discovered
+as early as lip cancer, we’d save practically as many of the internal
+as we do of the external cases. And if all the lip cancer cases were
+noticed at the first development, we’d save ninety-five per cent of
+them.”
+
+“Isn’t it the business of the physician to find out about the internal
+forms?” asked Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“Often the physician hasn’t the chance. The woman ought to do the first
+diagnosing herself. That is, she must be taught to recognize suspicious
+symptoms. In Germany there has been a campaign of education among women
+on cancer of the womb. The result is that more than twice as many
+Germans come to the operating table, in time to give a fair chance of
+permanent recovery in this class of cases, as do Americans.”
+
+“How is the American woman, who knows nothing about such matters, to
+find out?” queried the minister’s wife.
+
+“There is a campaign of education now under way here. Publications
+giving the basic facts about cancer, its prevention and cure, in simple
+and popular form, can be had from the American Society for the Control
+of Cancer,—Thomas M. Debevoise, secretary, 62 Cedar Street, New York
+City; or more detailed advice can be had from the Cancer Campaign
+Committee of the Congress of Surgeons of North America, Dr. Thomas S.
+Cullen, chairman, 3 West Preston Street, Baltimore; or from Dr. F. R.
+Green, 535 Dearborn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, secretary of the Council
+of Health and Public Instruction of the American Medical Association.”
+
+“Why not more easily and readily one’s own physician?” asked Mrs.
+Clyde.
+
+“Women don’t go to their own physicians early enough. It is necessary
+that they be trained to understand symptoms which do not at first seem
+serious enough for medical attention. Besides, I regret to confess, in
+this matter of cancer our physicians need educating, too. They are too
+prone to say, if they are not sure of the diagnosis, ‘Wait and see.’
+Waiting to see is what kills three fourths of the women who succumb to
+cancer. Let me illustrate this peril by two cases which have come under
+my observation: The wife of a lawyer in a Western city had a severe
+attack of stomach trouble. Her doctor, a young and open-minded man, had
+the courage to say, ‘I don’t know. But I’m afraid it’s cancer. You’d
+better go to such-and-such a hospital and let them see.’ The woman
+went. An exploratory incision was made and carcinoma found in the early
+stage. It was cut out and to-day she is as good as new.
+
+“Now, this same lawyer had a friend who had been treated for months by
+a stomach specialist of some reputation. Under the treatment he had
+grown steadily thinner, paler, and weaker. ‘Indigestion, gastric
+intoxication,’ the specialist repeated, parrotlike, until the man
+himself, in his misery, began to suspect. At this point the lawyer
+friend got hold of him and took him to the hospital where his wife had
+been. The surgeons refused the case and sent the man away to die.
+Indignant, the lawyer sought the superintendent of the hospital.
+
+“‘Why won’t you take my friend’s case?’
+
+“‘It is inoperable.’
+
+“‘Isn’t it cancer of the stomach, like my wife’s?’
+
+“‘Yes.’
+
+“‘You cured my wife. Why can’t you cure my friend?’
+
+“The official shook his head.
+
+“I want an answer,” insisted the lawyer.
+
+“‘Well, frankly,’ said the other, ‘your wife’s physician knew his
+business. Your friend’s physician is a fool. He has killed his patient
+by delay.’
+
+“Back home went the lawyer, and spread that story quietly. To-day the
+specialist’s practice is almost ruined; but he has learned an expensive
+lesson. The moral is this: If your doctor is doubtful whether your
+trouble is cancerous, and advises delay, get another doctor.
+
+“Then, there is the ‘conservative’ type of practitioner, who is timid
+about making a complete job of his operation. One of this kind had the
+case of an acquaintance of mine who was stricken with cancer of the
+breast. The physician, under persuasion of his patient, I presume,
+advised excising only the tumor itself, but the husband, who had been
+reading up on cancer, insisted on a radical operation. The entire
+breast was removed. A year later the woman’s unmarried sister was
+afflicted in exactly the same way; but the discovery was made earlier,
+so that the case was a distinctly favorable one. The girl, however,
+would not consent to the radical operation, and the physician (the same
+man) declared it unnecessary. The tumor alone was cut out. The cancer
+reappeared and another operation was necessary. The girl died after
+cruel suffering. The married sister is alive, and, five years after the
+operation, as sound as a bell. That physician is a wiser man; also a
+sadder one. There’s a special moral to this, too: the operator has but
+one chance; he must do his work thoroughly, or he might better not do
+it at all. When cancer returns after operation—which means that the
+roots were not eradicated—it is invariably fatal.
+
+“Here are a few things which I want every one of you to remember. Had I
+had time I’d have had them printed for each of you to take home, so
+important do I think them:—
+
+“No cancer is hopeless when discovered early.
+
+“Most cancer, discovered early, is permanently curable.
+
+“The only cure is the knife.
+
+“Medicines are worse than useless.
+
+“Delay is more than dangerous; it is deadly.
+
+“The one hope, and a strong one, is prompt and radical operation. A
+half-operation is worse than none at all.
+
+“Most, if not all, cancer is preventable by correcting the minor
+difficulty from which it develops.
+
+“With recognition of, and prompt action upon early symptoms, the death
+rate can be cut down at least a half; probably more.
+
+“The fatalism which says: ‘If it’s cancer, I might as well give up,’ is
+foolish, cowardly, and suicidal.
+
+“And, finally, here is some simple advice, intelligible to any thinking
+human being, which has been indorsed in printed form by the Congress of
+Surgeons of North America:—
+
+“‘Be careful of persistent sores or irritations, external or internal.
+
+“‘Be careful of yourself, without undue worry. At the first suspicious
+symptom go to some good physician and demand the truth. Don’t wait for
+pain to develop.
+
+“‘If the doctor suspects cancer insist that he confirm or disprove his
+suspicions.
+
+“‘Don’t be a hopeless fatalist. If it’s cancer face it bravely. With
+courage and prompt action the chances of recovery are all in your
+favor.
+
+“‘Don’t defer an advised operation even for a day; and don’t shrink
+from the merciful knife, when the alternative is the merciless anguish
+of slow death.’
+
+“For the woman who fears the knife, Dr. Charles H. Mayo, one of the
+greatest of living surgeons, has spoken the final words: ‘The risk is
+not in surgery, but in _delayed surgery_.’
+
+“I have said my say, ladies, and there are five minutes left. Has any
+one any further questions?”
+
+There was none. But as he stepped down, Mrs. Sharpless whispered to
+him: “I watched them while you talked, and half of those women are
+thinking, and thinking _hard_.”
+
+
+Six months thereafter, Mrs. Clyde came into the Health Master’s office
+one day.
+
+“I’ve just come from a sort of experience meeting of the Mothers’
+Club,” she said.
+
+“What was the topic this time?” asked Dr. Strong.
+
+“Aftermath.”
+
+“Of what?”
+
+“Your cancer talk.”
+
+“Anything definite?”
+
+“Definite, indeed! Between fifteen and twenty of the members went away
+from that meeting where you talked, suspecting themselves of cancer.”
+
+“That’s too many.”
+
+“Yes. Ten of them had their fears set at rest right away.”
+
+“I’m sorry to have frightened them; but one has to do a little harm in
+aiming at almost any good.”
+
+“This was worth it. Half a dozen others had minor operations.”
+
+“Perhaps saving major ones later.”
+
+“Very likely. And four of them actually had cancer. Three out of the
+four are going to be well women. The fourth has an even chance. Dr.
+Strong, I don’t think you’ve done so good a day’s work since you
+brought health into this house.”
+
+“I thank you,” said the doctor simply; “I think you are right. And
+you’ve given me the most profound and about the rarest satisfaction
+with which the physician is ever rewarded.”
+
+“And that is?” she asked.
+
+“The practical certainty of having definitely saved human life,” said
+the Health Master.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+THE GOOD GRAY DOCTOR
+
+
+A twenty-dollar bill! Crisp, fresh, and golden, it rose monumentally
+from the basis of nickels, dimes, and quarters which made up the
+customary collection of the Bairdstown Memorial Church. Even the
+generosity of the Clyde family, who, whenever they spent a week-end at
+Mr. Clyde’s farm outside the little city, attended the Sunday services,
+looked meager and insignificant beside its yellow-backed splendor.
+Deacon Wilkes, passing the plate, gazed at it in fascination.
+Subsequent contributors surreptitiously touched it in depositing their
+own modest offerings, as if to make certain of its substance. It was
+even said at the Wednesday Sewing Circle that the Rev. Mr. Huddleston,
+from his eminence in the pulpit, had marked its colorful glint with an
+instant and benign eye and had changed the final hymn to one which
+specially celebrated the glory of giving.
+
+In the Clyde pew also there was one who specially noted the donor, but
+with an expression far from benign. Dr. Strong’s appraising glance
+ranged over the plump and glossy perfection of the stranger, his
+symphonic grayness, beginning at his gray-suède-shod feet, one of which
+unobtrusively protruded into the aisle, verging upward through gray
+sock and trouser to gray frock coat, generously cut, and terminating at
+the sleek gray head. Even the tall hat which the man dandled on his
+knees was gray. Against this Quakerish color-scheme the wearer’s face
+stood out, large, pink, and heavy-jowled, lighted by restless brown
+eyes. His manner was at once important and reverent, and his “amen” a
+masterpiece of unction. No such impressive outlander had visited
+Bairdstown for many a moon.
+
+After the service the visitor went forward to speak with Mr.
+Huddleston. At the same time Dr. Strong strolled up the aisle and
+contrived to pass the two so, as to obtain a face-to-face view of the
+stranger.
+
+“At nine o’clock to-morrow, then, and I shall be delighted to see you,”
+the pastor was saying as Dr. Strong passed.
+
+“Good-morning, Professor,” said Dr. Strong, with an accent on the final
+word as slight as the nod which accompanied it.
+
+“Good-morning! Good-morning!” returned the other heartily. But his
+glance, as it followed the man who had accosted him, was puzzled and
+not wholly untroubled.
+
+“Who is your munificent friend?” asked Mrs. Clyde, as the Health Master
+emerged from the church and joined her husband and herself in their
+car.
+
+“When I last ran across him he called himself Professor Graham Gray,
+the Great Gray Benefactor,” replied Dr. Strong.
+
+“Dresses the part, doesn’t he?” observed Mr. Clyde. “Where was it that
+you knew him?”
+
+“On the Pacific Coast, five years ago. He was then ‘itinerating’—the
+quack term for traveling from place to place, picking up such practice
+as may be had by flamboyant advertising. Itinerating in eyes, as he
+would probably put it.”
+
+“A wandering quack oculist?”
+
+“Optician, rather, since he carried his own stock of glasses. In fact
+that’s where his profit came in. He advertised treatment free and
+charged two or three dollars for the glasses, special rates to
+schoolchildren. The scheme is an old one and a devilish. Half of the
+children in San Luis Obispo County, where I chanced upon his trail,
+were wearing his vision-twisters by the time he was through with them.”
+
+“What kind of glasses were they?”
+
+“Sometimes magnifying lenses. Mostly just plain window glass. Few
+children escaped him, for he would tell the parents that only prompt
+action could avert blindness.”
+
+“At least the plain glass couldn’t hurt the children,” suggested Mrs.
+Clyde.
+
+“Couldn’t it! It couldn’t fail to hurt them. Modify the sight of a
+delicate instrument like a child’s eye continuously by the most
+transparent of barriers, and it is bound to go wrong soon. The
+magnifying glasses are far worse. There are hundreds of children in
+that one locality alone who will carry the stigma of his quackery
+throughout their lives.”
+
+“Do you think he is here with a view to practicing his amiable trade?”
+inquired Clyde.
+
+“Only in part, if at all. I understand that he has changed his line.”
+
+“How comes he by all that showy money, then?”
+
+“By murder.”
+
+The Clydes, accustomed to their physician’s hammerstroke turns of
+speech, took this under consideration.
+
+“But he wasn’t committing murder in the church just now, I suppose,”
+insinuated Mrs. Clyde at length.
+
+“Not directly. His immediate business there, I suspect, was bribery.”
+
+“Of whom?”
+
+“The minister.”
+
+“Oh, come, Strong!” protested Mr. Clyde. “Mr. Huddleston isn’t an
+intellectual giant, I grant you; but he’s certainly a well-meaning and
+honorable old fellow.”
+
+“Some cynical philosopher has remarked that wicked men have a talent
+for doing harm, but fools have a genius. Mr. Huddleston’s goodness and
+honesty, taken in connection with his hopeless ignorance of human
+nature, are just so much capital to hand for a scoundrel like this
+Gray.”
+
+“What does he expect to get for his twenty-dol-lar bill?”
+
+“First, a reputation for piety and generosity. Second, that reputation
+duly certified to by the leading minister of the town.”
+
+“In other words, a testimonial.”
+
+“Precisely. For home use, and cheap at twenty dollars. Preparatory to
+operating in a town, your itinerating quack bribes two people—if he
+can. First, the editor of the local paper; second, the pastor of the
+leading church. The editor usually takes the money with his eyes wide
+open; the minister with his eyes tight shut.”
+
+“How can his eyes be shut to such a business?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Because so much dust has been thrown in them by the so-called
+religious journals.”
+
+“Surely you don’t mean that religious journals exploit quackery in
+their pages!” cried Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“They are the mainstay of the quack and patent medicine business,”
+declared the Health Master. “Leaving out the Christian Science papers,
+which, of course, don’t touch this dirty money, the religious press of
+all denominations, with a few honorable individual exceptions, sells
+out to any form of medical fraud which has a dollar to spend. Is it
+strange that the judgment of some of the clergy, who implicitly trust
+in their sectarian publications, becomes distorted? It’s an even chance
+that our Great Gray faker’s advertisement is in the religious weekly
+which lies on Mr. Huddleston’s study-table at this moment.”
+
+Grandma Sharpless turned around from her seat in front, where she
+always ensconced herself so that, as she put it, she could see what was
+coming in time to jump. “I know it is,” she stated quietly. “For while
+I was waiting in the parsonage last week I picked up the ‘Church
+Pillar’ and saw it there.”
+
+“Trust Grandma Sharpless’s eyes not to miss anything that comes within
+their range,” said Dr. Strong.
+
+“Well, I missed the sense of that advertisement till just now,”
+retorted the old lady. “I’ve just remembered about this Graham Gray.”
+
+“What about him?” asked the Health Master with eagerness, for Mrs.
+Sharpless’s memory was as reliable for retaining salient facts as her
+vision was for discerning them. “Do you know him?”
+
+“Only by his works. Last year a traveling doctor of that name stopped
+over at Greenvale, twenty miles down the river, and gave some of his
+lectures to Suffering Womanhood, or some such folderol. He got hold of
+Sally Griffin, niece of our farmer here, while she was visiting there.
+Sally’s as sound as a pippin, except for an occasional spell of
+fool-in-the-head, and I guess no school of doctoring ever helps that
+common ailment much. Well, this Gray got her scared out of her wits
+with symptoms, and sold her twenty-five dollars’ worth of medicine to
+cure her of something or other she didn’t have. Cured!” sniffed the
+lively narrator. “If I hadn’t taken the stuff away from her and locked
+it up, I expect she’d be in the churchyard by now.”
+
+“The whole philosophy of quackery explicated and punctured, by one who
+knows,” chuckled Dr. Strong.
+
+“None of your palaver with me, young man!” returned the brisk old lady,
+who was devoted to the Health Master, and showed it by a policy of
+determined opposition of the letter and whole-hearted support of the
+spirit and deed, in all things. “Probably he knows as much as most of
+your regular doctors, at that!”
+
+“At least he seems to know human nature. That’s the strong point of the
+charlatan. But have you got any of his medicine left?”
+
+“Yes; I think I can lay my hands on what’s left of it. I remember that
+Sally boohooed like a baby, grown woman that she is, when I took it
+away from her.” Dr. Strong’s eyebrows went up sharply. “As soon as we
+get to the house I’ll look it up.”
+
+On their arrival at the roomy old farmstead which Mr. Clyde had
+remodeled and modernized for what he called “an occasional three days
+of grace” from his business in the city of Worthington, Grandma
+Sharpless set about the search, and presently came to the living-room
+bearing in one hand a large bottle and in the other a newspaper.
+
+“Since you’re interested in Professor Gray,” she said, “here’s what he
+says about himself in yesterday’s ‘Bairdstown Bugle.’ I do think,” she
+added, “that the Honorable Silas Harris might be in better business
+with his paper than publishing such truck as this. Listen to it.”
+
+GOSPEL HERBS WILL CURE YOUR ILLS
+
+
+Women of Bairdstown; Read your Bible! Revelation 22d chapter, 2d verse.
+God promises that “the Herbs of the field shall heal the nations.” In a
+vision from above, the holy secret has been revealed to me. Alone of
+all men, I can brew this miracle-working elixir.
+
+
+“The blasphemous old slinkum!” Grandma Sharpless interrupted herself to
+say angrily. “He doesn’t even quote the Scriptures right!”
+
+“Oh, blasphemy is a small matter for a rascal of his kind,” said the
+Health Master lightly. “Go on.”
+
+She read on:—
+
+Come to me, ye women who suffer, and I will give you relief. All those
+wasting and wearing ailments from which the tender sex suffers, vanish
+like mist before the healing, revivifying influence of Gospel Herbs.
+Supposed incurable diseases: Rheumatism, Dropsy, Diabetes and all
+kidney ills, Stomach Trouble, Scrofula, Blood Poison, even the dreaded
+scourge, Consumption, yield at once to this remedy.
+    Though my special message is to women, I will not withhold this
+    boon from any suffering human. Come one and all, rich and poor,
+    young and old, of either sex. Your money refunded if I do not cure
+    you. Public meeting Monday and Tuesday evenings, at eight o’clock
+    sharp in the Scatcherd Opera House; admission free to all. Private
+    consultation at the Mallory Hotel, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday
+    from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Remember, I cure where the doctors fail; or
+    no pay.
+
+
+Prof. Graham Gray,
+The Great Gray Benefactor.
+
+
+Mrs. Sharpless held out for the general view the advertisement, which
+occupied, in huge type, two thirds of a page of the “Bugle.” The
+remainder of the page was taken up with testimonials to the marvelous
+effects of the Gospel Herbs. Most of the letters were from far-away
+towns, but there were a few from the general vicinity of Bairdsville.
+
+Meantime Dr. Strong had been delicately tasting and smelling the
+contents of the bottle, which were thick and reddish.
+
+“What do you make out is in it?” asked Clyde.
+
+“Death—and a few worse things. Grandma Sharpless, you say that the girl
+cried for this after you took it from her?”
+
+“Not only that; she wrote to the Professor for more. And when it came I
+smashed the bottle.”
+
+“You ought to have the honorary degree of M.D. Well, it’s pretty plain,
+but to make sure I’ll send this to Worthington for an analysis.”
+
+“So our friend, the gray wolf, is going to prowl in Bairdstown for the
+next three days!” Thomas Clyde began to rub his chin softly; then not
+so softly; and presently quite hard. His wife watched him with troubled
+eyes. When his hand came down to rest upon his knee, it was doubled
+into a very competent-looking fist. His face set in the expression
+which the newspapers of his own city had dubbed, after the tenement
+campaign of the year before, “Clyde’s fighting smile.”
+
+“Oh, Tom!” broke out his wife, “what kind of trouble are you going to
+get into now?”
+
+“Trouble?” repeated the head of the family, in well-simulated surprise.
+“Why, dear, I wasn’t even thinking of trouble—for myself. But I believe
+it is time for a little action. Let’s call this a household meeting”
+(this was one of the established methods of the Clyde clan) “and find
+out. As it isn’t a family affair, we won’t call in the children this
+time. Strong, what, if anything, are we going to do about this stranger
+in our midst? Are we going to let him take us in?”
+
+“The question is,” said Dr. Strong quickly, “whether the Clyde family
+is willing to loan its subsidized physician temporarily to the city of
+Bairdstown.”
+
+“On the Chinese plan,” supplemented Clyde.
+
+“Certainly. On the Chinese plan of trying to save the community from a
+visitation instead of waiting to cure them of the incurable results of
+it.”
+
+“By visitation I suppose you mean Professor Gray?” said Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“Exactly. I should rank him rather higher than an epidemic of scarlet
+fever, as an ally of damage and death.”
+
+“I’ll vote ‘Yes,’” said Mrs. Clyde rather plaintively. “Only, I wish
+you two men didn’t have so much Irish in your temperament.”
+
+“I scorn your insinuation,” replied her husband. “I’m the original dove
+of peace, but this Gray person ruffles my plumage. What do you say,
+Grandma?”
+
+“Bairdstown is my own place, partly. I know the people and they know me
+and I won’t sit quiet and see ‘em put upon. I vote ‘Yes.’”
+
+“Make it unanimous!” said Clyde. “What’s the first move of the army of
+relief? I’m in on this somewhere, Strong.”
+
+“Contribute your car for a couple of days, then, and we’ll go out on a
+still hunt for the elusive clue and the shy and retiring evidence. In
+other words, we’ll scour the county, and look up some of these local
+testimonials which the Great Gray One gathered in last year, and now
+prints in the ‘Bugle.’”
+
+“And I’ll stop in town and see Mr. Huddleston to-morrow,” said Mrs.
+Sharpless.
+
+“You won’t get any results,” prophesied the Health Master. “But,
+anyway, get him to come to the Gray lecture on Tuesday evening. We’ll
+need him.”
+
+During the ensuing two and a half days and two nights Mrs. Clyde had
+speech of her husband but once; and that was at 2 a.m. when he woke her
+up to tell her that he was having the time of his life, and she replied
+by asking him whether he had let the cat in, and returned to her
+dreams.
+
+Bairdstown’s Suffering Womanhood—as per advertisement—turned out
+extensively and self-commiseratingly to the free lecture of Tuesday
+evening, bringing with them a considerable admixture of the male
+populace, curious, cynical, or expectant. On the platform sat a number
+of “special guests,” including the Rev. Mr. Huddleston, mild of face
+and white of hair, and the Honorable Silas Harris, owner of the
+“Bugle.”
+
+“Cured” patients, to the number of half a dozen, fidgeted in the seats
+of honor with expressions of conscious and pleasurable importance.
+
+“They appear to be enjoying poor health quite literally,” whispered
+Clyde to Dr. Strong, as the two, begrimed with the dust of a long day’s
+travel just finished, slipped quietly into side seats.
+
+At once the entertainment began. A lank, harshfaced, muscular man whom
+Professor Gray introduced as his assistant, seated himself at the
+piano, and struck a chord, whereupon the Professor, in a powerful
+voice, sang what he termed the “Hymn of Healing,” inviting the audience
+to “assist” in the chorus, which gem of poesy ran as follows:—
+
+“Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed!
+    Trust in the gospel advice.
+Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field;
+    Healed without money or price.”
+
+
+“Some poetic license in that last line,” murmured Clyde to his
+companion.
+
+“The next portion of our programme,” announced the Great Gray
+Benefactor, “will be corroborative readings from the Good Book.” And he
+proceeded to deliver in oratorical style sundry Bible quotations so
+patched together and garbled as to ascribe, inferentially, miraculous
+powers to the Gospel Herbs. Then came the lecture proper, which was
+merely an amplification of the “Bugle” advertisement, interspersed with
+almanac funny stories and old jokes.
+
+“And now, before our demonstration,” concluded Professor Graham Gray,
+“if there is any here seeking enlightenment or help, let him rise. This
+is your meeting, dear friends, as much as mine; free to your voices and
+your needs, as well as to your welcome presence here. I court inquiry
+and fair investigation. Any questions? If not, we—”
+
+“One moment!” The whole assemblage turned, as on a single pivot, to the
+side aisle where Dr. Strong had risen and now stood, tall, straight,
+and composed, waiting for silence.
+
+“Our friend on the right has the floor,” said the Professor suavely.
+
+“You state that this God-given secret remedy was imparted to you for
+the relief of human misery?” asked Dr. Strong.
+
+“Thousands of grateful patients attest it, my friend.”
+
+“Then, with human beings suffering and dying all about you, why do you
+continue to profit by keeping it secret?”
+
+Down sat the questioner. A murmur rose and ran, as the logic of the
+question struck home. But the quack had his answer pat.
+
+“Does not the Good Book say that the laborer is worthy of his hire? Do
+your regular physicians, of whom I understand you are one, treat cases
+for nothing? Ah,” he went on, outstretching his hands to the audience
+with a gesture of appeal, “the injustice which I have suffered from the
+jealousy and envy of the medical profession! Never do I enter a town
+without curing many unfortunates that the regular doctors have given up
+as hopeless. Hence the violence of their attacks upon me. But I forgive
+them their prejudice, as I pity their ignorance.”
+
+Some applause followed the enunciation of this noble sentiment.
+
+“We have with us to-night,” pursued the speaker, quick to catch the
+veering sentiment, “a number of these marvelous cures. You shall hear
+from the very mouths of the saved ones testimony beyond cavil. I will
+call first on Mrs. Amanda Gryce, wife of Mr. Stanley Gryce, the well
+and favorably known laundryman. Speak up clearly, Mrs. Gryce, and tell
+your story.”
+
+“It’s two years now that I been doctorin’,” said the lady thus adjured,
+in a fluttering voice. “I doctored with a allopathic physician here,
+an’ with a homypath over to Roxton, an’ with a osty-path down to
+Worthington, an’ with Peruny in betwixt, an’ they didn’t any of ‘em do
+me no good till I tried Professor Gray. He seen how I felt without
+askin’ me a question. He just pulled down my eyelid an’ looked at it.
+‘You’re all run down; gone!’ says he. An’ thet’s jest what I was. So he
+treated me with his herb medicine an’ I feel like a new woman. An’ I
+give Professor Graham Gray the credit an’ the thanks of a saved woman.”
+
+“Not to mention seven dollars an’ a half,” supplemented a mournful
+drawl from the audience.
+
+“You hush, Stan Gryce!” cried the healed one, shrill above the laughter
+of the ribald. “Would you begrutch a few mizzable dollars for your
+poor, sufferin’ wife’s health?”
+
+An alarmed child of ten was next led forward and recited in sing-song
+measure:—
+
+“I—had—the—fits—for—most—three— years—and—I—was—cured—by
+Gospel—Herbs—and—I—have—come—here—to—say—God—bless—my—dear
+benefactor—Professor—Graham—Gray,”—and sat down hard at the last word,
+whereupon a tenor squeak in the far gallery took up the refrain:
+
+“You’d scarcex peckwon of my yage
+To speakin public on the stage.”
+
+
+Again there was a surge of mirth, and the lecturer frowned with
+concern. But he quickly covered whatever misgivings he might have had
+by bringing forward other “testimonies”: old Miss Smithson whose
+nervousness had been quite dispelled by two doses of the herbs; Auntie
+Thomas (colored) whose “misery” had vanished before the wonder-working
+treatment; and the Widow Carlin, whose boy had been “spittin’ blood
+like as if he was churchyard doomed,” but hadn’t had a bad coughing
+spell since taking the panacea. And all this time Dr. Strong sat quiet
+in his seat, with a face of darkening sternness.
+
+“You have heard your fellow-citizens,” the lecturer took up his theme
+again, “testify to the efficacy of my methods. And you see on this
+rostrum with me that grand and good old man, the worthy pastor of so
+many of you, my dear and honored friend—I feel that I may call him
+friend, since I have his approval of my humble labors—the Reverend
+Doctor Huddleston. You see also here, lending the support of his valued
+presence, the Honorable Silas Harris, whom you have twice honored by
+sending him to the state legislature. Their presence is the proudest
+testimonial to my professional character. In Mr. Harris’s fearless and
+independent journal you have read the sworn evidence of those who have
+been cured by my Godgiven remedies; evidence which is beyond
+challenge—”
+
+“I challenge it.”
+
+Dr. Strong, who had been hopefully awaiting some such opening, was on
+his feet again.
+
+“You have had your say!” cried Professor Gray, menacing him with a
+shaking hand. “These people don’t want to hear you. They understand
+your motives. You can’t run this meeting.”
+
+The gesture was a signal. The raw-boned accompanist, whose secondary
+function was that of bouncer, made a quick advance from the rear,
+reached for the unsuspicious Health Master—and recoiled from the impact
+of Mr. Thomas Clyde’s solid shoulder so sharply that only the side wall
+checked his subsidence.
+
+“Better stay out of harm’s way, my friend,” suggested Clyde amiably.
+
+Immediately the hall was in an uproar. The more timid of the women were
+making for the exits, when a high, shrill voice, calling for order
+strenuously, quelled the racket, and a very fat man waddled down the
+middle aisle, to be greeted by cries of “Here’s the Mayor.” Several
+excited volunteers explained the situation to him from as many
+different points of view, while Professor Graham Gray bellowed his
+appeal from the platform.
+
+“All I want is fair play. They’re trying to break up my meeting.”
+
+“Not at all,” returned Dr. Strong’s calm voice. “I’m more than anxious
+to have it continue.”
+
+With a happy inspiration, Mr. Clyde jumped up on his bench.
+
+“I move Mayor Allen take the chair!” he shouted. “Professor Gray says
+that he courts fair investigation. Let’s give it to him, in order.”
+
+A shout of acclaim greeted this suggestion. Bairdstown’s Suffering
+Womanhood and Bored Manhood was getting more out of a free admission
+than it had ever had in its life before. Ponderously the obese Mayor
+hoisted his weight up the steps and shook hands with the reluctant
+lecturer. He then invited Dr. Strong to come to the platform.
+
+“This is my meeting!” protested the Great Gray Benefactor. “I hired
+this hall and paid good money for it.”
+
+“You said it was our meeting as much as yours!” roared an insurgent
+from the crowd, and a chorus of substantiation followed.
+
+“Ten minutes will be all that I want,” announced Dr. Strong as he took
+a chair next the Mayor.
+
+“That’s fair!” shrilled the Chairman. “On the Professor’s own
+invitation.” In a tone lowered to the alarmed quack’s ear, he added:
+“Of course, you can back out if you want to. But I’d advise you to do
+it quick if you’re going to do it at all. This is a queer-tempered
+town.”
+
+So significant was his tone that the other judged advance to be safer
+than retreat. Therefore, summoning all his assurance, he sought, in an
+impassioned speech, to win back his hearers. He was a natural orator,
+and, when he reached his peroration, he had a large part of his
+audience with him again. In the flush of renewed confidence he made a
+grave tactical error, just when he should have closed.
+
+“Let this hireling of the Doctors’ Trust, the trust that would strangle
+all honest competition, answer these if he can!” he shouted, shaking
+the page of testimonials before his adversary’s face. “Let him confute
+the evidence of these good and honorable women who have appeared here
+to-night; women who have no selfish aims to subserve. Let him impugn
+the motives of the reverend clergyman and of the honored statesman who
+sit here with me. Let him do this, or let him shrink from this hall in
+the shame and dishonor which he seeks to heap upon one whose sole
+ambition it is to relieve suffering and banish pain and death.”
+
+There was hearty applause as the speaker sat down and Dr. Strong arose
+to face a gathering now turned for the most part hostile. He wasted no
+time in introduction or argument. “Mr. Chairman,” said he, “Professor
+Gray rests his case on his testimonials. With Mr. Clyde I have
+investigated a number of them, and will give you my results. Here are
+half a dozen testimonials to the value of one of his nostrums, the
+Benefaction Pills, from women who have been cured, so they state, of
+diseases ranging from eczema through indigestion to consumption. All,
+please note, by the same wonderful medicine. And here,” he drew a small
+box from his pocket, “is a sample of the medicine. I have just had it
+analyzed. What do you suppose they are? Sugar! Just plain sugar and
+nothing else.” Professor Gray leaped to his feet. “You don’t deny the
+cures!” he thundered.
+
+“I don’t deny that these people are well to-day. And I don’t deny that
+the testimonials from them are genuine, as documents. But your sugar
+pills had no more to do with the cure than so much moonshine. Listen,
+you people! Here is the core and secret of quackery:
+
+“All diseases tend to cure themselves, through the natural resistance
+of the body. But for that we should all be dead. This man, or some
+other of his kind, comes along with his promises and pills, and when
+the patient recovers from the disease in the natural course of events,
+he claims the credit. Meantime, he is selling sugar at about one
+hundred dollars per pound.”
+
+“Sugar,” said the quack, quick-wittedly. “But what kind of sugar? This
+sugar, as he calls it, is crystal precipitated from the extract of
+these healing herbs. No chemist can determine its properties by any
+analysis.”
+
+“Very well turned,” said Dr. Strong, with a smile. “I can’t immediately
+disprove that, though I could with time. But, whatever the case with
+his sugar, any chemist can analyze this.” He held up a small bottle,
+half filled with a red-brown liquid. “This is the Extract of Gospel
+Herbs. Now, let us see what this does.”
+
+He referred to his copy of the “Bugle,” containing the testimonials.
+“Here is Mrs. Sarah Jenkins, of the neighboring town of Maresco, where
+Professor Gray lectured a year ago, cured of Bright’s disease and
+dropsy; Miss Allie Wheat, of Weedsport, cured of cancer of the stomach;
+and Mrs. Howard Cleary, of Roxton, wholly relieved of nervous breakdown
+and insomnia. All genuine testimonials. Mr. Clyde and I have traced
+them.”
+
+Professor Gray raised his head with a flash of triumph. “You see!” he
+cried. “He has to admit the genuineness of my testimonials!”
+
+“Of your testimonials; yes. But what about your cures? Mrs. Jenkins
+has, as she said, ceased to suffer from her ills. She died of Bright’s
+disease and dropsy three months after Professor Gray cured her of them.
+Miss Wheat, whose cancer was purely imaginary, is now a hopeless wreck,
+in a sanitarium whither the Gospel Herbs drove her. Mrs. Cleary—but let
+me read what she testified to. Here it is in the paper with a picture
+of the Cleary home:—”
+
+_Dear Professor Gray: You have indeed been a benefactor to me. Before
+our baby was born my husband and I were the happiest of couples. Then I
+became a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep. I was cross and irritable. My
+nerves seemed all on fire. Your first treatment worked wonders. I slept
+like a log. Since then I have not been without Gospel Herbs in the
+house, and I am a well woman._
+
+(Signed) Mrs. Howard Cleary.
+
+“That was a year ago,” continued Dr. Strong. “Yesterday we visited the
+Cleary home. We found a broken husband and a deserted baby. The young
+wife we traced to Worthington, where we discovered her—well, I won’t
+name to this audience the sort of place we found her in.
+
+“But so far as there can be a hell on this earth, she had descended
+into it, and this,” he held the vial high to view, “_this_ sent her
+there.” His fingers opened; there was a crisp little crash of glass,
+and the red-brown liquid crept and spread along the floor, like blood.
+
+“Morphine,” said Dr. Strong. “Morphine, which enslaves the body and
+destroys the soul. There are your Gospel Herbs!”
+
+A murmur rose, and deepened into a growl. The Great Gray Benefactor,
+his face livid, sprang forward.
+
+“Lies!” he shouted. “All lies! Where’s his proof? What’s he got to
+show? Nothing but his own say-so. If there’s a law in the land, I’ll
+make him sweat for this. Mr. Huddleston, I appeal to you for justice.”
+
+“We shall be glad to hear from the Reverend Mr. Huddleston,” mildly
+suggested the chairman, who was evincing an enjoyment of the
+proceedings quite puzzling to Dr. Strong.
+
+The old clergyman got slowly to his feet. His mild, weak face was
+troubled. “Let us bear and forbear,” he pleaded in a tremulous voice.
+“I cannot believe these charges against our good friend, Professor
+Gray. I am sure that he is a good and worthy man. He has given most
+liberally to the church. I am informed that he is a member of his home
+church in good and regular standing, and I find in the editorial
+columns of the ‘Church Pillar’ a warm encomium upon his beneficent
+work, advising all to try his remedies. Surely our friend, Dr. Strong,
+has been led astray by mistaken zeal.
+
+“Only yesterday two members of my congregation, most estimable ladies,
+called to see me and told me how they had benefited by a visit just
+made to Professor Gray. He had treated them with his new Gospel Elixir,
+of which he has spoken to me. There was evidence of its efficacy in
+their very bearing and demeanor—”
+
+“I should say there was! _And_ in their breath. Did you smell it?”
+
+The interruption came in a very clear, positive, and distinct
+contralto.
+
+“Great Grimes’s grass-green ghost!” exclaimed Mr. Thomas Clyde, quite
+audibly amidst the startled hush. “Grandma Sharpless is among those
+present!”
+
+“I—I—I—I do not think,” began the clergyman, aghast, “that the matter
+occurred to me.”
+
+“Because, if _you_ didn’t, _I_ did,” continued the voice composedly.
+“They reeked of liquor.”
+
+The tension to which the gathering had been strung abruptly loosened in
+mirth.
+
+“Mrs. Sharpless will please take the platform,” invited the
+Mayor-chairman.
+
+“No, I’ll do my talking from here.” The old lady stood up, a straight,
+solid, uncompromising figure, in the center of the floor. “I met those
+two ladies in the parsonage hall,” she explained. “They were coming out
+as I was going in. They stopped to talk to me. They both talked at
+once. I wouldn’t want to say that they were—well—exactly—”
+
+“Spifflicated,” suggested a helpful voice from the far rear.
+
+“Spifflicated; thank you,” accepted the speaker. “But they certainly
+were—”
+
+“Lit up,” volunteered another first-aid to the hesitant.
+
+“Yes, lit up. One of them loaned me her bottle. If I’m any judge of bad
+whiskey, that was it.”
+
+An appreciative roar from the house testified to the fact that Mrs.
+Sharpless had her audience in hand.
+
+“As for you women on the stage,” she pursued, rising to her topic, “I
+know what’s wrong with you.‘Mandy Gryce, if you’d tend more to your
+house and less to your symptoms, you wouldn’t be flitting from
+allopathic bud to homoeopathic flower like a bumblebee with the
+stomach-ache.” (“Hear, hear!” from Mr. Gryce.) “Lizzie Tompy, your fits
+are nine tenths temper. I’d cure you of ‘em without morphine. Miss
+Smithson, if you’d quit strong green tea, three times a day, those
+nerves of yours would give you a fairer chance—and your neighbors,
+too.” (Tearful sniffs from Miss Smithson.)
+
+“Auntie Thomas, you wait and see what your rheumatism says to you
+to-morrow, when the dope has died out of your system. Susan Carlin, you
+ought to be home this minute, looking after your sick boy, instead of
+on a stage, in your best bib and tucker, giving testimonials to
+you-don’t-know-what-all poison.
+
+“Bairdstown’s Suffering Womanhood!” exclaimed the vigorous old lady,
+her color rising with her voice. “Go home! Go home, you poor,
+self-coddling fussybuddies, to your washboards and your sewing-machines
+and forget your imaginary symptoms.
+
+“There!” she drew a long breath, looking about over the group of
+wilting testimonial-givers. “That’s the first speech I have ever made,
+and I guess it’ll be the last. But before I stop, I’ve got a word to
+say to you, Professor Graham Gray. Bless us! Where’s the man gone?”
+
+“Professor Gray,” announced the chairman with a twinkle in his voice,
+“has retired to obtain fresh evidence. At least, that is what he _said_
+he had gone for.”
+
+From the main floor came a hoarse suggestion which had the words “tar
+and feathers” in it. It was cut short by a metallic shriek from
+without, followed by a heavy rumbling.
+
+“Something seems to tell me,” said the fat Mayor solemnly, “that the
+9.30 express, which just whistled for the crossing, is the heavier by
+about two hundred pounds of Great Gray Benefactor clinging to the rear
+platform, and happy to be there.”
+
+“And your money back if not benefited,” piped a reedy voice from the
+front, whereupon there was another roar.
+
+“The bright particular star of these proceedings having left, is there
+anything else to come before the meeting?” inquired the chairman.
+
+“I’d like to have one more word,” said Dr. Strong. “Friends, as one
+quack is, all quacks are. They differ only in method and degree. Every
+one of them plays a game with stacked cards, in which you are his
+victims, and Death is his partner. And the puller-in for this game is
+the press.
+
+“You have heard to-night how a good and wellmeaning clergyman has been
+made stool-pigeon for this murderous charlatan, through the lying of a
+religious—God save the mark!—weekly. That publication is beyond our
+reach. But there is one here at home which did the quack’s work for
+him, and took his money for doing it. I suggest that the Honorable
+Silas Harris explain!”
+
+“I’m running my paper as a business proposition,” growled the baited
+editor and owner of the ‘Bugle,’ “and I’m running it to suit myself and
+this community.”
+
+“You’re running it to suit the crooked and cruel advertisers who prey
+on this community,” retorted the other. “And you’ve served them further
+in the legislature, where you voted to kill the patent-medicine bill,
+last session, in protection of your own profits. Good profits, too. One
+third of all your advertising is medical quackery which takes good
+money out of this town by sheer swindling; money which ought to stay in
+town and be spent on the legitimate local products advertised in your
+paper. If I were a local advertiser, I’d want to know why.”
+
+“If that’s the case,” remarked Mr. Stanley Gryce, quick to catch the
+point, “I guess you owe my family seven dollars an’ a half, Silas, and
+till it’s paid up you can just drop my laundry announcement out of your
+columns.”
+
+“I guess I’ll stay out for a spell, too,” supplemented Mr. Corson, the
+hay and feed man. “For a week, my ad’s been swamped by Swamp Root so
+deep you can’t see it.”
+
+“While you’re about it,” added a third, “leave me out. I’m kinder sick
+of appearin’ between a poisonous headache powder and a consumption
+dope. Folks’ll be accusin’ me of seekin’ trade untimely.” This was
+greeted with a whoop, for the speaker was the local undertaker.
+
+“We’ve got a league for Clean Advertising in Worthington,” announced
+Mr. Clyde. “Why not organize something of the kind here?”
+
+“Help!” shouted the Honorable Silas, throwing up his hands. “Don’t
+shoot! I holler ‘Enough!’ As soon as the contracts are out, I’ll quit.
+There’s no money in patent-medicine advertising any more for the small
+paper, anyway.”
+
+“Well, we’ve done our evening’s chores, I reckon,” remarked the
+chairman. “A motion to adjourn will now be in order.”
+
+“Move we adjourn with the chorus of the ‘Hymn of Healing,’” piped the
+wag with the reedy voice, and the audience filed out, uproariously and
+profanely singing:—
+
+“Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed!
+    Trust in the gospel advice.
+Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field;
+    Healed without money or price.”
+
+
+“Well, young man,” said Grandma Sharpless, coming forward to join the
+Health Master, “you certainly carried out your programme.”
+
+“I?” said Dr. Strong, affectionately tucking the old lady’s arm under
+his. “To you the honors of war. I only squelched a quack. You taught
+Bairds-town’s self-coddling womanhood a lesson that will go down the
+generations.”
+
+“What I want to know,” said the Mayor, advancing to shake hands with
+Mrs. Sharpless, “is this: what’s a fussybuddy?”
+
+“A fussybuddy,” instructed Grandma Sharpless wisely, “is a woman who
+catches a stomach-ache from a patent-medicine almanac. What I want to
+know, Tom Allen, is what you had against the man. I seemed to get an
+inkling that you didn’t exactly like him.”
+
+“He’s forgotten me,” chuckled the Mayor, “but I haven’t forgotten him.
+Fifteen years ago he came along here horse-doctoring and poisoned a
+perfectly good mare for me. He won’t try to poison this town again in a
+hurry. You finished him, Mrs. Sharpless, you and Dr. Strong.”
+
+“What _I_ want to know,” said the Health Master, “is how poor old Mr.
+Huddleston feels about that contribution, now.”
+
+A month later he found out. Traveling by trolley one evening, he felt a
+hand on his shoulder, and turned to face Professor Graham Gray.
+
+“No hard feelings, I hope,” said the quack with superb urbanity. “All
+in the way of business, I take it. I’d have done the same to you, if
+you’d come butting in on my trade. Say, but that old lady was a Tartar!
+She cooked my goose in Bairdstown. For all that, I got an unsolicited
+testimonial from there two weeks ago that’s a wonder. Anonymous, too.
+Not a word of writing with it to tell who the grateful patient might
+be.”
+
+“What was it?” asked Dr. Strong with polite interest.
+
+“A twenty-dollar bill. Now, _what_ do you think of that?”
+
+When Dr. Strong spoke again—and the Great Gray Benefactor has always
+regarded this as the most inconsequential reply he ever received to a
+plain question—it was after a long and thoughtful pause.
+
+“I think,” said he with conviction, “that I’ll start in going to church
+again, next Sunday.”
+
+
+
+
+X.
+THE HOUSE THAT CAUGHT COLD
+
+
+“Can you cure a cold?” asked Grandma Sharpless.
+
+A flare from the soft-coal fire flickered across the library, revealing
+a smile on the Health Master’s face.
+
+“Am I a millionaire?” he countered.
+
+“Not from your salary as Chinese physician to the Clydes,” laughed the
+head of that family.
+
+“If I could cure a cold, I should be, easily, more than that. I’d be
+the foremost medical discoverer of the day.”
+
+“Then you can’t cure a cold,” pursued Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“What _is_ a cold?” countered the Health Master in that insinuating
+tone of voice which he employed to provoke the old lady into one of
+those frequent verbal encounters so thoroughly enjoyed by both of them.
+
+“An ordinary common cold in the head. You know what I mean perfectly
+well, young man. The kind you catch by getting into drafts.”
+
+“Oh, _that!_ Well, you see, there’s no such thing.”
+
+“No such thing as a cold in the head, Dr. Strong?” said Julia, looking
+up from her book. “Why, we’ve all had ‘em, loads of times.”
+
+“And Bettina is coming down with one now, if I’m any judge,” said Mrs.
+Sharpless. “She’s had the sniffles all day.”
+
+“Let’s hope it isn’t a cold. Maybe it’s only chicken-pox or mumps.”
+
+“Are you wishing chicken-pox and mumps on my baby?” cried Mrs. Clyde.
+
+In the three years during which Dr. Strong had been the “Chinese
+physician” of the household, earning his salary by keeping his patients
+well instead of curing them when ill, Mrs. Clyde had never quite
+learned to guard against the surprises which so often pointed the
+Health Master’s truths.
+
+“Not by any means; I’m only hoping for the lesser of evils.”
+
+“But mumps and chicken-pox are real diseases,” protested Clyde.
+
+“And you think that a ‘cold,’ as you call it, isn’t.”
+
+“Why, no,” said Clyde hesitantly. “I wouldn’t call it a disease, any
+more than I’d call a sprain a broken leg.”
+
+“But it is. A very real, serious disease. Its actual name is coryza.”
+
+“Bogy-talk,” commented Grandma Sharpless scornfully. “Big names for
+little things.”
+
+“Not a little thing at all, as we should all realize if our official
+death-records really dealt in facts.”
+
+“Death-records?” said Grandma Sharpless incredulously. “People don’t
+die of colds, do they?”
+
+“Hundreds every year; all around us.”
+
+“Well, _I_ never hear of it.”
+
+“Are you sure? Think back and recall how many of your friends’ obituary
+notices include some such sentence as this: ‘Last Thursday evening Mr.
+Smith caught a severe cold, from which he took to his bed on Saturday,
+and did not leave it again until his death yesterday morning?’ Doesn’t
+that sound familiar?”
+
+“So familiar,” cried Mr. Clyde, “that I believe the newspapers keep it
+set up in type.”
+
+“But the newspaper always goes on to say that Mr. Smith developed
+pneumonia or grip or bronchitis, and died of that, not of the cold,”
+objected Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“Oh, yes. In the mortality records poor Smith usually appears under the
+heading of one of the well-recognized diseases. It would hardly be
+respectable to die of a cold, would it?”
+
+“He doesn’t _die_ of the cold,” insisted the old lady. “He catches the
+cold and dies of something else.”
+
+“If I take a dose of poison,” the Health Master mildly propounded, “and
+fall down and break my neck, what do I die of?”
+
+“It’s no parallel,” said Grandma Sharpless. “And even if it is,” she
+added, tacitly abandoning that ground, “we’ve always had colds and we
+always will have ‘em.”
+
+“Not with my approval, at least,” remarked the Health Master.
+
+“I guess Providence won’t wait for your approval, young man.”
+
+“Then you regard coryza as a dispensation of Providence? The
+Presbyterian doctrine of foreordination, applied to the human nose,”
+smiled the physician. “We’re all predestined to the ailment, and
+therefore might as well get out our handkerchiefs and prepare to sneeze
+our poor sinful heads off. Is that about it?”
+
+“No, it isn’t! This is a green December and it means a full churchyard.
+We’re in for a regular cold-breeding season.”
+
+“Nonsense! Weather doesn’t breed colds.”
+
+“What does, then?”
+
+“A very mean and lively little germ. He’s rather more poisonous than
+the chicken-pox and mumps variety, although he hasn’t as bad a name. In
+grown-ups he prepares the soil, so to speak, for other germs, by
+getting all through the system and weakening its resistant powers,
+thereby laying it open to the attacks of such enemies as the
+pneumococcus, which is always waiting just around the corner of the
+tongue to give us pneumonia. Or bronchitis may develop, or tonsillitis,
+or diphtheria, or kidney trouble, or indeed almost anything. I once
+heard an eminent lecturer happily describe the coryza bacillus as the
+bad little boy of the gang who, having once broken into the system,
+turns around and calls back to the bigger boys: ‘Come on in, fellers.
+The door’s open.’
+
+“With children the coryza-bug makes various trouble without necessarily
+inviting the others in. A great proportion of the serious ear-troubles
+come from colds; all the way from earache to mastoiditis, and the
+consequent necessity of quick operations to save the patient’s life.
+Almost any of the organs may be impaired by the activity of the little
+pest. And yet as intelligent a family as this”—he looked around the
+circle—“considers it a ‘mere cold.’”
+
+“Why haven’t you told us before?” asked Mr. Clyde bluntly.
+
+“A just reproach,” admitted the Health Master. “Not having been
+attacked, I haven’t considered defense—a wretched principle in health
+matters. In fact, I’ve let the little matters of life go, too much, in
+my interest in the bigger.”
+
+“But what about Bettina?” said the mother anxiously.
+
+“Let’s have her in,” said the Health Master, and the six-year-old
+presently trotted into the room, announcing through a somewhat reddened
+nose, “I’m all stobbed ub; and Katie rubbed me with goose-grease, and I
+don’d wand to take any paregoric.”
+
+“Paregoric?” said the physician. “Opium? I guess not. Off to bed with
+you, Toots, and we’ll try to exorcise the demon with hot-water bottles
+and extra blankets.”
+
+Following her usual custom of kissing everybody good-night around the
+circle, Bettina held up her arms to her sister, who was nearest.
+
+“Stop!” said the Health Master. “No kissing.”
+
+“Not even my mamma?” queried the child. “I’m afraid not. You remember
+when Charley had scarlet fever he wasn’t allowed even to be very near
+any of you.”
+
+“But scarlet fever is the most contagious of any of the diseases, isn’t
+it?” asked Julia.
+
+“Not as contagious as a cold in the head.”
+
+“I don’t know how contagious a cold is,” said Grandma Sharpless; “but I
+do know this: once it gets into a house, it goes through it like
+wildfire.”
+
+“Then the house ought to be ashamed of itself. That’s sheer
+carelessness.”
+
+“Half the kids in our school have got stopped-up noses,” contributed
+Charley.
+
+“Why hasn’t the Committee on Schools reported the fact?” demanded the
+Health Master, turning an accusing eye on Julia.
+
+“Why—why, I didn’t think of it,” said she. “I didn’t think it was
+anything.”
+
+“Oh, you didn’t! Well, if what Charley says is correct, I should think
+your school ought to be put under epidemic regimen.”
+
+“You’d have a fine row with the Board of Education, trying to persuade
+them to special action for any such cause as that,” remarked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“There’s the measure of their intelligence, then,” returned the Health
+Master. “Sickness is sickness, just as surely as a flame is fire; and
+there is no telling, once it’s well started, how much damage it may
+do.”
+
+“But a cold is only in the head, or rather, in the nose,” persisted
+Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“That’s where you’re wrong. Coryza is a disease of the whole system,
+and it weakens the whole system. The symptoms are most apparent in the
+nose and mouth: and it is from the nose and mouth that the disease is
+spread. But if you’ve got the cold you’ve got it in every corner of
+your being. You won’t be convinced of its importance, I suppose, until
+I can produce facts and figures. I only hope they won’t be producible
+from this house. But by the end of the season I’ll hope to have them.
+Meantime we’ll isolate Bettykin.”
+
+Bettina was duly isolated. Meanwhile the active little coryza bacillus
+had got its grip on Mr. Clyde, who for three days attended to his
+business with streaming eyes, and then retired, in the company of
+various hot-water bags, bottles, and foot-warmers, to the sanctuary of
+his own bedroom, where he led a private and morose existence for one
+week. His general manager succeeded to his desk; likewise, to his
+contaminated pencils, erasers, and other implements, whereby he
+alternately sneezed and objurgated himself into the care of a doctor,
+with the general and unsatisfactory result that the balance-sheet of
+Clyde & Co., Manufacturers, showed an obvious loss for the month—as it
+happened, most unfortunately, an unusually busy month—of some three
+thousand dollars, directly traceable to that unconsidered trifle, a
+cold in the head.
+
+“At that you got off cheap,” argued the Health Master.
+
+It was three months after the invasion of the Clyde household by
+Bettina’s coryza germ.
+
+“I’m glad somebody considers it cheap!” observed Mr. Clyde. “Personally
+I should rather have taken a trip to Europe on my share of that three
+thousand dollars.”
+
+“Yet you were lucky,” asserted Dr. Strong. “Bettykin got through her
+earache without any permanent damage. Robin’s attack passed off without
+complications. Your own onset didn’t involve any organ more vital than
+your bank account. And the rest of us escaped.”
+
+“Doesn’t it prove what I said,” demanded Grandma Sharpless; “that a
+cold in the head is only a cold in the head?”
+
+“‘Answer is No,’ as Togo would put it,” replied the Health Master. “In
+fact, I’ve got proof here of quite the opposite, which I desire to
+present to this gathering.”
+
+“This meeting of the Household Protective Association is hereby called
+to order!” announced Mr. Clyde, in the official tones proper to the
+occasion. The children put aside their various occupations and assumed
+a solemn and businesslike aspect which was part of the game. “The lone
+official member will now report,” concluded the chairman.
+
+“Let the Health Officer of the city report for me,” said Dr. Strong,
+taking a printed leaflet from his pocket. “He is one of those rare
+officials who aren’t afraid to tell people what they don’t know, and
+may not want to know. Listen to what Dr. Merritt has to say.” And he
+read:—
+
+“‘The death-rate of the city for the month of February, like the rate
+for December and January, is abnormally high, being a shade over ten
+per cent above the normal for this time of year. While the causes of
+mortality range through the commoner diseases, with a special rise in
+pulmonary troubles, it is evident that the increase must be due to some
+special cause. In the opinion of the Bureau of Health this cause is the
+despised and infectious “cold,” more properly known as coryza, which
+has been epidemic this winter in the city. Although the epidemic wave
+is now receding, its disastrous aftereffects may be looked for in high
+mortality rates for some months. Should a similar onset occur again,
+the city will be asked to consider seriously a thorough school
+campaign, with careful isolation of all suspicious cases.’”
+
+“Did you write that, young man?” asked Mrs. Sharpless suspiciously.
+
+“Why, no; I didn’t _write_ it,” answered the Health Master. “I’ll go as
+far as to admit, however, that Dr. Merritt listens politely to my
+humble suggestions when I offer them.”
+
+“Humph! Ten per cent increase. What is that in real figures?”
+
+“Twenty-five extra deaths a month,” said Manny Clyde, a growing expert
+on local statistics.
+
+“Seventy-five needless deaths for the three months, and more to come,”
+said the Health Master, “besides all the disability, loss of time and
+earning power and strength, and all the pain and suffering—which things
+never get into the vital statistics, worse luck! So much to the account
+of the busy little coryza-bug.”
+
+“Can’t the Health Bureau do something?” asked the practical Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Not much, until its public is better educated,” said Dr. Strong
+wearily. “The present business of a health official is to try and beat
+the fool-killer off from his natural prey with a printed tract. It’s
+quite a job, when you come to consider it.”
+
+“What he ought to have, is the club of the law!” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Precisely. The people won’t give it to him. In this household we’re
+better off, since we can make our own laws. Since Betty’s attack we’ve
+tried out the isolation plan pretty effectually; and we’ve followed, as
+well as might be, the rule of avoiding contact with people having
+coryza.”
+
+He glanced up at a flamboyant poster which Mrs. Clyde, who had a
+natural gift of draftsmanship, had made in a spirit of mischief,
+entitling it “The Red Nose as a Danger Signal.”
+
+“As much truth as fun in that,” he remarked. “But, at the best, we
+can’t live among people and avoid all danger. In fact, avoidance is
+only the outer line of defense. The inner line is symbolized by a
+homely rule, ‘Keep Comfortable.’”
+
+“What’s comfort to do with keeping well?” asked Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“What are your nerves for?” retorted Dr. Strong with his quizzical
+smile.
+
+“Young man,” said the old lady plaintively, “did I ever ask you a
+question that you didn’t fire another back at me before it was fairly
+out of my mouth? My nerves, if I let myself have any, wouldn’t be for
+anything except to plague me.”
+
+“Oh, those are pampered nerves. Normal nerves are to warn you. They’re
+to tell you whether the little things of life are right with you.”
+
+“And if they’re not?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Why, then you’re uncomfortable. Which is to say, there’s something
+wrong; and something wrong means, in time, a lessening of vitality, and
+when you let down your body’s vitality you’re simply saying to any germ
+that may happen along, ‘Come right in and make yourself at home.’
+
+“Perhaps you remember when the house caught cold, how shocked Grandma
+Sharpless was at my saying that colds aren’t caught in a draft. Well,
+they’re not. Yet I ought to have qualified that. Now, what is a draft?
+Air in motion. If there is one thing about air that we thoroughly know,
+it’s this: that moving air is infinitely better for us than still air.
+Even bad, stale air, if stirred vigorously into motion, seems to purify
+itself and become breathable and good. Now, the danger of a draft is
+that it may mean a sudden change of the body’s temperature. Nobody
+thinks that wind is unhealthful, because when you’re out in the
+wind—which is the biggest and freest kind of a draft—you’re prepared
+for it. If not, your nerves say to you, ‘Move faster; get warm.’ It’s
+the same indoors. If the draft chills you, your nerves will tell you
+so. Therefore, mind your nerves. Otherwise, you’ll become specially
+receptive to the coryza germ and when you’ve caught _that_, you’ll have
+caught cold.”
+
+“I wish,” remarked Mr. Clyde, “that my nerves would tell me why I feel
+so logy every morning. They don’t say anything definite. It isn’t
+indigestion exactly. But I feel slow and inert after breakfast, as if
+my stomach hadn’t any enthusiasm in its job.”
+
+“Breakfast is the only meal I don’t have with you, so I don’t know,”
+replied the Health Master, who was a very early riser. “But I should
+say you were eating the wrong things, perhaps.”
+
+“How could that be?” said Mrs. Clyde. “Tom has the simplest kind of
+breakfast, and it’s the same every day.”
+
+“Well, there you are.” The Health Master’s tone assumed that the
+solution was found.
+
+“Where are we?” queried Mr. Clyde. “I’m up in the air!”
+
+“What is this remarkably regular breakfast?”
+
+“Eggs, rolls, and coffee.”
+
+“Oh! Eggs every morning?”
+
+“Two of them. Medium boiled.”
+
+“Not even the method is varied. Same eggs, same preparation every
+morning, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months—”
+
+“No. That’s my winter breakfast only.”
+
+“Very well; four or five months in the year. No wonder your poor
+stomach gets bored.”
+
+“What’s the matter with eggs, Dr. Strong?” inquired Manny. “They let us
+have ‘em, in training.”
+
+“Nothing is the matter with two eggs, or twenty. But when you come to
+two hundred, there’s something very obvious the matter—monotony. Your
+stomach is a machine, it’s true, but it’s a human machine. It demands
+variety.”
+
+“Then Charles ought to be a model. He wants everything from soup to
+pie.”
+
+“A thoroughly normal desire for a growing boy.”
+
+“He eats an awful lot of meat,” observed Julia, who was a somewhat
+fastidious young lady. “My Sunday-school teacher calls meat-eaters
+human tigers.”
+
+“Oh, that’s too easy a generalization, Junkum,” replied the Health
+Master. “With equal logic she could say that vegetable-eaters are human
+cows.”
+
+“But the vegetarians make very strong arguments,” said Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“A lot of pale-eyed, weak-blooded nibblers!” stated Grandma Sharpless.
+“If meat weren’t good for us, we wouldn’t have been eating it all these
+generations.”
+
+“True enough. Perhaps we eat a little too much of it, particularly in
+the warm months. But in winter it’s practically a necessity.”
+
+“Some of the big athletes say they’re vegetarians,” said Manny.
+
+“There are individual cases,” admitted the Health Master; “but in the
+long run it doesn’t work. A vegetarian race is, generally speaking,
+small of stature and build, and less efficient than a meat-eating race.
+The rule of eating is solid food, sound food, plenty of it, and a good
+variety. Give your stomach a fair chance: don’t overload it, don’t
+understock it, and don’t let it get bored.”
+
+For some time Miss Bettina had been conducting a quiet and strategic
+advance upon the Health Master, and now by a sudden onslaught she
+captured his knee and, perching herself thereon, put a soft and chubby
+hand under his chin.
+
+“You want something, Miss Toodles,” he accused with a formidable frown.
+“None of your wheedling ways with me! Out with it!”
+
+“Candy,” said the child, in no way impressed by his severity.
+
+“Candy, indeed! When?”
+
+“Now. Any time. Lots of it. Lots of sugar, too.”
+
+“Betty’s developing _such_ a sweet tooth!” mourned her mother. “I have
+to limit her rigidly.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“You wouldn’t let the child stuff herself on sweets all the time,”
+protested Grandma Sharpless, scandalized.
+
+“Nor on anything else. But if she craves sweets, why not let her have
+them at the proper time?”
+
+“Well, in my day children ate plain food and were thankful.”
+
+“Hm! I’m a little dubious about the thankfulness. And in your day
+children died more frequently and more easily than in ours.”
+
+“They weren’t pampered to death on candy, anyway!”
+
+“Possibly they weren’t pampered quite enough. Take the Cherub, here,”
+he tossed Betty in the air and whisked her to his shoulder. “She’s a
+perfect little bundle of energy, always in motion. She needs
+energy-producing food to keep going, coal for that engine. Sugar is
+almost pure carbon; that is, coal in digestible form. Of course she
+wants sweets. Her little body is logical.”
+
+“But isn’t it bad for her teeth?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“No; nor for her last year’s overshoes or her tin dog’s left hind leg,”
+chuckled the Health Master. “Sometimes I marvel that the race has
+survived all the superstitions surrounding food and drink.”
+
+“In my father’s household,” said Mr. Clyde, “the family principle was
+never to drink anything with meals. The mixture of solids and liquids
+was held to be bad. Another superstition, I suppose.”
+
+“At that rate, bread and milk would be rank poison,” said Dr. Strong.
+“Next to food, water has got the finest incrustation of old-wives’
+warnings. Now, there’s some doubt whether a man should eat whenever he
+wants to. Appetite, in the highly nervous American organization, is
+sometimes tricky. But thirst is trustworthy. The normal man is
+perfectly safe in drinking all the water he wants whenever he wants
+it.”
+
+“I can still remember the agonies that I suffered when, as a boy, I had
+scarlet fever, and they would allow me almost no water,” said Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“One of medicine’s direst errors,” said Dr. Strong. “Nobody will ever
+know how much that false and cruel system has added to our death-rate
+in the past. To-day a practitioner who kept water from a fever
+patient—unless there were unusual complications—would be properly
+citable for malpractice. By the way,” he continued, “we’re changing our
+views about feeding in long illnesses. Typhoid patients have always
+been kept down to the lowest possible diet, nothing but milk. Now, some
+of the big hospitals are feeding typhoid cases, right through the
+fever, on foods carefully selected for their heat and energy values,
+with the result that not only has the patient more strength to fight
+the disease, but he pulls through practically free from the emaciation
+which has always been regarded as inevitable.”
+
+“Can I have my candy?” inquired Bettina, holding to her own point.
+
+“If it’s good, sound candy. Now I’m going to utter an awful heresy.
+Generally speaking, and in moderation, what you want is good for you.”
+
+“Pure anarchy,” laughed Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Not at all; the law of the body, always demanding what is best for its
+development.”
+
+“Well, I want,” declared Robin, with a sudden energy, “to take off
+these hot, scratchy flannels.”
+
+“Too late now,” said the Health Master, “until spring. You’ve been
+wearing them all winter. But another year, if I have my way, you won’t
+have to put them on.”
+
+“You’d let him tempt pneumonia by going through a winter with light
+summer underwear?”
+
+“Unless you get out an injunction against me,” smiled the physician.
+“Bobs had a pretty tough time of it for the first week when he changed
+to flannels. He’s thin-skinned, and the rough wool irritated him pretty
+badly. In fact, he had a slight fever for two days. It isn’t worth that
+suffering. Besides, he’s a full-blooded youngster, and doesn’t need the
+extra warmth. You can’t dress all children alike in material any more
+than you can dress them all from the same pattern.”
+
+“Then I want to leave off mine, too,” announced Charles.
+
+“Nonsense! You little ruffian, you could wear sandpaper on that skin of
+yours. Don’t talk to me, or next time I see you without your overcoat
+I’ll order a hair shirt for you.”
+
+“I’ve never thought much about the children’s clothes, except to change
+between the seasons,” confessed Mrs. Clyde. “I supposed that was all
+there is to it.”
+
+“Not wholly. I once knew a man who died from changing his necktie.”
+
+“Did he put on a red tie with a pink shirt?” interestedly queried
+Manny, who had reached the age where attire was becoming a vital
+interest.
+
+“He changed abruptly from the big puff-tie which he had worn all
+winter, and which was a regular chest-protector, to a skimpy bow,
+thereby exposing a weak chest and getting pneumonia quite naturally.
+Yet he was ordinarily a cautious old gentleman, and shifted the weight
+of his underclothes by the calendar—a rather stupid thing to do, by the
+way.”
+
+“On the first of November,” began Grandma Sharpless severely—
+
+“Yes, I know,” cut in the Health Master. “Your whole family went into
+flannels whether the thermometer was twenty or seventy. And we’ve seen
+it both, more than once on that date.”
+
+“What harm did it ever do them?”
+
+“Bodily discomfort. In other words, lessened vitality. Think how much
+nervous wear is suffered by a child itching and squirming in a scratchy
+suit of heavy flannels on a warm day.”
+
+“Children can’t be changing from one weight to another every day, can
+they?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“No need of that. But in the fall and spring we can regulate that
+matter a little more by the thermometer, and a little less by the
+almanac. There is also the consideration of controlling heat. Now,
+Charley, what would you think of a man who, in June, say, with the
+mercury at seventy-five, wandered around in a heavy suit and his winter
+flannels.”
+
+“I’d think he was sick,” said the nine-year-old promptly, “or else
+foolish. But what makes you ask me?”
+
+“Just by way of calling your attention to the thermometer, which in
+this room stands at seventy-nine. And here we all sit, dressed
+twenty-five per cent warmer than if we were out doors in a June
+temperature several degrees colder. You’re the Committee on Air and
+Light, Charley. I think this matter of heat ought to come within your
+province.”
+
+“And it makes you feel so cold when you go out,” said Julia.
+
+“Of course. We Americans live in one of the most trying climates in the
+world, and we add to its rigors by heating our houses like incubators.
+No room over seventy, ought to be the rule.”
+
+“It’s hard to work in a cold room,” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Not when you’re used to it. The Chicago schools that have started
+winter roof classes for sickly children, find that the average of
+learning capacity goes up markedly in the cold, clean air.”
+
+“But they can’t be as comfortable,” said Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Much more so. As soon as the children get used to it, they love it,
+and they object strenuously to going back into the close rooms. The
+body grasps and assimilates the truth; the mind responds.”
+
+“Well, I like to be comfortable as well as anybody,” said Mrs.
+Sharpless, “but I don’t consider it the chief end of life.”
+
+“Not the chief end,” assented Dr. Strong; “the chief means.”
+
+“Comfort and health,” mused Mrs. Clyde. “It seems a natural
+combination.”
+
+“The most natural in the world. Let me put it into an allegory. Health
+is the main line, the broad line, the easy line. It’s the simple line
+to travel, because comfort keeps pointing it out. Essentially it is the
+line of the least resistance. The trouble with most of us is we’re
+always unconsciously taking transfers to the cross-lines. The transfer
+may be Carelessness, or Slothfulness, or Gluttony, or one of the
+Dissipations in food, drink, work or play; or it may be even Egotism,
+which is sometimes a poison: but they all take you to Sick Street.
+Don’t get a transfer down Sick Street. The road is rough, the scenery
+dismal, and at the end is the cemetery.”
+
+“That’s the end of all roads,” said Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“Then in Heaven’s name,” said the Health Master, “let us take the
+longest and sunniest route and sing as we go!”
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+THE BESIEGED CITY
+
+
+To Bettina falls the credit of setting the match to the train. That
+lively-minded young lady had possessed herself of a large, red square
+of cardboard, upon which, in the midst of the Clyde family circle, she
+wrought mightily with a paint-brush.
+
+“What comes after p in ‘diphtheria,’ Charley?” she presently appealed
+to her next older brother.
+
+Charley considered the matter with head aslant. “Another p,” he
+answered, tactfully postponing the evil moment.
+
+“It doesn’t look right,” announced the Cherub, after a moment’s
+contemplation. “Dr. Strong, how do you spell ‘diphtheria’?”
+
+“I? Why, Toots, I spell it with a capital, but leave off the final x,”
+replied the Health Master cheerfully. “What kind of a game are you
+playing? Quarantining your dolls?”
+
+“It isn’t a game.” Betty could be, on occasion, quite a self-contained
+young person.
+
+“What is it, then, if I’m not prying too far into personal matters?”
+
+“It’s for Eula Simms to put on her house.”
+
+“The Simmses _will_ be pleased,” remarked Julia.
+
+“They ought to be,” said Betty complacently. “I don’t suppose they can
+afford a regular one like the one we put up when Charley had scarlet
+fever, two years ago. And Eula’s big sister’s got diphtheria,” she
+added quite casually.
+
+“What’s that?” The Health Master straightened up sharply in his chair.
+“How do you know that, Twinkles?”
+
+“Eula told me across the fence this morning. She’s excused from school.
+Three other houses on the street have got it, too. I’m going to make
+placards for them.”
+
+“And do the work in play that the Health Department ought to be doing
+in the deadliest earnest! What on earth is Dr. Merritt thinking of?”
+And he went to the telephone to call up the Health Officer and find
+out.
+
+“We’re due for a bad diphtheria year, too,” observed Grandma Sharpless,
+whose commentaries on practical matters, being always the boiled-down
+essence of first-hand observation, carried weight in the household.
+“I’ve noticed that it swings around about once in every five or six
+years. And it was six years ago we had that bad epidemic.”
+
+“Then there is the influenza epidemic of last spring to consider,” said
+Mrs. Clyde. “Dr. Strong told us then that we’d have to pay for that for
+months. So, I suppose, the city is still in a weakened condition and
+easy soil for diphtheria or any other epidemic.”
+
+“There’s measles already in our school,” said Julia. “That’ll help,
+too.”
+
+“Why haven’t you reported it, Junkum?” asked her father. “You’re
+Chairman of the Committee on School Conditions of the Clyde Household
+Protective Association.”
+
+“We only found out to-day,” said Bobs, “when they told us maybe school
+would close.”
+
+“Three years I’ve been President of the Public Health League,” remarked
+Mr. Clyde with a wry face, “and nothing has happened. Now that I’m just
+about retiring I hope there isn’t going to be serious trouble. What
+does the Health Department say, Strong?” he inquired, turning as the
+Health Master entered.
+
+“Something very wrong there. Merritt won’t talk over the ‘phone. Wants
+me to come down.”
+
+“This evening?”
+
+“Yes. He’s ill, himself, and badly worried. What do _you_ think?”
+
+“It looks like some skullduggery,” declared Mr. Clyde, borrowing one of
+his mother-in-law’s expressive words. “Is it possible that reports of
+diphtheria are being suppressed, and that is why the infected houses
+are not placarded?”
+
+“If it is, we’re in for trouble. As I told you, when I undertook the
+Chinese job of keeping this household in health,” continued the Health
+Master, addressing the family, “I can’t reliably protect a family in a
+community which doesn’t protect itself. There are too many loopholes
+through which infection may penetrate. So the Protective Association,
+in self-defense, may have to spur up the city to its own defense.
+First, though, I’m going over the throats of this family and take
+cultures.”
+
+“You don’t think,” began the mother anxiously, “that the children—”
+
+“No; I don’t think they’ve got it. But the bacteriological analysis
+will show.”
+
+“I hate to have it done,” said Mrs. Clyde, shuddering. “It seems so—so
+inviting of trouble.”
+
+“Superstition,” said Dr. Strong, smiling. “Aren’t you just as anxious
+to find out that they _haven’t_ got the infection as that they have?
+Come on, Bettykin; you’re first.” And, having prepared his material, he
+swabbed the throats of the whole company, after which he took the
+cultures with him to Dr. Merritt.
+
+It was late when he returned, but he went direct to Mr. Clyde’s room.
+
+“It’s worse than I thought, Clyde,” said he. “We’re in the first stage
+of a bad epidemic. The reports have been suppressed by Mullins, the
+Deputy Health Officer.”
+
+“What did he do that for?”
+
+“To cover his own inefficiency. He is City Bacteriologist, also, and
+the law requires him, in time of epidemic, to make bacteriological
+analyses. He doesn’t know how. So he simply pigeonholed the case
+reports as they came in.”
+
+“How did such a rascal ever get the job?” asked Clyde.
+
+“Political pull. The most destructive of all the causes of death which
+never get into the mortality records,” said Dr. Strong bitterly.
+
+“How many cases?”
+
+“Three or four hundred, at least. It’s got a good start. And more than
+that of measles. While he was in the business of suppressing, Mullins
+threw a lot of measles reports aside, too. I don’t like the prospect.”
+
+“The first thing to do,” decided Mr. Clyde, with customary energy, “is
+to get Dr. Mullins out. I’ll call an emergency meeting of the Public
+Health League to-morrow. By the way, Julia has some matters to report
+from school.”
+
+“Well, suppose we call an emergency meeting of our own of the Household
+Protective Association for to-morrow evening,” suggested Dr. Strong.
+“Since we’re facing an epidemic, we may as well fortify the youngsters
+as soundly as possible.”
+
+Directly after dinner on the following evening the Association was
+called to order by Mr. Clyde, presiding. It was a full meeting except
+for Maynard, who had not returned for dinner. First Dr. Strong reported
+that the cultures from the throats of the family had turned out
+“negative.”
+
+“So we don’t have to worry about that,” he remarked.
+
+Whereupon Mrs. Clyde and her mother drew long breaths of relief.
+
+“And now for the Committee on School Conditions,” said Mr. Clyde.
+
+“All I’ve heard of in our school is measles,” announced Julia. “There’s
+a lot of the boys and girls away.”
+
+“No diphtheria?” asked Mr. Clyde.
+
+“I asked Miss Brown that at recess, and she looked queer and said,
+‘None that we know of.’ But I heard of some cases in the Academy; so I
+told Manny.”
+
+“Why Manny?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“He’s Chairman of the Committee on Milk, and the Bliss children from
+our dairy go to the Academy.”
+
+“That explains why Maynard isn’t here, then,” said the grandmother. “I
+suppose he’s gone out to the farm.”
+
+“Yes. He took the interurban trolley out, to make sure that they’d be
+careful about keeping the children away from the dairy.”
+
+“Good team-work, Junkum,” approved the presiding officer.
+
+“And I asked Mary and Jim Bliss to come around to-morrow to see Dr.
+Strong and have him look at their throats.”
+
+“You ought to be drawing a salary from the city, young lady,” said the
+Health Master warmly. “You may have stopped a milk-route infection; one
+of the hardest kind to trace down.”
+
+“They’re talking of closing school after to-morrow,” concluded the
+girl.
+
+“The very worst thing they could do,” declared Dr. Strong.
+
+“The very best, I should think,” controverted Grandma Sharpless, who
+never hesitated to take issue with any authority, pending elucidation
+of the question under discussion. “If you group a lot of children close
+together it stands to reason they’ll catch the disease from each
+other.”
+
+“Not unless you group them too close. Arm’s length is the striking
+distance of a contagious disease. _There’s_ a truth for all of us to
+remember all the time.”
+
+“If it _is_ a truth,” challenged Mrs. Sharpless. “One of the surest and
+one of the most important,” averred the Health Master. “The only
+substance that carries the contagion of diphtheria or measles is the
+mucus from the nose or throat of an infected person. As far as that can
+be coughed or sneezed is the danger area. Of course, any article
+contaminated with it is dangerous also. But a hygienically conducted
+schoolroom is as safe a place as could be found. I’d like to run a
+school in time of epidemic. I’d make it a distributing agency for
+health instead of disease.”
+
+“How would you manage that?”
+
+“By controlling and training the pupils hygienically. Don’t you see
+that school attendance offers the one best chance of keeping track of
+such an epidemic, among the very ones who are most liable to it, the
+children? Diphtheria is contagious in the early stages, as soon as the
+throat begins to get sore, and before the patient is really ill. Just
+now there is an indeterminate number of children in every one of our
+schools who have incipient diphtheria. What is the one important thing
+to do about them?”
+
+“Find out who they are,” said Julia quickly. “Exactly. If you close
+school to-morrow and scatter the scholars far and wide in their homes,
+how are we going to find out this essential fact? In their own homes,
+with no one to watch their physical condition, they will go on
+developing the illness unsuspected for days, maybe, and spread it about
+them in the process of development. Whereas, if we keep them in school
+under a system of constant inspection, we shall discover these cases
+and surround them with safeguards. Why, if a fireman should throw
+dynamite into a burning house and scatter the flaming material over
+several blocks, he’d be locked up as insane. Yet here we propose to
+scatter the fire of contagion throughout the city. It’s criminal
+idiocy!”
+
+“If we could only be sure of controlling it in the schools,” said
+Grandma Sharpless, still doubtful.
+
+“At least we can do much toward it. As a matter of fact the best
+authorities are very doubtful whether diphtheria is a ‘school disease,’
+anyway. There is more evidence, though not conclusive, that measles
+is.”
+
+“Surely we don’t have to consider measles now, in the face of the
+greater danger.”
+
+“Most emphatically we do. For one thing, it will increase the
+diphtheria rate. A child weakened by measles is so much the more liable
+to catch any other disease which may be rife. Besides, measles spreads
+so rapidly that it often kills a greater total than more dangerous
+illnesses. We must prepare for a double warfare.”
+
+“At the Public Health League meeting,” said Mr. Clyde, “the objections
+to closing the schools came from those who feared that an official
+acknowledgment that the city had an epidemic would hurt business.”
+
+“A viciously wrong reason for being right,” said the Health Master. “By
+the way, I suppose that Dr. Mullins will be Acting Health Officer, now
+that Merritt is unfortunately out of it. Merritt went to the hospital
+in collapse after the session of the Board of Education at which he
+appeared, to argue for keeping the schools open.”
+
+“No,” said Clyde. “We’ve blocked Mullins off. But it’s the next step
+that is troubling me. What would you do, Strong, if you were in
+control?”
+
+“Put a medical inspector in every school,” answered Dr. Strong
+instantly. “Send home every child with the snuffles or an inflamed
+throat. And send with him full warning and instructions to the parents.
+Have daily inspection and instruction of all pupils.”
+
+“Can you make school children understand?”
+
+“Why not? It is merely a matter of telling them repeatedly: ‘Keep your
+fingers and other objects away from your mouth and nose. Wash your
+hands frequently. Brush your teeth and rinse your mouth well. And keep
+your distance. Remember, that the striking distance of disease is arm’s
+length.’ Then I would break class every hour, throw open every window,
+and march the children around for five minutes. This for the sake of
+improved general condition. Penalize the pupils for any violation of
+hygienic regulations. Hygienic martial law for war-time.”
+
+“Good!” applauded Mr. Clyde. “So much for the schools. What about the
+general public?”
+
+“Educate them to the necessity of watching for danger signals; the
+running nose, the sore throat, the tiny pimples on the inside of the
+mouth or cheek which are the first sign of measles. Above all, furnish
+free anti-toxin. Make it free to all. This is no time to be higgling
+over pennies.”
+
+“I don’t like the principle of coddling our citizens by giving to those
+who can afford to pay.”
+
+“Better coddled citizens than dead children. Unless you give out free
+anti-toxin, physicians to families where every dollar counts will say,
+‘Oh, it may not be diphtheria. We’ll wait and see, and maybe save the
+extra dollars.’ Diphtheria doesn’t wait. It strikes. Then there is the
+vitally important use of anti-toxin as a preventive. To render a whole
+family immune, where there is exposure from a known case of diphtheria,
+is expensive at the present rates, but is the most valuable expedient
+known. It is so much easier to prevent than to cure.”
+
+“All right; I give in. What else?”
+
+“Education, education, education; always education of the public, till
+the last flame is stamped out. Get the press, first; that is the most
+direct and far-reaching agency. Then organize public meetings,
+lectures, addresses in churches and Sunday schools, talks wherever you
+can get people together to listen. That is what I’d do.”
+
+“Go ahead and do it, then.”
+
+“Easily said,” smiled the Health Master. “Who am I, to practice what I
+preach?”
+
+“Provisional Health Officer of Worthington,” came the quick answer. “I
+have the Mayor’s assurance that he will appoint you to-morrow if you
+will take the job.”
+
+“I’ll do it,” said the Health Master, blinking a little with the
+suddenness of the announcement, but speaking unhesitatingly, “on two
+conditions: open schools and free anti-toxin.”
+
+“I’ll get that arranged with the Mayor. Meantime, you have unlimited
+leave of absence as Chinese physician to the Clyde household.”
+
+“But the Household Protective Association will have to back me,” said
+Dr. Strong, as the meeting broke up. “I can’t get along without you.”
+
+Swiftly and terribly moves an epidemic, once it has gained headway. And
+silence and concealment had fostered this onset from the first. Despite
+the best efforts of the new Health Officer, within a week the streets
+of the city were abloom with the malign flower of the scarlet for
+diphtheria and the yellow for measles.
+
+“First we must find out where we stand,” Dr. Strong told his
+subordinates; and, enlisting the services of the great body of
+physicians,—there is no other class of men so trained and inspired to
+altruistic public service as the medical profession,—he instituted a
+house-to-house search for hidden or undiscovered cases. From the best
+among his volunteers he chose a body of auxiliary school inspectors,
+one for every school, whom he held to their daily régime with military
+rigor.
+
+“But my patients are dying while I am looking after a roomful of
+healthy children,” objected one of them.
+
+“You can save twenty lives by early detection of the disease, in the
+time it takes to save one by treatment,” retorted the disciplinarian.
+“In war the individual must sometimes be sacrificed. And this is war.”
+
+The one bright spot in the early days of the battle was Public School
+Number Three which the twins and Bettina attended. The medical
+inspector who had this assignment was young, intelligent, and an
+enthusiast. Backed by Dr. Strong, and effectively aided by the Clyde
+children, he enforced a system which brought prompt results. In every
+instance where a pupil was sent home under suspicion,—and the first
+day’s inspection brought to light three cases of incipient diphtheria,
+and fifteen which developed into measles, besides a score of suspicious
+symptoms,—Julia, or Robin Clyde, or one of the teachers went along to
+deliver printed instructions as to the defense of the household, and to
+explain to the family the vital necessity of heeding the regulations
+until such time as the physician could come and determine the nature of
+the ailment. Within a week, amidst growing panic and peril, Number
+Three was standing like an isle of safety. After that time, not a
+single new case of either disease developed from exposure within its
+limits, and in only two families represented in the school was there
+any spread of contagion.
+
+“It’s the following-up into the house that does it,” said Dr. Strong,
+at an early morning meeting of the Household Protective Association (he
+still insisted on occasional short sessions, in spite of the
+overwhelming demands on his time and energies, on the ground that these
+were “the only chances I get to feel the support of full understanding
+and sympathy”), “that and the checking-up of the three carriers we
+found.”
+
+“What’s a carrier?” asked Bettina, who had an unquenchable thirst for
+finding out things.
+
+“A carrier, Toodlekins, is a perfectly well person who has the germs of
+disease in his throat. Why he doesn’t fall ill himself, we don’t know.
+He can give the disease to another person just as well as if he were in
+the worst stages of it himself. Every epidemic develops a number of
+carriers. One of the greatest arguments for inspection is that it
+brings to light these people, who constitute the most difficult and
+dangerous phase of infection, because they go on spreading the disease
+without being suspected. Now, I’ve got ours from Number Three
+quarantined. If I could catch every carrier in town, I’d guarantee to
+be in control of the situation in three weeks.”
+
+“Our reports show over twenty of them discovered and isolated,” said
+Mrs. Clyde, who had turned her abounding energies to the organization
+of a corps of visiting nurses.
+
+“Perhaps I’d better say something about carriers in my next talk,” said
+Grandma Sharpless, whose natural gift as a ready and convincing
+speaker, unsuspected by herself as well as her family until the night
+when she had met and routed the itinerating quack on his own platform,
+was now being turned to account in the campaign for short talks before
+Sunday schools and club gatherings.
+
+“Develop it as part of the arm’s-length idea,” suggested the Health
+Master. “Any person may be a carrier and therefore a peril on too close
+contact. Tell ‘em that in words of one syllable.”
+
+“Never use any other kind when I mean it,” answered Mrs. Sharpless.
+“What about that party at Mrs. Ellery’s, Manny?”
+
+“I’ve got that fixed,” replied Maynard Clyde, who had been acting as
+general factotum for the household in its various lines of endeavor.
+“Mrs. Ellery gave a party to our crowd Friday night,” he explained to
+Dr. Strong, “and Monday one of the Ellery girls came down with
+diphtheria.”
+
+“What have you done about it?” asked the Health Master.
+
+“Notified all the people who were there. That was easy. The trouble is
+that a lot of the fellows have gone back to college since: to Hamilton,
+Michigan, Wisconsin, Harvard, Columbia,—I suppose there were a dozen
+colleges represented.”
+
+“And you think that’s too wide a field for the follow-up system?” asked
+his father.
+
+“Why, no,” said the boy thoughtfully. “I figured that starting a new
+epidemic would be worse than adding to an old one. So I went to Mrs.
+Ellery and got a list of her guests, and I wrote to every college the
+fellows have gone back to, and wrote to the fellows themselves. They
+probably won’t thank me for it.”
+
+“They ought to give you a life-saving medal each,” declared Dr. Strong.
+“As for the situation here”—his face darkened—“we’re not making any
+general headway. The public isn’t aroused, and it won’t be until we can
+get the newspapers to take up the fight. The thing that discourages me
+is that they won’t help. I don’t understand it.”
+
+“Don’t you? I do,” said Clyde grimly. “Their advertisers won’t let ‘em
+print anything about it. As I told you in the matter of closing the
+schools, business is frightened. The department stores, theaters, and
+other big advertisers are afraid that the truth about the epidemic
+would scare away trade. So they are compelling the papers to keep
+quiet.”
+
+“Idiots!” cried Dr. Strong. “Suppressing news is like suppressing gas.
+The longer you do it, the more violent the inevitable explosion. But
+when I called on the editors, they didn’t say anything to me about the
+advertising pressure. It was, ‘We should be glad to help in any way,
+Dr. Strong. But an alarmist policy is not for the best interests of
+Worthington; and the good of our community must always be the first
+consideration.’—Bah! The variations I’ve heard on that sickening theme
+today! The ‘Press,’ the ‘Clarion,’ the ‘Evening News,’ the ‘Telegram,
+the ‘Observer’—all of ‘em.”
+
+“You didn’t mention the ‘Star,’” said Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“That rag? It’s against everything decent and for everything rotten in
+this town,” said Clyde.
+
+“When I need a danger signal,” observed the old lady with her most
+positive air, “I’ll wave any kind of rag. The ‘Star’ has circulation.”
+
+“Yes,” admitted the Health Master, “and among the very class we want to
+reach. But what’s the use?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “But I’m going to find out.”
+
+One hour later she walked into the editorial sanctum of Mr. “Bart”
+Snyder, editor, proprietor, and controlling mind of as “yellow” a sheet
+as ever subsisted on a combination of enterprise, real journalistic
+ability, and blackmail. Mr. Snyder sat in a perfect slump of apparent
+languor, his body sagging back into his tilted chair, one foot across
+his desk, the other trailing like a broken wing along the floor, his
+shrewd, lined face uplifted at an acute angle with the cigar he was
+chewing, and his green hat achieving the most rakish effect possible to
+a third slant. His brilliant gray eyes were narrowed into a hard
+twinkle as he surveyed his visitor.
+
+“Siddown,” he grunted, and shoved a chair toward her with the grounded
+foot.
+
+Grandma Sharpless did not “siddown.” Instead she marched over to a spot
+directly in front of him, halted, and looked straight into the hard,
+humorous face.
+
+“Bartholomew Snyder,” said she crisply, “I knew you when you were a
+boy. I knew your mother, too. She was a decent woman. Take off that
+hat.”
+
+The Snyder jaw fell so unpremeditatedly that the Snyder cigar dropped
+upon the littered floor. One third of a second later, the Snyder foot
+descended upon it (and it was a twenty-cent cigar, too) as the Snyder
+chair reverted to the perpendicular, and the Snyder hat came off. The
+Snyder countenance quivered into articulation and therefrom came a
+stunned, “Well, I’ll be—”
+
+“No, you don’t! Not in _my_ presence,” cut in his visitor. “Now, you
+listen.”
+
+“I’m listening,” he assured her in a strangled murmur.
+
+She seated herself and threw a quality of rigidity into her backbone
+calculated to impress if not actually to appeal. “I want your help,”
+she said.
+
+“Fine, fat way you’ve got of opening up a request for a favor,” he
+retorted, recovering himself somewhat, and in a particularly
+discouraging voice. But the shrewd old judge of human nature before him
+marked the little pursing at the corners of the mouth. “I’ll bet I know
+what it is.”
+
+“I’ll bet all the money I’ve got in the bank and my best gold tooth
+thrown in you don’t,” was the prompt retort.
+
+“There’s a sporting proposition, all right,” cried the editor in great
+admiration. “I thought you was going to ask me to let up on the city
+administration now you’ve got one of the fat jobs in the family, with
+your Dr. Strong.”
+
+“It’s a good thing you don’t have to make guesses for a living,”
+returned his caller scornfully. “Pitch into the administration as hard
+as you like. I don’t care. All I want is for you to print the news
+about this diphtheria epidemic.”
+
+“Is that all?” There was a profound sardonicism in the final word.
+
+“Come to think of it, it isn’t. I want you to print some editorials,
+too, telling people how to take care of themselves while the disease is
+spreading.”
+
+“Anything more?”
+
+“Well, you might do the same thing about the measles epidemic.”
+
+“Harr-rr-rr!” It was a singular growl, not wholly compounded of wrath
+and disgust. “Doc Strong send you here?”
+
+“No; he didn’t!”
+
+“Don’t bite me. I believe you.”
+
+“Will you publish some articles?”
+
+“Look-a-here, Mrs. Sharpless; the ‘Star’ is a business proposition. Its
+business is to make money for me. That’s all it’s here for. People say
+some pretty tough things about me and the paper. Well, we’re pretty
+tough. We can stand ‘em. Let ‘em talk, so long as I get the circulation
+and the advertising and the cash. Now, you want me to print something
+for you. Come down to brass tacks; what is there in it for me?”
+
+“A chance to be of some real use to your city for once in your life,”
+answered Grandma Sharpless mildly. “Isn’t that enough?”
+
+Bart Snyder threw back his head and laughed immoderately. “Say, I like
+you,” he gurgled. “You’ve got nerve. Me a good Samaritan! It’s so rich,
+I’m half a mind to go you, if it wasn’t for losing the advertising.
+Wha’ d’ ye want me to say, anyway, just for curiosity and cussedness?”
+
+“Just give the people plain talk,” explained the visitor. “Talk to ‘em
+in your editorials as if you had ‘em by the buttonhole. Say to them:
+‘Do you want to get diphtheria? Well, you don’t need to. It’s just as
+easy to avoid it as to have it. Are you anxious to have measles in your
+house? It’s for you to decide. All you need is to take reasonable care
+against it. Infectious disease only kills foo—careless people.’”
+
+“Let it go at ‘fools,’” interjected Mr. Snyder, smiting his thigh. “Go
+on.”
+
+“Then I’d give them simple, straight advice; tell them how to recognize
+the early symptoms; how and where to get anti-toxin. And I’d scare ‘em,
+too. I’d tell ‘em there are five thousand cases of the two diseases in
+town, and there will be ten thousand in a week unless something is
+done.”
+
+Up rose the editor-proprietor, kicked over his own chair, whirled Mrs.
+Sharpless’s chair with its human burden to the desk, thrust a pencil
+into her hand, and slapped down a pad before her.
+
+“Write it,” he adjured her.
+
+“Who? Me?” cried Mrs. Sharpless, her astonishment momentarily
+overwhelming her grammar. “Bless you, man! I’m no writer.”
+
+“Talk it, then, and make your pencil take down the talk. I’ll be back
+in a minute.”
+
+That minute stretched to a good half-hour, during which period Grandma
+Sharpless talked to her pencil. When Mr. Snyder returned, he had with
+him a mournful-looking man who, he explained occultly, “holds down our
+city desk.”
+
+“This is our new Health Editor,” chuckled Snyder, indicating Mrs.
+Sharpless. “How many cases did you say there were in town, ma’am?”
+
+“Five thousand or more.”
+
+The city editor whistled whisperingly. “Where do you get that?” he
+asked.
+
+“From Dr. Strong.”
+
+“That’s news,” said the desk man. “I didn’t suppose it was half so bad.
+If only we dared print it!”
+
+“No other paper in town dares,” suggested the visitor insinuatingly.
+
+“Makes it all the more news,” remarked Snyder. “What if we played it up
+for a big feature, eh?”
+
+“Advertisers,” said the city editor significantly.
+
+“Let ‘em drop out. They’ll come back quick enough, when we’ve shown up
+one or two and told why they quit us. And think of the splash we can
+make! Only paper in the city that dares tell the truth. We’ll rub that
+into our highly respectable rivals. I’ll make you a proposition,” he
+added, turning to his caller.
+
+“Make it.”
+
+“You know I’ve hammered at Tom Clyde pretty hard. I don’t cotton to
+that saintly, holier-than-thou reform bunch at all. Well, let Clyde
+come into the ‘Star’ with a signed statement as President of the Public
+Health League, and we’ll make it the basis of a campaign that will rip
+this town wide open for a couple of weeks. I’d like to see him in my
+paper, after all the roasting we’ve handed him.” And the malicious face
+wrinkled into another grin.
+
+“You’ve bought a bargain,” stated Mrs. Sharpless. “The statement will
+be ready to-night. And another from Dr. Strong for good measure.”
+
+“Fine business!” ejaculated the “Star’s” owner. “Not open to a
+reasonable offer in the newspaper game, are you?” he added, laughing.
+“No? Well, I’m sorry.”
+
+“Would there be any use in my seeing the editors of the other papers?”
+asked Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“Watch them fall in line,” was the grim response. “Before we’ve been
+out a day, they’ll be tumbling over each other to make the dear,
+deluded public believe that they’re the real pioneers in saving the
+city from the deadly germ.”
+
+“Well, here are my notes, if you can make anything out of them.”
+
+“Eh? Notes?” said the newspaper man, who had been glancing at the
+sheets over Mrs. Sharp-less’s shoulder. “Oh—ah. Yes, of course. All
+right. Glad to have metcher,” he added, politely ushering her to the
+door. “I’ll send a reporter up for the statements at eight o’clock.”
+
+“Thank you very much, Bartholomew Snyder,” said Grandma Sharpless,
+shaking hands.
+
+“Not a bit of it! Thanks the other way. You’ve given me a good tip in
+my own game. Watch me—us—wake ‘em up to-morrow.”
+
+Only the combined insistence of Grandma Sharpless and diplomacy of the
+Health Master overrode Mr. Clyde’s angry objections to “going into that
+filthy sheet” when the matter was broached to him that evening. For the
+good of the cause he finally acceded. And next morning the “Star” was a
+sight! It blazed in red captions. It squirmed and wriggled with
+illustrations of alleged germs. It shrieked in stentorian headlines. If
+the city had been beset by all the dogs of war, it couldn’t have blared
+more martial defiance against the enemy. It held its competitors up to
+infinite scorn and derision as mean-spirited shirks and cowards, and
+slathered itself with fulsome praises as the only original prop of
+truth and righteousness. And, as the centerpoint and core of all this,
+flaunted-the statement and signature of the Honorable Thomas Clyde,
+President of the Worthington Public Health League—with photograph. The
+face of Mr. Clyde, as he confronted this outrage upon his sensibilities
+at the breakfast table, was gloom itself until he turned to the
+editorial page. Then he emitted a whoop of glee. For there,
+double-leaded and double-headed was a Health Column, by “Our Special
+Writer, Grandma Sharpless, the Wisest Woman in Worthington. She will
+contribute opinions and advice on the epidemic to the ‘Star’
+exclusively.” (Mr. Snyder had taken a chance with this latter
+statement.)
+
+“Let me see,” gasped the old lady, when her son-in-law made known the
+cause of his mirth. Then, “They’ve published that stuff of mine just as
+I wrote it. I didn’t dream it was for print.”
+
+“That’s what makes it so bully,” said the Health Master. “You’ve got
+the editorial trick of confidential, convincing, man-to-man talk down
+fine. What’s more, you’ll have to keep it up, now. Your friend, Snyder,
+has fairly caught you. Well, we need an official organ in the
+household.”
+
+Vowing that she couldn’t and wouldn’t do it, nevertheless the new
+“editor” began to think of so many things that she wanted to say that,
+each day, when a messenger arrived from the “Star” with a polite
+request for “copy,” there was a telling column ready of the Health
+Master’s wisdom, simplified and pointed by Grandma Sharpless’s own
+pungent, crisp, vigorous, and homely style. Thanks largely to this, the
+“Star” became the mouthpiece of an anti-epidemic campaign which
+speedily enlisted the whole city.
+
+But the “yellow” was not to have the field to itself. Once the cat was
+out of the bag, the other papers not only recognized it as a cat with
+great uproar, but, so to speak, proceeded to tie a can to its tail and
+pelt it through the streets of the city. As a matter of fact, no
+newspaper wishes to be hampered in the publishing of legitimate news;
+and it was only by the sternest threats of withdrawal of patronage that
+the large advertisers had hitherto succeeded in coercing the press of
+Worthington. Further coercion was useless, now that the facts had found
+their way into type. With great unanimity and an enthusiasm none the
+less genuine for having been repressed, the papers rushed into the
+breach. The “Clarion” organized an Anti-Infection League of School
+Children, with officers and banners. The “Press” “attended to” the
+recreant Dr. Mullins so fiercely that, notwithstanding his pull, he
+resigned his position in the Health Department because of “breakdown
+due to overwork in the course of his duties,” and ceased to trouble, in
+official circles. Enterprising reporters of the “Observer” caused the
+arrest of thirty-five trolley-car conductors for moistening transfers
+with a licked thumb, and then got the street-car company to issue a new
+form of transfer inscribed across the back, “Keep me away from your
+Mouth.” It fell to the “Evening News” to drive the common drinking-cup
+out of existence, after which it instituted reforms in soda fountains,
+restaurants, and barber shops, while the “Telegram” garnered great
+glory by interspersing the inning-by-inning returns of the baseball
+championship with bits of counsel as to how to avoid contagion in the
+theater, in the street, in travel, in banks, at home, and in various
+other walks of life. But the “Star” held foremost place, and clinched
+it with a Sunday “cut-out” to be worn as a badge, inscribed “Hands Off,
+Please, Until It’s Over.” All of which, while it sometimes verged upon
+the absurd, served the fundamentally valuable purpose of keeping the
+public in mind of the peril of contact with infected persons or
+articles.
+
+Slowly but decisively the public absorbed the lesson. “Arm’s length”
+became a catch-phrase; a motto; a slogan. People came slowly to
+comprehend the methods by which disease is spread and the principles of
+self-protection.
+
+And as knowledge widened, the epidemic ebbed, though gradually. Serious
+epidemics are not conquered or even perceptibly checked in a day. They
+are like floods; dam them in one place and they break through your
+defenses in another. Inexplicable outbreaks occur just when the tide
+seems to have turned. And when victory does come, it may not be
+ascribable to any specific achievement of the hygienic forces. The most
+that can be said is that the persevering combination of effort has at
+last made itself felt.
+
+The red placards began to disappear; many of them, alas! only after the
+sable symbol of death had appeared beneath them. Dr. Strong and his
+worn-out aides found time to draw breath and reckon up their accounts
+in human life. The early mortality had been terrific. Of the cases
+which had developed in the period of suppression, before antitoxin was
+readily obtainable, more than a third had died.
+
+“Nobody will ever be indicted for those murders,” said Dr. Strong to
+Mr. Clyde grimly. “But we have the satisfaction of knowing what can
+really be done by prompt work. Look at the figures after the free
+anti-toxin was established.”
+
+There was a drop in the death rate, first to twenty per cent, then to
+ten, and, in the ebb stage of the scourge, to well below five.
+
+“How many infections we’ve prevented by giving anti-toxin to immunize
+exposed persons, there’s no telling,” continued Dr. Strong. “That
+principle of starting a back-fire in diphtheria,—it’s exactly like
+starting a back-fire in a prairie conflagration,—by getting anti-toxin
+into the system in time to head off the poison of the disease itself,
+is one of the two or three great achievements of medical science. There
+isn’t an infected household in the city today, I believe, where this
+hasn’t been done. The end is in sight.”
+
+“Then you can go away and get a few days’ rest,” said Grandma
+Sharpless, who constituted herself the Health Master’s own health
+guardian and undiplomaed medical adviser, and to whom he habitually
+rendered meek obedience; for she had been watching with anxiety the
+haggard lines in his face.
+
+“Not yet,” he returned. “Measles we still have with us.”
+
+“Decreasing, though,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Our nurses report a heavy drop
+in new cases and a big crop of convalescents.”
+
+“It is those convalescents that we must watch. I don’t want a
+generation of deaf citizens growing up from this onset.”
+
+“But can you prevent it if the disease attacks the ears?” asked Clyde.
+
+“Almost certainly. We’ve got to inspect every child who has or had
+measles in this epidemic, and, where the ear-drum is shiny and concave,
+we will puncture it, by a very simple operation, which saves serious
+trouble in ninety per cent of the cases, at least. But it means
+constant watchfulness, for often the infection progresses without
+pain.”
+
+“At the same time your inspectors will watch for other after-effects,
+then,” suggested Mrs. Sharpless.
+
+“Exactly. It’s my own opinion that nearly all the serious diseases of
+the eye, ear, liver, kidney, heart, and so on in early middle age are
+the late remote effects of what we carelessly call the lesser diseases
+of childhood. It is only a theory as yet; though some day I think it
+will be proved. At any rate, we know that a serious and pretty definite
+percentage of all deafness follows measles; and we are going to carry
+this thing through far enough to prevent that sequel and to turn over a
+reasonably cleaned-up situation to Dr. Merritt.”
+
+“He’s out of danger, by the way,” said Mrs. Clyde, “and will be back at
+his desk in a fortnight.”
+
+“Well; he’ll have an easier job henceforth,” prophesied Mr. Clyde.
+“He’s got an enlightened city to watch over. And he can thank you for
+that, Strong.”
+
+“He can thank the Clyde family,” said Dr. Strong with feeling. “I could
+have done little without you back of me.”
+
+“It’s been interesting to extend the principles of our Household
+Protective Association to the larger world,” smiled Clyde. “Beyond our
+own city, too, in one case. Manny has had a letter from the Professor
+of Hygiene at Hamilton College, where he enters next year, thanking him
+on behalf of the faculty for his warning about young Hyland who was
+exposed to diphtheria at the Ellery party. He went back to Hamilton a
+few days after and was starting in to play basketball, which would have
+been decidedly dangerous for his team mates; but the authorities, after
+getting Manny’s letter, kept him out of the gymnasium, and kept a watch
+on him. He developed the disease a week later; but there has been no
+infection from him.”
+
+“There’s direct result,” approved Dr. Strong. “That’s what I call
+spreading the gospel.”
+
+“Grandma’s our real revivalist, at that,” said Julia. “The children at
+Number Three pay more attention to her column than they do to what the
+teachers tell them. The principal told us that it was the greatest
+educational force for health that Worthington had ever known.”
+
+“Only reflected wisdom from you, young man,” said Grandma Sharpless to
+the Health Master. “Thank goodness, I’m through with it. I’m so sick of
+it that I can’t look at writing materials without wanting to cut the
+ink bottle’s throat with my penholder. Bart Snyder has let me off.
+What’s more, he sent me a check for $250. Pretty handsome of him. But
+I’m going to send it back.”
+
+“Why waste good money, grandma?” drawled Mr. Clyde.
+
+“You wouldn’t have me keep it, would you, for doing that work?”
+
+“Who said anything about keeping it? But don’t feed it back to Bart
+Snyder. Why not contribute it to the Public Health League? It’s always
+got a handsome deficit.”
+
+“In graceful recognition of my having a son-inlaw as president of it, I
+suppose.”
+
+“I’m not president any more. My term was up last night. They didn’t
+honor me with a reelection,” said Mr. Clyde, with a rather too obvious
+glumness, which, for once, escaped the sharp old lady.
+
+“The slinkums!” she cried. “After all the time and work you’ve given to
+it!”
+
+“Well,” said the ex-incumbent philosophically, “there’s one comfort.
+They’ve put a better man in my place.”
+
+“No such a thing,” declared his mother-in-law, with vehement
+partisanship. “They couldn’t find one. Who was it?”
+
+“Give you one guess.”
+
+“Was it you, young man?” queried she, fixing the Health Master with a
+baleful eye.
+
+“Oh, no; a better man than I,” he hastened to assure her.
+
+“Well, in the name of sakes, who, then?”
+
+“You,” said Mr. Clyde, grabbing the old lady by both shoulders and
+giving her a vigorous kiss. “Unanimously elected amidst an uproar of
+enthusiasm, as the ‘Star’ puts it. Here it is, on the first column of
+the front page.”
+
+For the first time in the history of the Clyde household, the senior
+member thereof gave way to an unbridled license of speech, in the
+presence of the family.
+
+“Well, I vum!” said Grandma Sharpless.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+PLAIN TALK
+
+
+“What do you find so interesting in that paper, Strong?” asked Mr.
+Thomas Clyde, from his place in the corner of the big living-room.
+
+Dinner was just finished in the Clyde household, and the elders were
+sitting about, enjoying the easy and intermittent talk which had become
+a feature of the day since the Health Master had joined the family.
+From outside, the play of lively voices, above the harmonized
+undertones of a strummed guitar, told how the children were employing
+the after-dinner hour. Dr. Strong let the evening paper drop on his
+knees.
+
+“Something that has set me thinking,” he said.
+
+“Don’t you ever give that restless mind of yours a vacation, young
+man?” inquired Grandma Sharpless, looking up from her game of
+solitaire.
+
+“All that is good for it. Perhaps you’d like to share this problem, and
+thus relieve me of part of the responsibility.”
+
+“Do go on, if you’ve found anything exciting,” besought Mrs. Clyde,
+glancing up with her swift, interrogating smile. “The paper seemed
+unusually dull to me.”
+
+“Because you didn’t read quite deep enough into it, possibly.” He
+raised the journal, folded it neatly to a half-page, and holding it
+before his eyes, began smoothly:—
+
+“Far, far away, as far as your conscience will let you believe, in the
+Land of Parables—”
+
+“Wait a minute,” interrupted Mr. Clyde. “That ‘Land of Parables’ sounds
+as if we were going to have some Improving Information.” He regarded
+his friend and adviser with a twinkling eye. “Ought the children to
+miss this?”
+
+“That is for you to decide later,” said the Health Master gravely. And
+he resumed:—
+
+“Far, far away, as far as conscience will let you believe, in the Land
+of Parables, there once stood a prosperous and self-contented city. Men
+lived therein by rule and rote. Only what their fathers before them had
+believed and received did they believe and receive. ‘As it hath been,
+so it is now and ever must and shall be,’ was the principle whereby
+their lives were governed. Therefore they endured, without hope as
+without complaint, the depredations of a hideous Monster who preyed
+upon them unceasingly.
+
+“So loathsome was this Monster that the very thought of him was held to
+taint the soul. His name was sealed away from the common speech. Only
+the boldest men spoke of him, and then in paraphrases and by
+circumlocutions. Fouled, indeed, was the fame of the woman who dared so
+much as confess to a knowledge of his existence.
+
+“From time to time the wise and strong men of the city banded together
+and sallied forth to drive back other creatures of prey as they pressed
+too hard upon the people. Not so with the Monster. Because of the ban
+of silence no plan could be mooted, no campaign formulated to check his
+inroads. So he grew great and ever greater, and his blood hunger fierce
+and ever more fierce, and his scarlet trail wound in and out among the
+homes of the people, manifest even to those eyes which most sedulously
+sought to blind themselves against it.
+
+“Seldom did the Monster slay outright. But where his claws clutched or
+his fangs pierced, a slow venom crept through the veins, and life was
+corroded at its very wellsprings. Nor was this the worst. Once the
+blight fell upon one member of a household, it might corrupt, by hidden
+and subtle ways, the others and innocent, who knew not of the curse
+overhanging them.
+
+“Upon the foolish, the reckless, and the erring the Monster most
+readily fastened himself. But man nor woman nor child was exempt.
+Necessity drove young girls, struggling and shuddering, into the
+Monster’s very jaws. The purity of a child or of a Galahad could not
+always save from the serpent-stroke which sped from out the darkness.”
+
+“One moment, Strong,” broke in Mr. Clyde. “You’ve read this before?”
+
+“I know what is in it, if that is what you mean. Why?”
+
+“Nothing,” hesitated the other, glancing toward his wife and her
+mother. “Only, I suspect it isn’t going to be pleasant.”
+
+“It isn’t pleasant. It’s true.”
+
+Grandma Sharpless laid down her cards. “Let him go on, Tom,” she said
+decisively. “We have no ban of silence in this house.”
+
+At a nod from Clyde, the Health Master continued:—
+
+“Always the taboo of silence hedged the Monster about and protected
+him; and men secretly revolted against it, yet were restrained from
+speech by the fear of public dishonor. So, in time, he came to have a
+Scarlet Court of Shame, with his retinue of slaves, whose duty it was
+to procure victims for his insatiate appetite. But this service availed
+his servitors nothing in forbearance, for, sooner or later, his breath
+of fiery venom blasted and withered them, one and all.
+
+“One refuge only did the people seek against the Monster. At every
+doorpost of the city stood a veiled statue of the supposed Goddess and
+Protectress of the Household, worshiped under the name of _Modesty_,
+and to her the people appealed for succor and protection. Also they
+invoked her vengeance against such as spoke the name of the Monster,
+and bitter were the penalties wrought upon these in her name.
+Nevertheless there arose martyrs whose tongues could not be silenced by
+any fear.
+
+“One was a brave priest who stood in his pulpit unashamed and spoke the
+terrible truth of the Monster, bidding his hearers arise and band
+themselves together and strike a blow for their homes and their dear
+ones. But the people hurried forth in dread, and sought refuge before
+the Veiled Idol; and the priest’s words rang hollow in the empty
+tabernacle; and his church was deserted and crumbled away in neglect,
+so that the fearful said:—
+
+“‘Behold the righteous wrath which follows the breaking of the
+prescribed silence.’
+
+“Again, a learned and pious physician and healer gathered the young men
+about him in the marketplace to give them solemn warning against the
+Monster and his scarlet slaves. But his words returned upon himself,
+and he was branded with shame as one who worshiped not the Veiled
+Goddess, and was presently driven forth from his own place into the
+wilderness.
+
+“Then there came into the hall of the City Fathers a woman with
+disheveled hair and tear-worn cheeks, who beat upon her breast and
+cried:—“‘Vengeance, O Wise and Great Ones! My son, my little son went
+to the public baths, and the venom of the Monster was upon the waters,
+and my son is blind forever. What will ye do, that others may not
+suffer my grief?’
+
+“And the Wise and Great Ones spoke together and said:—
+
+“‘Surely this woman is mad, that she thus fouls her lips.’ And they
+drove her out of their presence.
+
+“From among their own number there came a terror and a portent. For
+their Leader, who had been stricken in youth, but thought himself to
+have thrown off the toils of the Monster, rose in his place and spoke
+in a voice that piped and shook:—
+
+“‘Because no man taught me in my unripe days, I strayed into the paths
+of the Scarlet One. For the space of a generation I hoped; but now the
+clutch is upon me again, and I die. See to it, O my Fellows, that our
+youth no longer perish in their ignorance.’
+
+“So he passed out from the place of honor; and the strength of his mind
+and his body was loosened until he died. But, rather than violate the
+taboo, the Wise and Great Ones gave a false name to his death, and he
+was buried under a graven lie.
+
+“Finally there came to the Council Hall one with the fire of martyrdom
+in his eyes.
+
+“‘Though I perish,’ he said, ‘I and mine, yet will I speak the truth
+for once. My daughter I have given in marriage, and the Monster has
+entered into the house of her marriage, and from henceforth she must
+go, a maimed creature, sexless and childless, to the end of her days.
+Shame upon this city, that it endures such shame; for my daughter is
+but one of many.’
+
+“‘The shame be yours,’ replied the Fathers, ‘that you bring scandal
+upon your own. Go forth into exile, in the name of the Veiled Goddess,
+_Modesty_, beneath whose statue we meet.’
+
+“But the man strode forward, and with a violent hand plucked the veil
+from the statue.
+
+“‘Not the Protectress of Homes,’ he cried, ‘but the ally of the
+Monster. Not the Goddess, _Modesty_, but her sham sister, _Prudery_.
+Down with false gods!’
+
+“So saying, he threw the idol to the ground, where it was shattered
+into a thousand pieces. With those pieces the Fathers stoned him to
+death.
+
+“But in many households that night there was a baring of the Veiled
+Idol. And ever, behind the folds, was revealed not the pure gaze of the
+True Goddess, but the simper and leer of _Prudery_, mute accomplice of
+_Shame_.
+
+“Thus did the city awake. Fearfully it gathered its forces; tremblingly
+it prepared its war upon the Monster. But the Monster is intrenched.
+Its venom runs through the blood of the people, poisoning it from
+generation to generation, so that neither the grandsons nor the
+great-grandsons of those who stoned the martyr to the False Goddess
+shall escape the curse. The Prophet has said it: ‘Even unto the third
+and the fourth generations.’
+
+“_De te fabula narratur_; of you is the fable narrated.
+
+“The Land of Parables is your country.
+
+“The stricken city is your city.
+
+“The Monster coils at your doorway, lying in wait for your loved ones;
+and no prudence, no precaution, no virtue can guard them safely against
+his venom so long as the Silence of Prudery holds sway.”
+
+Dr. Strong let the newspaper fall on his lap, and looked slowly from
+face to face of the silent little group.
+
+“Need I tell you the name of the destroyer?” he asked.
+
+“Not me,” said Mrs. Clyde in a low tone. “It is a two-headed monster,
+isn’t it?”
+
+The Health Master nodded. “And because we all fear to utter the words
+‘venereal disease,’ our children grow up in the peril of the Monster
+whose two allies are Vice and Ignorance.”
+
+“One editor in this town, at least, has some gumption,” commented
+Grandma Sharpless, peering over her spectacles at the sheet which Dr.
+Strong had let fall. “Which paper is it?”
+
+“None, if you must know. The fact is, I read that allegory into the
+newspaper, not out of it.”
+
+“Then it was your own?” asked Mrs. Clyde. “Such as it is, mine own. But
+the inspiration came from this headline.” He pointed to a legend in
+heavy type:—
+
+DIVORCE IN THE INSIDE SET
+
+AFTER SEX MONTHS OF MARRIAGE, MRS. BARTLEY STARR SEEKS FREEDOM—NATURE
+OF CHARGES NOT MADE PUBLIC
+
+
+“Do you know what is back of it, Strong?” asked Clyde.
+
+“The ruin of a life. Bartley Starr has been a ‘rounder.’ With the curse
+of his vices upon him he married a young and untaught girl.” He
+repeated with slow significance a passage from the allegory. “The
+Monster entered into the house of her marriage, and from henceforth she
+must go, a maimed creature, sexless and childless, to the end of her
+days.”
+
+“Oh, no, no!” burst out Mrs. Clyde. “Not poor little, lovely, innocent
+Margaret Starr!”
+
+“Too innocent,” retorted the Health Master. “And more than innocent;
+ignorant.”
+
+“But Bartley Starr!” said Mr. Clyde. “Who would have supposed him such
+a scoundrel? And with his bringing-up, too!”
+
+“The explanation lies in his bringing-up.”
+
+“Nonsense! Henry Starr is as upright a man and as good a father as you
+can find in Worthington.”
+
+“The former, perhaps. Not the latter, certainly. He is a worshiper of
+the False Veiled Goddess, I suspect. Hence Bartley’s tragedy.”
+
+“Do you blame Bartley’s viciousness upon his father?” demanded Mrs.
+Clyde.
+
+“In part, at least. I happen to know a good deal about this case.
+Bartley got his sex-education or miseducation from chance talk at
+school. He took that to college with him, and there, unguided, fell
+into vicious ways. I don’t suppose his father ever had a frank talk
+with him in his life. And I judge that little Mrs. Starr’s mother never
+had one with her, either. Look at the result!”
+
+“But boys find out about such things some way,” said Mr. Clyde
+uneasily.
+
+“Some way? What way? And from whom? How much has Manny found out?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Manny’s father.
+
+“Why don’t you know?” persisted the Health Master relentlessly. “You
+are his father, and, what is more, his friend.”
+
+“Why must Manny know?” cried Mrs. Clyde. “Surely my son isn’t going to
+wallow in that sort of foulness.”
+
+“Pray God he is not!” said Grandma Sharpless, turning her old, shrewd,
+kind face, the eyes bright and soft with feeling, toward her daughter.
+“But, oh, my dear, my dear, the bitterest lesson we mothers have to
+learn is that our children are of the common flesh and blood of
+humanity.”
+
+“Manny is clean-minded and high-spirited,” said Strong. “But not all of
+his companions are. Not a month ago I heard one of the older boys in
+his class assuring some of his fellows, in the terms of the most
+damnable lie that ever helped to corrupt youth, ‘Why, it ain’t any
+worse than an ordinary cold.’”
+
+“That was a stock phrase of the young toughs when I was a boy,” said
+Mr. Clyde. “So it still persists, does it?”
+
+“Any worse than an ordinary cold?” repeated Mrs. Clyde, looking
+puzzled. “What did he mean?”
+
+“Gonorrhoea,” said Dr. Strong.
+
+Mrs. Clyde winced back and half-rose from her chair.
+
+“Are you going?” asked the Health Master rather ‘grimly. “Must I be
+mealy-mouthed on this subject? Here I am, trying to tell you something
+of the most deadly import, and am I to choose perfumed words and pick
+rose-tinted phrases?”
+
+“Speak out, Strong,” said the head of the house. “I’ve been rather
+expecting this.”
+
+“First, then: you need not worry about Manny. I talked to him, long
+ago.”
+
+“But he’s only a boy, still,” said Mrs. Sharpless involuntarily.
+
+“He enters college this fall. And I’ve made sure that he won’t take
+with him the ‘no worse than a cold’ superstition about a disease which
+has wrecked the lives of thousands of Bartley Starrs.”
+
+“But I thought that Starr’s was the—the other and worse form,” said Mr.
+Clyde.
+
+“Plain talk,” adjured the Health Master. “You thought it was syphilis?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And you thought syphilis worse than gonorrhoea?”
+
+“Surely!”
+
+“Well, it isn’t. I’ll explain that in detail presently. Just now—”
+
+“Do I have to hear all of this,” appealed Mrs. Clyde, with a face of
+piteous disgust.
+
+“Well, _I_ told Manny,” said the Health Master in measured tones. “Must
+I be the one to tell Julia, too?”
+
+“Julia!” cried the mother. “Tell Julia?”
+
+“Some one must tell her.”
+
+“That child?”
+
+“Fourteen years old, and in high school. Last year there were ten known
+cases of venereal disease among the high-school girls.”[3]
+
+ [3] These and the following instances are based on actual and
+ established medical findings.
+
+
+“How horrible!”
+
+“Bad enough. I have known worse elsewhere. In a certain small city
+school, several years ago, it was discovered that there was an epidemic
+of vice which involved practically the whole school. And it was
+discovered only when venereal disease broke out. Our school authorities
+are just beginning to learn that immorality must be combated by
+watchfulness and quarantine, just as contagious disease must.”
+
+“How was the outbreak in our high school found out?” asked Grandma
+Sharpless.
+
+“In a curious and tragic way. One of the boys developed a sudden and
+serious inflammation of the eyes. At first the ophthalmologist to whom
+he went was puzzled. Then he began to suspect. A bateriological
+analysis showed that it was a case of gonorrhoeal infection. It was by
+a hair’s breadth that the less infected eye was saved. The sight of the
+other is lost. Examination showed that the disease was confined to the
+eyes. By a careful bit of medical detective work, the physician and the
+principal of the high school determined that the infection came from
+the use of a bath-towel in the house of a fellow-pupil where the
+patient had spent two or three nights. This pupil was examined and
+found to have a fully developed case, which he had concealed, in fear
+of disgrace. Consequently, the poison is now so deep-seated in him that
+it may be years before he is cured. He made a confession implicating a
+girl in the class above him. A rigid investigation followed which
+brought the other cases to light.”
+
+“I shall take Julia out of that school at once,” said Mrs. Clyde,
+half-crying.
+
+“No,” controverted the Health Master gently. “I shouldn’t do that. In
+the complex life of a city like this, it is impossible to shelter a
+girl completely and permanently. Better armor her with knowledge.
+Besides, the danger in the school, being discovered, is practically
+over now. In time, and using this experience as a lever with the school
+authorities, we hope to get a course of lectures on hygiene
+established, including simple sex-instruction. Meantime this must be
+carried on by the mothers and fathers.”
+
+“But what am I to say to Julia?”
+
+“That is what I am going to tell you,” replied the Health Master, “and
+look to you to pass on the truth in terms too plain to admit of any
+misunderstanding. First, does she know what womanhood and motherhood
+mean?”
+
+“Not yet, I think. She seems so young. And it’s so hard to speak of
+those things. But I thought I would try to explain to her some day.”
+
+“Some day? At once! How can you think her too young? She has already
+undergone the vital change from childhood to womanhood, and without so
+much as a word of warning or reassurance or explanation as to what it
+means.”
+
+“Not quite without,” put in Grandma Sharpless quietly.
+
+“Good!” approved the Health Master. “But be sure that the explanation
+is thorough. Tell her the significance of sex and its relation to
+reproduction and life. If you don’t, be sure that others will. And
+their version may well be in terms which would make a mother shudder to
+hear.”
+
+“Who would tell her?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Her playmates. Do you think that girls don’t talk of the mysteries as
+much as boys? If so, you’re sadly in error. The first essential is that
+she should understand truly and wisely what it means to be a woman.
+That is fundamental. And now for the matter of venereal disease. I am
+going to lay certain facts before you all, and you can hand on to the
+children such modifications as you deem best.
+
+“First, gonorrhoea, because it is the worse of the two. That is not the
+accepted notion, I know: but the leading specialists one by one have
+come around to the view, that, by and large, it does more damage to
+humanity than the more greatly dreaded syphilis. For one thing, it is
+much more widespread. While there are no accurate statistics covering
+the field in general, it is fairly certain that forty per cent of all
+men over thirty-five in our larger cities have had the disease at some
+time.”
+
+“That doesn’t seem possible,” broke in Mr. Clyde.
+
+“Not to you, because you married early, and your associations have been
+largely with family, home-loving men. But ask any one of the traveling
+salesmen in your factory his view. Your traveling man is the Ulysses of
+modern life, ‘knowing cities and the hearts of men.’ I think that
+you’ll find that compared with the ‘commercial’ view, my forty per cent
+is optimistic.”
+
+“But it is easily curable, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Clyde, insensibly
+yielding to the Health Master’s matter-of-fact tone, and finding,
+almost insensibly, that her interest in the hygienic problem had
+overcome her shamed reluctance to speak of it.
+
+“Often in the early stages. But it is very uncertain. And once firmly
+fixed on the victim, it is one of the most obstinate and treacherous of
+diseases. It may lie dormant for months or even years, deceiving its
+victim into thinking himself wholly cured, only to break out again in
+full conflagration, without warning.
+
+“This is the history of many ruined marriages. Only by the most
+searching tests can a physician make certain that the infection is
+stamped out. Probably no disease receives, on the average, such harmful
+treatment by those who are appealed to to cure it. The reason for this
+is that the young man with his first ‘dose’—that loathsome, light term
+of description!—is ashamed to go to his family physician, and so takes
+worthless patent medicines or falls into the hands of some ‘Men’s
+Specialist’ who advertises a ‘sure cure’ in the papers. These
+charlatans make their money, not by skillful and scientific treatment,
+of which they know nothing, nor by seeking to effect a cure, but by
+actually nourishing the flame of the disease, so as to keep the patient
+under their care as long as possible, all the time building up fat fees
+for themselves. If they were able, as they claim, to stop the infection
+in a few days at a small fee, they couldn’t make money enough to pay
+for the scoundrelly lies which constitute their advertisements. While
+they are collecting their long-extended payments from the victim, the
+infection is spreading and extending its roots more and more deeply,
+until the unfortunate may be ruined for life, or even actually killed
+by the ravages of the malignant germs.”
+
+“I didn’t suppose that it was ever fatal,” said Clyde.
+
+“Oh, yes. I’ve seen deaths in hospitals, of the most agonizing’ kind.
+But it is by virtue of its byproducts, so to speak, that gonorrhoea is
+most injurious and is really more baneful to the race than syphilis.
+The organism which causes it is in a high degree destructive to the
+eyes. Newborn infants are very frequently infected in this way by
+gonorrhoeal mothers. Probably a quarter of all permanent blindness in
+this country is caused by gonorrhoea. The effect of the disease upon
+women is disastrous. Half of all abdominal operations on married women,
+excluding appendicitis, are the results of gonorrhoeal infection from
+their husbands. A large proportion of sterility arises from this cause.
+A large proportion of the wives of men in whom the infection has not
+been wholly eradicated pay the penalty in permanently undermined
+health. And yet the superstition endures that ‘it’s no worse than a bad
+cold.’”
+
+“There is no such superstition about syphilis, at least,” remarked
+Clyde.
+
+“No. The very name is a portent of terror, and it is well that it
+should be so. The consequence is that the man who finds himself
+afflicted takes no chances, as a rule. He goes straight to the best
+physician he can find, and obeys orders under terror of his life. Thus
+and thus only, he often is cured. Terrible as syphilis is, there is
+this redeeming feature: we can tell pretty accurately when the organism
+which causes it is eliminated. Years after the disease itself is cured,
+however, the victim may be stricken down by the most terrible form of
+paralysis, resulting from it.”
+
+“Isn’t the Ehrlich treatment regarded as a sure cure?” asked Mrs.
+Sharpless.
+
+“No cure is sure. Salvarsan, skillfully administered, is as near a
+specific as any known form of treatment. But we don’t know whether it
+has any effect at all upon locomotor ataxia or general paralysis, the
+after effects, which may destroy the patient fifteen or twenty years
+after the actual disease has been cured. All locomotor ataxia and all
+general paralysis come from syphilis. And these diseases are not only
+incurable, but are as nearly a hell on earth as poor humanity is ever
+called upon to endure. Of course, you know that a man who is base
+enough to marry with syphilis dooms his children. Fortunately
+seventy-five or eighty per cent of the offspring of such marriages die
+in infancy or early childhood. The rest grow up deficient in mind or
+body or both. Upwards of ten per cent of all insanity is syphilitic in
+its origin.
+
+“Both venereal diseases are terribly contagious. Innocence is no
+protection. Syphilis may be contracted from a drinking-cup or
+eating-utensil, or from the lips of an infected person having an open
+sore on the mouth. Gonorrhoea is spread by towels, by bathtubs, or from
+contaminated toilets. No person, however careful, is immune from either
+of the ‘red plagues.’ And yet the public is just beginning to be
+educated to the peril.”
+
+“Why wouldn’t that be a good topic for the Woman’s Club to discuss?”
+asked Grandma Sharpless.
+
+“Splendid!” said Dr. Strong. “That is, if they would allow you to talk
+about it.”
+
+“_Allow_ me!” The old lady’s firm chin tilted up sharply. “Who’s going
+to put the ban of silence on me?”
+
+“Nobody, I dare say, if you make up your mind to speak,” replied Dr.
+Strong, smiling. “But some will probably try. Would you believe that,
+only a short time since, a professor of hygiene in one of our leading
+universities had to abandon a course of lectures to the students
+because the wives of the faculty and trustees objected to his including
+venereal diseases in his course? And a well-known lecturer, who had
+been invited to speak on health protection before a list of colleges,
+suffered the indignity of having the invitation withdrawn because he
+insisted that he could not cover the ground without warning his hearers
+against the twin pestilences of vice.”
+
+“Are the colleges so greatly in need of that sort of warning?” asked
+Mrs. Clyde.
+
+“Subsequent records obtained from some of the protesting institutions
+showed that one third of the students had at some time been infected.”
+
+“I’m glad you’ve told my boy,” said Mrs. Clyde, rising. “I’ll talk to
+my girls.”
+
+“And I to the women,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “Then I’d better make a
+list, for both of you, of the literature on the subject which you will
+find useful,” said the Health Master. “I’ll give it to you later.”[4]
+
+ [4] The list of publications on the sex problem and venereal disease
+ recommended by the Health Master to the Clyde family was as follows:—
+Published by the California Social Hygiene Society, Room 256, U.S.
+Custom House, San Francisco, Calif.: The Four Sex Lies, When and How to
+Tell the Children, A Plain Talk with Girls about their Health and
+Physical Development. Published by the Detroit Society for Sex Hygiene,
+Wayne Co. Medical Society Building, Detroit, Mich.: To the Girl who
+does not Know, A Plain Talk with Boys. Published by the Chicago Society
+of Social Hygiene, 305 Reliance Building, Chicago, Ill: Self
+Protection, Family Protection, Community Protection. Published by the
+Maryland Society for Social Hygiene, 15 East Pleasant Street,
+Baltimore, Md.: The So- Called Sexual Necessity in Man, The Venereal
+Diseases. Published by the American Federation for Sex Hygiene, 105
+West 40th St., N.Y. City: List of Publications of the Constituent
+Societies, The Teaching of Sex Hygiene, Sex Instruction as a Phase of
+Social Education. Published by the Society of Sanitary and Moral
+Prophylaxis: The Sex Problem, Health and the Hygiene of Sex.
+
+
+For a time after the women had left, the two men sat silent.
+
+“Strong,” said Mr. Clyde presently, “who is Bartley Starr’s physician?”
+
+“Dr. Emery.”
+
+“Why didn’t he warn him not to marry?”
+
+“He did. He positively forbade it.”
+
+“And Starr married that young girl in the face of that prohibition?”
+
+“He thought he was cured. Dr. Emery couldn’t say positively that he
+wasn’t. He could only beg him to wait another year. Starr hadn’t the
+courage—or the principle; he feared scandal if he postponed the
+wedding. So he disregarded the warning and now the scandal is upon him
+with tenfold weight.”
+
+“Isn’t there any law for such cases?”
+
+“Not in this state. Indiana requires that parties to a marriage swear
+to their freedom from venereal disease and certain other ailments.
+Other states have followed suit. Every state ought to.”
+
+“Why didn’t Dr. Emery go to the girl’s father, then?”
+
+“Because of our damnable law,” returned the Health Master with a sudden
+and rare access of bitterness.
+
+“You mean that the law forbids?”
+
+“It holds the physician liable for any professional confidence
+violated.” Dr. Strong rose and paced up and down the room, talking with
+repressed energy. “Therein it follows medical ethics in its most
+conservative and baneful phase. The code of medical conduct provides
+that a physician is bound to keep secret all the private affairs of a
+patient, learned in the course of practice. One body, the American
+Institute of Homoeopathy, has wisely amended its code to except those
+cases where ‘harm to others may result.’ That amendment was passed with
+particular reference to venereal disease.”
+
+“What about contagious disease?” asked Mr. Clyde. “Doesn’t the law
+require the physician to report diphtheria, for instance, and thus
+violate the patient’s confidence?”
+
+“Certainly it does. All schools recognize that principle of protection
+to the public. Yet, in the case of syphilis or gonorrhoea, when the
+harm to the public health is far greater than from any ‘reportable’
+disease except tuberculosis, the physician must hold his peace, though
+he sees his patient pass out of his hands bearing fire and sword and
+poison to future generations. There’s the Ban of Silence in its most
+diabolical form!”
+
+Mr. Clyde regarded his household physician keenly. “I’ve never before
+seen you so stirred,” he observed.
+
+“I’ve reason to be stirred.” The Health Master whirled suddenly upon
+his friend and employer. “Clyde, you’ve never questioned me as to my
+past.”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Have you never wanted it cleared up?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“You’ve always been willing to take me on trust?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And I appreciate it. But now I’m going to tell you how I happened to
+come to you, a broken and ruined man.”
+
+“Think it over, Strong,” advised Mr. Clyde. “Don’t speak now. Not that
+it would make any difference to me. I know you. If you were to tell me
+that you had committed homicide, I’d believe that it was a necessary
+and justifiable homicide.”
+
+“Suicide, rather,” returned the other with a mirthless laugh;
+“professional suicide. I’ll speak now, if you don’t object.”
+
+“Go ahead, then, if it will ease your mind.”
+
+“I’m a lawbreaker, Clyde. I did, years ago, what you thought Emery
+should have done. I deliberately violated the profession’s Ban of
+Silence. The man was my patient, in the city where I had built up a
+good high-class practice. He had contracted gonorrhoea and I had
+treated him for a year. The infection seemed to be rooted out. But I
+knew the danger, and when he told me that he was engaged to be married,
+to a girl of my own set and a valued friend, I was horror-stricken. I
+pleaded, argued, and finally threatened. It was no use. He was the
+spoiled child of a wealthy family, impatient of any thwarting. One day
+the suspicions of the girl’s mother were aroused. She came to me in
+deep distress. I told her the truth. The engagement was broken. The man
+did not bring suit against me, but his family used their financial and
+social power to persecute and finally drive me out of the city, a
+nervous wreck. That’s my history.”
+
+“You could have protected yourself by telling the true facts,”
+suggested Clyde. .
+
+“Yes: but that would have been an unforgivable breach of confidence.
+The public had no right to the facts. The girl’s family had.”
+
+“Then they should have come to your rescue with the truth.”
+
+“I bound them to secrecy.”
+
+Slowly Mr. Clyde rose, walked over, picked up the paper with the
+staring headlines, folded it, laid it on the table, and, in passing the
+physician, set a hand, as if by chance, upon his shoulder. From so
+undemonstrative a man the action meant much.
+
+“So,” he said with affectionate lightness, “my Chinese physician had
+been fighting dragons before he ever came to us; worse monsters than
+he’s been called upon to face, since. That was a splendid defeat,
+Strong.”
+
+“A bitter one,” said the Health Master; “and by the same old Monster,
+in another manifestation that we’ve been fighting here. We’ve downed
+him now and again, you and I, Clyde. But he’s never killed: only
+scotched. He’s the universal ally of every ill that man hands on to
+man, and we’ve only to recognize him under the thousand and one
+different forms he assumes to call him out to battle under his real
+name.”
+
+“And that is?” inquired Clyde.
+
+“Ignorance,” said the Health Master.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
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diff --git a/57543-h.zip b/57543-h.zip
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-

-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Health Master, by Samuel Hopkins Adams

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and

-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms

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-Title: The Health Master

-

-Author: Samuel Hopkins Adams

-

-Release Date: August 2, 2018 [EBook #57543]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

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-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HEALTH MASTER ***

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-Produced by David Widger from page images generously

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-</pre>

-

-    <div style="height: 8em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h1>

-      THE HEALTH MASTER

-    </h1>

-    <h2>

-      By Samuel Hopkins Adams

-    </h2>

-    <h3>

-      Associate Fellow of the American Medical Association

-    </h3>

-    <h4>

-      Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company

-    </h4>

-    <h3>

-      1913

-    </h3>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <p>

-      <i>To George W. Goler, M.D., a type of the courageous, unselfish, and

-      far-sighted health official, whom the enlightened and progressive city of

-      Rochester, N. Y., hires to keep it well, on the &ldquo;Chinese plan,&rdquo;

-      this book is inscribed, with the hope that it may, by exercising some

-      influence in the hygienic education of the public, aid the work which he

-      and his fellow guardians of the public health are so laboriously and

-      devotedly performing throughout the nation.</i>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      INTRODUCTORY NOTE

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      To dogmatise on questions of medical practice is to invite controversy and

-      tempt disaster. The highest wisdom of to-day may be completely refuted by

-      to-morrow&rsquo;s discovery. Therefore, for the simple principles of

-      disease prevention and health protection which I have put into the mouth

-      of my Health Master, I make no claim of finality. In support of them I

-      maintain only that they represent the progressive specialized thought of

-      modern medical science. So far as is practicable I have avoided questions

-      upon which there is serious difference of belief among the authorities.

-      Where it has been necessary to touch upon these, as, for example, in the

-      chapter on methods of isolation in contagious diseases, a question which

-      arises sooner or later in every household, I have advocated those measures

-      which have the support of the best rational probability and statistical

-      support.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Not only has the book been prepared in consultation with the recognized

-      authorities on public health and preventive medicine, but every chapter

-      has been submitted to the expert criticism of specialists upon the

-      particular subject treated. My own ideas and theories I have advanced only

-      in such passages as deal with the relation of the physician and of the

-      citizen to the social and ethical phases of public health. To the large

-      number of medical scientists, both public and private, whose generous aid

-      and counsel have made my work possible, I gratefully acknowledge my debt.

-      My thanks are due also for permission to reprint, to the <i>Delineator</i>,

-      in which most of the chapters have appeared serially; to <i>Collier&rsquo;s

-      Weekly</i>, and to the <i>Ladies&rsquo; Home Journal</i>.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Author.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <h2>

-      CONTENTS

-    </h2>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> INTRODUCTORY NOTE </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> I.&mdash;THE CHINESE PLAN PHYSICIAN </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> II.&mdash;IN TIME OF PEACE </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> III.&mdash;REPAIRING BETTINA </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> IV.&mdash;THE CORNER DRUG-STORE </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> V.&mdash;THE MAGIC LENS </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> VI.&mdash;THE RE-MADE LADY </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VII.&mdash;THE RED PLACARD </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> VIII.&mdash;HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> IX.&mdash;THE GOOD GRAY DOCTOR </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> X.&mdash;THE HOUSE THAT CAUGHT COLD </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> XI. THE BESIEGED CITY </a>

-    </p>

-    <p class="toc">

-      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> XII. PLAIN TALK </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br />

-      <hr />

-      <br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h1>

-      THE HEALTH MASTER

-    </h1>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      I.&mdash;THE CHINESE PLAN PHYSICIAN

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE eleven-o&rsquo;clock

-      car was just leaving Monument Square when Mr. Thomas Clyde swung aboard

-      with an ease and agility worthy of a younger and less portly man. Fortune

-      favored him with an unoccupied seat, into which he dropped gratefully.

-      Just in front of him sprawled a heavy-shouldered young man, apparently

-      asleep. Mr. Clyde was unfavorably impressed both by his appearance and by

-      the manner of his breathing, which was as excessive as it was unusual. As

-      the car swung sharply around a curve the young man&rsquo;s body sagged at

-      the waist, and lopped over toward the aisle. Before Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s

-      restraining hand could close upon his shoulder, he had tumbled outward to

-      the floor, and lay quiet, with upturned face. There was a stir through the

-      car.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The horrid drunken creature!&rdquo; exclaimed a black-clad woman

-      opposite Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Why do they allow such people on the cars?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The conductor hurried forward, only to find his way blocked by a very

-      tall, slender man who had quietly stepped, from a seat next the window,

-      over an intervening messenger boy and the box he was carrying. The new

-      arrival on the scene of action stooped over the prostrate figure. One

-      glance apparently satisfied him. With a swift, sharp motion he slapped the

-      inert man forcefully across the cheek. The sound of the impact was

-      startlingly loud. The senseless head rolled over upon the left shoulder,

-      only to be straightened out by another quick blow. A murmur of indignation

-      and disgust hummed and passed, and the woman in black called upon the

-      conductor to stop the assault. But Mr. Thomas Clyde, being a person of

-      decision and action, was before the official. He caught the assailant&rsquo;s

-      arm as it swung back again.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let him alone! What do you mean by beating a helpless man that way!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you know more about this affair than I do?&rdquo; The crisp

-      query was accompanied by a backward thrust of the tall man&rsquo;s elbow

-      which broke Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s hold, and&mdash;smack! smack!&mdash;the

-      swift double blow rocked the victim&rsquo;s head again. This time the man

-      groaned. The car was in an uproar. Mr. Clyde instantly and effectively

-      pinned the tall man&rsquo;s elbows from behind. Some one pulled the bell,

-      and the brakes ground, throwing those forward who had pressed into the

-      aisle. Against this pressure, Mr. Clyde, aided by the conductor, began

-      dragging his man backward. The stranger was helpless to resist this grip;

-      but as he was forced away he perpetrated a final atrocity. Shooting out

-      one long leg, he caught the toe of his boot under the outstretched man&rsquo;s

-      jawbone and jerked the chin back. This time, the object of the violence

-      not only groaned, but opened his eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have you in jail for that!&rdquo; panted Mr. Clyde, his

-      usually placid temper surging up.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Other passengers began to lift the victim.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Drop him!&rdquo; snapped the tall man, with such imperative

-      decisiveness, that the helping hands involuntarily retracted. &ldquo;Let

-      him lie, you fools! Do you want to kill him?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Misgivings beset and cooled Mr. Thomas Clyde. He had now reached the rear

-      platform, still holding in his powerful and disabling grasp the unknown

-      man, when he heard a voice from an automobile which had been halted by the

-      abrupt stop of the car.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can I be of any help?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dr. Magruder!&rdquo; exclaimed Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;come in here, will

-      you, and look at a sick man?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As the doctor stepped aboard, the captive with a violent wrench freed

-      himself from Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s relaxing hold and dropped from the platform

-      into the darkness. Dr. Magruder forced his way through the crowd, took one

-      look at the patient, and, right and left, struck him powerfully across the

-      cheeks time and again, until the leaden-lidded eyes opened again. There

-      was a quick recourse to the physician&rsquo;s little satchel; then&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said the doctor cheerfully. &ldquo;He&rsquo;ll do

-      now. But, my friend, with that heart of yours, you want to sign the pledge

-      or make your will. It was touch and go with you that time.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Waiting to hear no more, Mr. Thomas Clyde jumped from the rear step and

-      set off at a rapid pace, looking about him as he ran. He had not gone a

-      block when he saw, by the radiance of an electric light, a tall figure

-      leaning against a tree in an attitude of nerveless dejection. The figure

-      straightened up.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t try to man-handle me again,&rdquo; advised the man,

-      &ldquo;or you may meet with a disappointment.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve come to apologize.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; returned the other coolly; &ldquo;I appreciate

-      it. Many a fool wouldn&rsquo;t go even so far.&rdquo; Mr. Clyde smiled.

-      &ldquo;I own to the soft impeachment. From what Dr. Magruder said I judge

-      you saved that fellow from the hospital.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I judge I did&mdash;no thanks to you! You&rsquo;ve a grip like a

-      vise.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; I keep in good training,&rdquo; said the other pleasantly.

-      &ldquo;A man of my age has to, if he is to hold up his work.&rdquo; He

-      looked concernedly at the stranger who had involuntarily lapsed against

-      the tree again. &ldquo;See here,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t

-      believe you&rsquo;re well.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; I don&rsquo;t believe I am,&rdquo; answered the tall man in

-      uncompromising tones; &ldquo;but I do believe that it is peculiarly my own

-      affair whether I am or not.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nonsense! Man, your nerves are on the jump. You used yourself up on

-      that chap in the street car. Come across to my club and take something to

-      brace you up.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      People usually found it hard to resist Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s quiet

-      persuasiveness. The stranger, after a moment of consideration, smiled.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Begin with a fight and end with a drink?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s

-      a reversal of the usual process. If your cuisine runs to a cup of hot milk

-      as late as this, I&rsquo;d be glad to have it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As they entered the club, Mr. Clyde turned to his guest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What name shall I register?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The stranger hesitated. &ldquo;Strong,&rdquo; he said finally.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dr. Strong?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well&mdash;yes&mdash;Dr. Strong if you will.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of what place?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Any place&mdash;Calcutta, Paris, Mexico City, Philadelphia, Rio. I&rsquo;ve

-      tried &lsquo;em all. I&rsquo;m a man without a country, as I am without a

-      profession.&rdquo; He spoke with the unguarded bitterness of shaken

-      nerves.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Without a profession! But you said &lsquo;Doctor.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A title isn&rsquo;t a profession,&rdquo; returned the guest

-      shortly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Turning that over in his mind, Mr. Clyde led the way to a quiet table in

-      the corner of the diningroom, where he gave his order. Observing that his

-      new acquaintance was <i>distrait</i>, he swung into the easy

-      conversational flow of a cultured man of the world, at the same time

-      setting his keen judgment of men to work upon the other. There was much

-      there to interest a close observer. The face indicated not much over

-      thirty years; but there were harsh lines in the broad and thoughtful

-      forehead, and the hair that waved away from it was irregularly blotched

-      with gray. The eyes, very clear and liquid, were marred by an expression

-      of restlessness and stress. The mouth was clear-cut, with an expression of

-      rather sardonic humor. Altogether it was a face to remark and remember;

-      keen, intellectual, humorous, and worn. Mr. Thomas Clyde decided that he

-      liked the man.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve been a traveler, Doctor?&rdquo; he asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. I&rsquo;ve seen life in many countries&mdash;and death.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And traced the relations between them, I suppose?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ve flashed my little pin-point lantern at the Great

-      Darkness in the fond hope of discovering something,&rdquo; returned the

-      other cynically.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In a way, I&rsquo;m interested in those matters,&rdquo; continued

-      Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;They&rsquo;ve organized a Public Health League here, and

-      made me president of it. More from finance than fitness,&rdquo; he added,

-      humorously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Finance has its part, too,&rdquo; said the other. &ldquo;Give me

-      millions enough and I&rsquo;ll rid any city of its worst scourge,

-      tuberculosis.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then I wish to Heaven you had the millions to spend here in

-      Worthington! We&rsquo;re in a bad way. Two years ago we elected a reform

-      administration. The Mayor put in a new Health Officer and we looked for

-      results. We&rsquo;ve had them&mdash;the wrong kind. The death rate from

-      tuberculosis has gone up twenty-five per cent, and the number of cases

-      nearly fifty per cent since he took office.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t say so!&rdquo; said the stranger, showing his first

-      evidence of animation. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s good.&rdquo; Mr. Clyde stared.

-      &ldquo;You think so? Then you&rsquo;ll undoubtedly be pleased to learn

-      that other diseases are increasing almost at the same rate: measles,

-      scarlet fever, and so on.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Fine!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And finally, our general mortality rate has gone up a full point.

-      We propose to take some action regarding it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Quite right. You certainly ought to.&rdquo; Something in his guest&rsquo;s

-      tone made Mr. Clyde suspicious. &ldquo;What action would you suggest,

-      then? he asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A vote of confidence in your Health Officer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You propose that we indorse the man who is responsible for a marked

-      rise in our mortality figures?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In the name of all that&rsquo;s absurd, why?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let me answer that by another question. If disease appears in your

-      household, do you want your doctor to conceal it or check it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde took that under advisement. &ldquo;You mean that this city has

-      been concealing its diseases, and that Dr. Merritt, our new Health

-      Officer, is only making known a condition which has always existed?&rdquo;

-      he asked presently.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t you just told me so?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When did I tell you anything of the sort?&rdquo; The younger man

-      smiled. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s five questions in a row,&rdquo; said he.

-      &ldquo;Time for an answer. You said that deaths from tuberculosis had

-      increased twenty-five per cent since the new man came in.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re wrong. Tuberculosis doesn&rsquo;t increase in sudden

-      leaps. It isn&rsquo;t an epidemic disease, rising and receding in waves.

-      It&rsquo;s endemic, a steady current.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But look at the figures. Figures don&rsquo;t lie, do they?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Usually, in vital statistics,&rdquo; was the imperturbable reply.

-      &ldquo;In this case, probably not. That is, they don&rsquo;t lie to me. I&rsquo;m

-      afraid they do to you.&rdquo; Mr. Clyde looked dubiously at the propounder

-      of this curious suggestion and shook his head.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t get it?&rdquo; queried Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Perhaps you

-      recall the saying of Thoreau&mdash;I think it the profoundest

-      philosophical thought of the New World&mdash;that it takes two to tell the

-      truth, one to speak and one to hear it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You mean that we&rsquo;ve misinterpreted the figures? Why, they&rsquo;re

-      as plain as two and two.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Truth lies behind figures, not in them,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;Now, you&rsquo;re worried because of a startling apparent swelling

-      of the tuberculosis rate. When you find that sort of a sudden increase, it

-      doesn&rsquo;t signify that there&rsquo;s more tuberculosis. It signifies

-      only that there&rsquo;s more knowledge of tuberculosis. You&rsquo;re

-      getting the disease more honestly reported; that&rsquo;s all. Dr. Merritt&mdash;did

-      you say his name is?&mdash;has stirred up your physicians to obey the law

-      which requires that all deaths be promptly and properly reported, and all

-      new cases of certain communicable diseases, as well. Speaking as a doctor,

-      I should say that, with the exception of lawyers, there is no profession

-      which considers itself above the law so widely as the medical profession.

-      Therefore, your Health Officer has done something rather unusual in

-      bringing the doctors to a sense of their duty. As for reporting, you can&rsquo;t

-      combat a disease until you know where it is established and whither it is

-      spreading. So, I say, any health officer who succeeds in spurring up the

-      medical profession, and in dragging the Great White Plague out of its

-      lurking-places into the light of day ought to have a medal.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What about the other diseases? Is the same true of them?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not to the same extent. No man can tell when or why the epidemic

-      diseases&mdash;scarlet fever, measles, whooping-cough, and diphtheria&mdash;come

-      and go. By the way, what about your diphtheria death rate here?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is the exception to the rule. The rate is decreasing.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong brought his hand down flat on the table with a force which made

-      his cup jump in its saucer. &ldquo;And your misnamed Public Health League

-      proposes to take some action against the man who is shown, by every

-      evidence you&rsquo;ve suggested thus far, to be the right man in the right

-      place!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How does the diphtheria rate show in his favor any more than the

-      other death rates against him?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Because diphtheria is the one important disease which your medical

-      officer can definitely control, and he seems to be doing it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The only important one? Surely smallpox is controllable?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Smallpox is the poisoned arrow of the fool-killer. It is

-      controllable; but it isn&rsquo;t important, except to fools and

-      anti-vaccination bigots.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Thomas Clyde softly rubbed his cleanshaven chin, a sign and token with

-      him that his mind was hard at work.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re giving me a new view of a city in which I&rsquo;ve

-      lived for the first and last forty-five years of my life,&rdquo; he said

-      presently. &ldquo;Are you familiar with conditions here?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Never have been here before, and have no reason to suppose that I

-      shall ever return. Traveling at night is too much for me, so I stopped

-      over to have a look at a town which has been rather notorious among public

-      health officials for years.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Notorious!&rdquo; repeated Mr. Clyde, his local pride up in arms.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;For falsifying its vital statistics. Your low mortality figures are

-      a joke. Worthington has been more jeered at, criticized, and roasted by

-      various medical conventions than any other city in the United States.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, I&rsquo;ve never seen anything of that sort in the papers.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong laughed. &ldquo;Your newspapers print what you want to read;

-      not what you don&rsquo;t want to read. They follow the old adage, &lsquo;What

-      you don&rsquo;t know won&rsquo;t hurt you.&rsquo; It&rsquo;s a poor

-      principle in matters of hygiene.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So one might suppose,&rdquo; returned the host dryly. &ldquo;Still

-      you can scarcely expect a newspaper to run down its own city. I&rsquo;ve

-      known business to suffer for a year from sensational reports of an

-      epidemic.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The other grunted. &ldquo;If a pest of poisonous spiders suddenly bred and

-      spread in Worthington, the newspapers would be full of it, and everybody

-      would commend the printing of the facts as a necessary warning and

-      safeguard. But when a pest of poisonous germs breeds and spreads, Business

-      sets its finger to its lips and says, &lsquo;Hush!&rsquo; and the

-      newspapers obey. You&rsquo;re a business man, I assume, Mr. Clyde?

-      Frankly, I haven&rsquo;t very much sympathy with the business point of

-      view.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He rose and pushed his chair back.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Wait a moment,&rdquo; said the other. &ldquo;Sit down. I have

-      something that may be of importance to suggest to you. It occurs to me

-      that Worthington would be the better for having a man with your ideas as a

-      citizen. Now, supposing the Public Health League should offer you&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I am not at present in medical practice,&rdquo; broke in the other.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Even at that, I was thinking that you would be of use as an

-      advisory physician and scientific lookout.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      For a moment, the other&rsquo;s face brightened, an indication which Mr.

-      Clyde was quick to note. But instantly the expression of eagerness died

-      out.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ten hours a day?&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;It couldn&rsquo;t

-      be done properly in less time. And I&rsquo;m a mere nervous wreck, bound

-      for the scrap-heap.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Would you mind,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde very gently, &ldquo;telling

-      me what&rsquo;s wrong? I&rsquo;m not asking without a purpose.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong held out his long arms before him. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a surgeon

-      without a right hand, and a bacteriologist without a left.&rdquo; The

-      sinewy and pale hands shook a little. &ldquo;Neuritis,&rdquo; he

-      continued. &ldquo;One of the diseases of which we doctors have the most

-      fear and the least knowledge.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And with the loss of your occupation, general nervous collapse?&rdquo;

-      asked Mr. Clyde. Being himself a worker who put his heart into his work,

-      he could guess the sterile hopelessness of spirit of the man banned from a

-      chosen activity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;I may still be fit for the lecture platform as a

-      dispenser of other men&rsquo;s knowledge. Or perhaps I&rsquo;ll end up as

-      medical watchdog to some rich man who can afford that kind of pet.

-      Pleasing prospect, isn&rsquo;t it, for a man who once thought himself of

-      use in the world?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good idea,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde quietly. &ldquo;Will you try the

-      position with my family?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The other stared in silence at his questioner.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just consider my situation for a moment. As you know, I&rsquo;m a

-      layman, interested in, but rather ignorant of, medical subjects. As wealth

-      goes in a city of one hundred and fifty thousand population, I&rsquo;m a

-      rich man. At any rate, I can afford a considerable outlay to guard against

-      sickness. In the last five years I suppose disease has cost my household

-      ten thousand dollars in money, and has cost me, in worry and consequent

-      incapacity for work, ten times that amount. Even at a large salary you

-      would doubtless prove an economy. Come, what do you say?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You know absolutely nothing of me,&rdquo; suggested the other.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I know that you are a man of quick and correct judgment, for I saw

-      you in action.&rdquo; The other smiled. &ldquo;You are, for reasons which

-      are your own, not very expansive, as to your past professional career. I&rsquo;m

-      content with that attitude of yours, and I&rsquo;m quite satisfied to base

-      my offer on what I have been able to judge from your manner and talk.

-      Without boasting, I may say that I have built up a great manufacturing

-      plant largely on my judgment of men. I think I need you in my business of

-      raising a family.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How much of a family?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Five children, their mother and their grandmother. I may warn you

-      at once that you&rsquo;ll have a jealous rival in Grandma. She&rsquo;s the

-      household guardian, and pretty &lsquo;sot&rsquo; in her ideas. But the

-      principal thing is for you to judge me as I&rsquo;ve judged you, and

-      determine whether we could work out the plan together.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong set his chin in one thin, cupped hand and gazed consideringly

-      upon the profferer of this strange suggestion. He saw a strong-built,

-      clear-skinned man, whose physical aspect did not suggest the forty-five

-      years to which he had owned. Mr. Clyde recommended himself at first sight

-      by a smooth-voiced ease of manner, and that unostentatious but careful

-      fitness of apparel which is, despite wise apothegms to the contrary, so

-      often an index of character. Under the easy charm of address, there was

-      unobtrusively evident a quick intelligence, a stalwart self-respect, and a

-      powerful will.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Yet, the doctor noted, this man had been both ready and fair in yielding

-      his judgment, under the suggestion of a new point of view. Evidently he

-      could take orders as well as give them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;have you appraised me?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The weary eyes of the other twinkled a little. &ldquo;Physically you

-      disclose some matters plainly enough, if one wishes to show off in the

-      Sherlock Holmes manner. For instance, you&rsquo;ve recently been in the

-      tropics; your eyesight is better than your hearing, you drink lightly if

-      at all, and don&rsquo;t use tobacco in any form; you&rsquo;ve taken up

-      athletics&mdash;handball principally&mdash;in recent years, as the result

-      of a bad scare you got from a threatened paralytic attack; and your only

-      serious illness since then has been typhoid fever.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde laughed outright. &ldquo;If you had started our acquaintance

-      that way,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;d have thought you a

-      fortune-teller. Part of it I can follow. You noticed that I kept my left

-      ear turned, of course; and the fact that my nose shows no eyeglass marks

-      would vouch for my eyesight. Did you judge me a non-smoker because I

-      forgot to offer you a cigar&mdash;which deficiency I&rsquo;ll gladly make

-      up now, if it isn&rsquo;t too late.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Partly that&mdash;no, thank you. I&rsquo;m not allowed to smoke&mdash;but

-      principally because I noticed you disliked the odor of my hot milk. It is

-      offensive, but so faint that no man without a very keen sense of smell

-      would perceive it across a table; no tobacco-user preserves his sense of

-      smell to any such degree of delicacy. As for the drink, I judged that from

-      your eyes and general fitness.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And the handball, of course, from my &lsquo;cushioned&rsquo; palms.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Obviously. A man at the heart of a great business doesn&rsquo;t

-      take up violent indoor exercise without some special reason. Such a reason

-      I saw on the middle finger of your left hand.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Holding up the telltale member, Mr. Clyde disclosed a small dark area at

-      the side of the first joint.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Leaky fountain-pen,&rdquo; he remarked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;As you are right-handed naturally, but write with your left hand,

-      it&rsquo;s clear that you&rsquo;ve had an attack of writer&rsquo;s

-      paralysis&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Five years ago,&rdquo; put in Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And that your doctor made good use of the salutary scare it gave

-      you, to get you to take up regular exercise.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And, incidentally, to cut out my moderate, occasional cocktail.

-      Now, as to the tropics and the typhoid?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The latter is a guess; the former a certainty. Under your somewhat

-      sparse long hair in front there is an outcropping of very fine hairs. Some

-      special cause exists for that new growth. The most likely cause, at your

-      age, is typhoid. As you&rsquo;ve kept in good training, it isn&rsquo;t

-      likely that you&rsquo;d have had any other serious ailment recently. On

-      that I took a chance. The small scars at the back of your ears could be

-      nothing but the marks of that little pest of the tropics, the <i>bête

-      rouge</i>. I&rsquo;ve had him dug out of my skin and I know something of

-      him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Right on every count,&rdquo; declared Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve

-      given me cumulative proof of your value to me. I&rsquo;ll tell you. Forget

-      formalities. Let me &lsquo;phone for a cab; we&rsquo;ll go to your hotel, get

-      your things, and you come back with me for the night. In the morning you

-      can look the ground over, and decide, with the human documents before you,

-      whether you&rsquo;ll undertake the campaign.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The younger man smiled a very pleasant and winning smile. &ldquo;You go

-      fast,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;And as in all fast motion, you create a

-      current in your direction. Certainly, if I&rsquo;m to consider your

-      remarkable plan I&rsquo;d best see the whole family. But there&rsquo;s one

-      probable and perhaps insurmountable obstacle. Who is your physician?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t such a thing in the house, at present,&rdquo; said

-      Mr. Clyde lightly. Then, in a graver tone, &ldquo;Our old family physician

-      died six months ago. He knew us all inside and out as a man knows a

-      familiar book.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A difficult loss to replace. Knowledge of your patient is half the

-      battle in medicine. You&rsquo;ve had no one since?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. Six weeks ago, my third boy, Charley, showed signs of fever

-      and we called a distant cousin of mine who has a large practice. He felt

-      quite sure from the first that it was diphtheria; but he so managed

-      matters that we had no trouble with the officials. In fact, he didn&rsquo;t

-      report it at all, though I believe it was a very light case of the

-      disease.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong&rsquo;s eyes narrowed. &ldquo;At the outset, I&rsquo;ll give

-      you two bits of advice, gratis, Mr. Clyde. First, don&rsquo;t ever call

-      your doctor-cousin again. He&rsquo;s an anarchist.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just what do you mean by that?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s plain enough, isn&rsquo;t it? Anarchist, I said: a man

-      who doesn&rsquo;t believe in law when it contravenes his convenience.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin again. &ldquo;Hum,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;Well!

-      the second gift of advice?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That you either respect the law yourself or resign the presidency

-      of the Public Health League.&rdquo; A distinct spot of red appeared on

-      each of the elder man&rsquo;s smooth cheeks. &ldquo;Are you trying to

-      provoke me to a quarrel?&rdquo; he asked brusquely.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Then his expression mollified. &ldquo;Or are you testing me?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Neither. I&rsquo;m giving you my best and most honest advice. If

-      you expect me to do as your substitute physician did, to guard your

-      household in violation of the law which tries to protect the whole public

-      equally, you&rsquo;ve got the wrong man, and your boasted judgment has

-      gone askew,&rdquo; was the steady reply.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde turned and left the room. When he returned his hand was

-      outstretched.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve taken three swallows of cold air, and sent for a cab,&rdquo;

-      he said. &ldquo;Shake hands. I think you and I will be friends. Only&mdash;train

-      me a little gently at the outset. You&rsquo;ll come with me?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, and the two men shook hands.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During the drive Mr. Clyde expounded the virtues and characteristics of

-      his native city to his new acquaintance, who was an excellent listener.

-      Long afterward he found Dr. Strong acting on remembered and shrewdly

-      analyzed information given in that first long talk. When they reached the

-      big, rambling, many-windowed house which afforded the growing Clyde family

-      opportunity to grow, the head of the household took his guest to an

-      apartment in one of the wings.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;These two rooms are yours,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I hope you&rsquo;ll

-      be like Coleridge who came to visit with one satchel and stayed five

-      years.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That remains to be seen to-morrow,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;By

-      the way, as I usually read myself to sleep, you might leave me some of

-      your local health reports. Thus I can be looking the ground over.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All I&rsquo;ve got you&rsquo;ll find on the shelf over the desk.

-      Good-night!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Being of that type of man who does his thinking before and not after a

-      decision, Mr. Thomas Clyde arose in the morning with an untroubled mind as

-      to his new venture in household economics. Voices from the library

-      attracted him thither, as he came downstairs, and, entering, he beheld his

-      guest hedged in a corner by the grandmother of the Clyde household.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me, young man,&rdquo; the old lady was saying, in

-      her clear, determined voice. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve not slept well for ages!

-      I know that kind of an eye.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Mrs. Sharpless has been diagnosing my case, Mr. Clyde,&rdquo;

-      called the guest, with a rather wry smile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You stay here for a while,&rdquo; said she vigorously, &ldquo;and I&rsquo;ll

-      cocker you up. I don&rsquo;t believe you even eat properly. Do you?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Maybe not,&rdquo; admitted the young man. &ldquo;We doctors are

-      sometimes less wise for ourselves than for others.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh! So you&rsquo;re a doctor?&rdquo; asked the grandmother with a

-      shrewd, estimating glance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dr. Strong is, I hope, going to stay with us awhile,&rdquo;

-      explained her son-in-law.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll take care

-      of him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a strong inducement,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong gracefully.

-      &ldquo;But I want a little more material on which to base a decision.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Between us Grandma and I ought to be able to answer any questions,&rdquo;

-      said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;About sickness, then, in the family. I&rsquo;ve already introduced

-      myself to Mrs. Clyde and questioned her; but her information isn&rsquo;t

-      definite.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Myra seldom is,&rdquo; observed Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s part

-      of her charm. But Grandma Sharpless has been keeping a daybook for years.

-      Everything that&rsquo;s ever happened, from the cat&rsquo;s fits to the

-      dressmaker&rsquo;s misfits, is in that series. I&rsquo;ve always thought

-      it might come in handy sometime.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just the thing!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong heartily. &ldquo;Will you

-      bring it, Mrs. Sharpless? I hope you&rsquo;ve included your comment on

-      events as well as the events themselves.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;My opinions are generally pronounced enough so that I can remember

-      &lsquo;em, young man,&rdquo; returned Mrs. Sharpless, as she departed for

-      the desired volumes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That last remark of yours sounded a little like making fun of

-      Grandma,&rdquo; suggested Mr. Clyde, as the door closed after her.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Far from it,&rdquo; retorted Dr. Strong quickly. &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t

-      you see that she&rsquo;s a born diagnostician? She&rsquo;s got the sixth

-      sense sticking out all over her. Women more often have it than men. When a

-      doctor has it, and sometimes when he&rsquo;s only able to counterfeit it,

-      he becomes great and famous.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now that you speak of it, I remember my wife&rsquo;s saying that

-      when she was a girl and lived in the country, her mother was always being

-      sent for in cases of illness.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;Heretical though it is to say so, I would rather

-      have the diagnosis of such a woman, in an obscure case, than of many a

-      doctor. She learns in the school of experience.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Here, Mrs. Sharpless returned, carrying several diaries.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;These go five years back,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find

-      &lsquo;em pretty complete. We&rsquo;ve had our fair share of trouble;

-      measles, whooping-cough,&mdash;I thought Betsy was going to bark her poor

-      little head off,&mdash;mumps, and chicken-pox. I nursed &lsquo;em through,

-      myself.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All of them?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All of &lsquo;em didn&rsquo;t have all the things because Tom Clyde

-      sent the rest away when one of &lsquo;em came down. All nonsense, I say.

-      Better let &lsquo;em get it while they&rsquo;re young, and have done with

-      it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One of the worst of the old superstitions,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong

-      quietly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me, young man! Doctor or no doctor, you can&rsquo;t

-      teach me about children&rsquo;s diseases. There isn&rsquo;t any of those

-      measly and mumpy ones that I&rsquo;m afraid of. Bobs <i>did</i> scare me,

-      though, with that queer attack of his.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Bobs,&rdquo; explained Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;is Robin, one of the

-      eight-year-old twins.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tell me about the attack.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When <i>was</i> it?&rdquo; said the grandmother, running over the

-      leaves of a selected diary. &ldquo;Oh, here it is. Last March. It was

-      short and sharp. Only lasted three days; but the child had a dreadful

-      fever and pretty bad cramps.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Anything else?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, yes; though that idiot of a cousin of Tom&rsquo;s snubbed me

-      when I told him about it. The boy seemed kind of numb and slow with his

-      hands for some time after.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And now?&rdquo; So sharp came the question that Mr. Clyde glanced

-      at the speaker, not without apprehension.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing left of it that I can see.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What had you in mind?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde of the doctor,

-      curiously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Speaking technically, anterior poliomyelitis.&rdquo; Grandma

-      Sharpless laughed comfortably. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve noticed that a very long

-      name like that usually means a sore toe or a pimple behind your ear. It&rsquo;s

-      the short names that bring the undertaker.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Shrewdly said, but exception noted,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;As for Bobs, I remember two cases I saw at Clinton years ago, like

-      that attack of his. One of &lsquo;em never walked afterward, and the other

-      has a shriveled hand to this day.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;To come down nearer to English, that&rsquo;s

-      infantile paralysis, one of the mysteries of medicine. I&rsquo;ll tell you

-      some things about it some day. Your Bobs had a narrow escape.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re sure it is an escape?&rdquo; asked the father

-      anxiously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If Mrs. Sharpless is satisfied that there&rsquo;s no trace left, I

-      am.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Come in to breakfast,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, entering the room

-      with a child attached to either hand. She was a tall, fair woman with the

-      charm of fresh coloring and regular features, large, intelligent eyes, and

-      a somewhat restless vigor and vitality. That her husband and children

-      adored her was obvious. One had to look twice to perceive that she was

-      over thirty; and even a careful estimate did not suggest her real age of

-      thirty-seven.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During the introductory meal, Dr. Strong talked mostly to her, but he kept

-      watching the children. And when it was over, he went to his study and made

-      an inventory, in the order of age.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"></a>

-    </p>

-

-    <p>

-      This catalogue Dr. Strong put away, with Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s day

-      books, for further notation and amplification. Then he made three visits:

-      one to the Health Bureau, one to the Water Department, and one to the City

-      Engineer&rsquo;s office, where he spent much time over sundry maps. It was

-      close upon dinner-time when he returned, and immediately looked up Mr.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; said that gentleman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Assuming that I accept your offer it should be understood that I&rsquo;m

-      only a guardian, not, a physician.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Meaning&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That I shall expect, in emergency, to call in such physicians or

-      others as I consider best equipped for the particular task.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very well. But why that phrase &lsquo;or others&rsquo;?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve suggested before that I am a heretic. In certain

-      instances I might want an osteopath, or, if I were dealing with a sick

-      soul causing a sick body, I might even send for a Christian Scientist.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You have a refreshingly catholic breadth of view.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m trying to map out for you, a rich man, as good treatment

-      as a very poor man would have in a hospital&mdash;that is, the best

-      technical advice for every hygienic emergency that may arise&mdash;plus

-      some few extensions of my own. Now we come to what is likely to prove the

-      stumbling-block.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Set it up.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If I&rsquo;m to take this job, I must be the autocrat, in so far as

-      my own department is concerned. As you know, a city health official&rsquo;s

-      powers are arbitrary. He can burn your house down; he can imprison you; he

-      can establish a military régime; he can override or undo the laws which

-      control the ordinary procedure of life. Hygienic law, like martial law,

-      supersedes rights in crises. You are asking me to act as health officer of

-      your house. If I&rsquo;m to do my work, I must have full sway, and I shall

-      expect you to see that every member of your household obeys my orders&mdash;except,&rdquo;

-      he added, with a twinkle, &ldquo;Grandma Sharpless. I expect she&rsquo;s

-      too old to take orders from any one. Diplomacy must be my agent with her.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde pondered. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a pretty wide authority you&rsquo;re

-      asking.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, but I shall use it only in extreme cases. I shall deal

-      extensively in advice and suggestion, which you may take or leave as you

-      choose. But an order will mean a life or death matter.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Agreed. Now, as to terms&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let the terms go, until we see how much I can save you. Meantime,

-      don&rsquo;t overestimate what I undertake to do. Suppose you just run

-      through the roster of what you consider the danger points, and I&rsquo;ll

-      tell you how far I can promise anything.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;First, then, tuberculosis, of course.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Practical immunity from that, as long as you maintain your present

-      standards of life.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Typhoid fever. As I told you, we&rsquo;ve had one visitation.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no reason why you should ever have another if the

-      children will take ordinary precautions.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Diphtheria?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t guarantee the youngsters against getting it, though

-      we can do something to protect them. And if they do get it, we can be

-      pretty certain of pulling them through.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Scarlet fever and measles?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why not add whooping-cough and influenza? The former kills as many

-      people as either scarlet fever or measles, and the latter twice as many.

-      They&rsquo;re all in the same category; medical science is pretty near

-      helpless against their onset. You and your family may be as rigidly

-      careful as they will; if the family next door, or a family at the

-      farthermost end of the town, is careless, we&rsquo;re as likely as not to

-      suffer for their sins. All that I can promise, then, is hope against the

-      occurrence of these diseases, and the constant watchfulness, when they

-      come, which they call for but don&rsquo;t always get.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Cancer?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Eternal vigilance, again; so that, if it does come, we may discover

-      it in time.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let me see,&rdquo; mused Mr. Clyde; &ldquo;what else is there? Oh&mdash;nervous

-      and functional disorders.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Functional disorders mean, usually, either a bad start, or the

-      heritage of some disease like scarlet fever or grippe, or excess or

-      carelessness in living. I think your household is free from them; and it

-      should remain free. As for nervous ailments, they commonly mean lack of

-      self-discipline. It may be overindulgence in work&rdquo;&mdash;he glanced

-      down at his right hand&mdash;&ldquo;or it may be overindulgence in play.&rdquo;

-      His glance wandered significantly to the doorway, through which the voice

-      of Mrs. Clyde could be heard. &ldquo;By the way, you&rsquo;ve left out the

-      greatest destroyer of all&mdash;perhaps because you&rsquo;re beyond the

-      danger point.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tuberculosis is the greatest destroyer, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not numerically. It is beaten out by the death record of intestinal

-      poisoning in the very young. Your flock has run the gamut and come through

-      with undiminished vitality. Two of them, however, are running life&rsquo;s

-      race under a handicap&rdquo;&mdash;the father&rsquo;s eyelids went up&mdash;&ldquo;which

-      I&rsquo;ll take up shortly, when I&rsquo;ve fully determined the causes.

-      They can be repaired, one readily, the other in time. Finally, I hope to

-      be able to teach them the gospel of the sound, clean mind in the sound,

-      clean body. In a desert I might guarantee immunity from most of the ills

-      that flesh is heir to. Amid the complexities of our civilization, disease

-      and death are largely social; there is no telling from what friend the

-      poison may come. No man can safeguard his house. The most he can hope for

-      is a measure of protection. I can offer you nothing more than that, under

-      our compact.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is enough,&rdquo; returned Mr. Clyde. He took from his inner

-      pocket a folded paper, which he handed over to the young man. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s

-      the contract, duly signed. Come in, Grandma.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Sharpless, entering the door, stopped on seeing the two men.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Business, Tom?&rdquo; she asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Business that you&rsquo;re interested in,&rdquo; said her

-      son-in-law, and briefly outlined his plan.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Grandma Sharpless shook a wise gray head. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad you&rsquo;re

-      going to stay, young man,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;You need looking after.

-      But as for the scheme, I don&rsquo;t hold much with these new-fangled

-      notions.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perhaps it isn&rsquo;t as new-fangled as you suppose,&rdquo;

-      returned the head of the household. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just given Dr.

-      Strong a contract, and where do you suppose I got it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That lawyer man of yours, probably,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, he looked it over and made sure it was sound in American law.

-      But essentially it&rsquo;s a copy of a medical contract in force before

-      Hippocrates ever rolled a pill. It&rsquo;s the old logical Chinese form,

-      whereby the doctor&rsquo;s duty is prescribed as warding off sickness, not

-      curing it. Is that old-fashioned enough for you, grandma?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Chinese! My land!&rdquo; said the old lady. &ldquo;What do they

-      know about sickness?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They know the one most important fact in all medical practice, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo;

-      said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;that the time for locking the stable door is

-      before the horse is stolen, and that an ounce of prevention is worth a

-      pound of cure.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      II.&mdash;IN TIME OF PEACE

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;H</span>ow is the

-      Chinese plan working?&rdquo; asked Mr. Thomas Clyde, stretching himself on

-      the lounge in Dr. Strong&rsquo;s study.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      One week before, the doctor had been officially installed, on the Oriental

-      principle of guarding the Clyde household against intruding sickness. In

-      that time he had asked few questions. But Mr. Clyde, himself a close

-      observer, noted the newcomer&rsquo;s quietly keen observation of the

-      children, and sometimes of Mrs. Clyde, as they met at mealtime. He had

-      remarked, too, that the nervous tension of the man was relaxing; and

-      guessed that he had found, in his new and unique employment, something of

-      that panacea of the troubled soul, congenial work. Now, having come to Dr.

-      Strong&rsquo;s wing of the house by request, he smilingly put his

-      question, and was as smilingly answered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Your Chinese physician has been making what the Chinese call a

-      &lsquo;go-look-see.&rsquo; In other but less English terms, a reconnaissance.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In what department?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Earth, air, and water.&rdquo; The other waved an inclusive hand.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Any results?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, all kinds. Preliminary report now ready. I&rsquo;d like to make

-      it a sort of family conference.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good idea! I&rsquo;ll send for Mrs. Clyde and Grandma Sharpless.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Children out of town?&rdquo; inquired Dr. Strong suggestively.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course not. Oh, I see. You want us all. Servants, too?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The cook certainly. She should be very important to our council of

-      war. Perhaps we might leave the rest till later.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      They gathered in the spacious study; and Grandma Sharpless glanced round

-      approvingly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like family prayers,&rdquo; she commented.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Concerted effort <i>is</i> a sort of prayer, if it&rsquo;s honest,&rdquo;

-      said Dr. Strong gravely. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never had much of an opinion of

-      the man who gets up in meeting to beg the Lord for sound health for

-      himself and family and then goes home and sleeps with all his windows

-      closed.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There are no closed windows in this house,&rdquo; said Grandma

-      Sharpless emphatically. &ldquo;I see to that, having been brought up on

-      fresh air myself.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You show it,&rdquo; returned the doctor pleasantly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And I&rsquo;ve noticed that this house breathes deep at night,

-      through plenty of open windows. So I can save my own breath on that topic.

-      Just now I want to talk milk.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All our milk comes from my farm,&rdquo; said the head of the

-      family. &ldquo;Cows are my hobby. You ought to see the place, Strong; it&rsquo;s

-      only ten miles out.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I have seen the place.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What do you think of it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I think you&rsquo;d better get your milk somewhere else for a

-      while.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, Dr. Strong!&rdquo; protested Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;There isn&rsquo;t

-      a woman among my friends who doesn&rsquo;t envy me our cream. And the milk

-      keeps sweet&mdash;oh, for days, doesn&rsquo;t it, Katie?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes&rsquo;m,&rdquo; replied the cook. &ldquo;Three days, or even

-      four, in the ice-box.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t that show it&rsquo;s pure?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde

-      triumphantly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong shook his head. &ldquo;Hardly proof,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Really

-      clean milk will keep much longer. I have drunk milk from the Rochester

-      municipal supply that was thirteen days old, and as sweet as possible. And

-      that was in a hot August.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Thirteen days old! I&rsquo;d be ashamed to tell it!&rdquo; declared

-      Grandma Sharpless, with so much asperity that there was a general laugh,

-      in which the doctor joined.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t care to try it with your milk. It is rich, but it

-      isn&rsquo;t by any means pure. Eternal vigilance is the price of good

-      milk. I don&rsquo;t suppose you inspect your farm once a month, do you,

-      Mr. Clyde?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; I leave that to the farmer. He&rsquo;s an intelligent fellow.

-      What&rsquo;s wrong?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Scientifically speaking, from 300,000 to 500,000 bacteria per cubic

-      centimeter.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do we drink all those things when we have a glass of milk, Dr.

-      Strong?&rdquo; inquired &ldquo;Manny&rdquo; Clyde, the oldest boy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Four or five times that many for every teaspoonful,&rdquo; said the

-      doctor. &ldquo;But it isn&rsquo;t as bad as it sounds, Manny. One hundred

-      thousand is considered a fairly safe allowance, though <i>very</i> good

-      milk&mdash;the kind I drank when it was thirteen days old&mdash;may

-      contain only two or three thousand. When the count runs up to half a

-      million or so, it shows that some kind of impurity is getting in. The

-      bacteria in your milk may not be disease germs at all; they may all be

-      quite harmless varieties. But sooner or later, if dirt gets into milk,

-      dangerous germs will get in with it. The high count is a good danger

-      signal.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If Bliss, the farmer, has been allowing dirt to get into the milk,

-      he&rsquo;ll find himself out of a place,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde decisively.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be too hard on him,&rdquo; advised the doctor. &ldquo;His

-      principal fault is that he&rsquo;s getting the milk dirty trying to keep

-      it clean. He is washing his cans with water from an open well near the

-      barnyard. The water in the well is badly contaminated from surface

-      drainage. That would account for the high number of bacteria; that and

-      careless milking.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And on that account you advise me to give up the milk?&rdquo; asked

-      Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only temporarily. There are other more immediate considerations.

-      For one thing, there are both diphtheria and typhoid near by, and the

-      people on the farm are in contact with them. That&rsquo;s dangerous. You

-      see, milk under favorable conditions is one of the best cultures for germs

-      that is known. They flourish and multiply in it past belief. The merest

-      touch of contamination may spread through a whole supply, like fire

-      through flax. One more thing: one of your cows, I fear, is tuberculous.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We might pasteurize, I suppose,&rdquo; suggested Mrs. Clyde

-      anxiously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong returned a decisive negative. &ldquo;Pasteurized milk is better

-      than poisoned milk,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but it&rsquo;s a lot worse than

-      good raw milk. Pasteurizing simply means the semi-cooking of all the

-      varieties of germs, good and bad. In the process of cooking, some of the

-      nutritive quality is lost. To be sure, it kills the bad germs, but it also

-      kills the good ones.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you mean that some of the germs are actually useful?&rdquo;

-      asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very useful, in certain rôles. For example, the lactic acid

-      bacteria would be unpopular with you, Mrs. Clyde, because they are

-      responsible for the souring of milk. But they also perform a protective

-      work. They do their best to destroy any bacilli of disease which may

-      invade their liquid home. Now, when you pasteurize, you kill all these

-      millions of defenders; and any hostile germs that come along afterward and

-      get into the milk, through dust or other mediums, can take possession and

-      multiply without hindrance. Therefore pasteurized milk ought to be guarded

-      with extra care after the process, which it seldom is. I once visited a

-      large pasteurizing plant which made great boasts of its purity of product,

-      and saw flies coming in from garbage pail and manure heap to contaminate

-      the milk in the vats; milk helpless to protect itself, because all its

-      army of defense had been boiled to death.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If we are allowed neither to use our farm milk raw nor to

-      pasteurize it, what shall we do with it?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Full directions are in there,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong, pointing

-      to an envelope on his desk. &ldquo;If you&rsquo;ll look over what I&rsquo;ve

-      written, and instruct your farmer to follow it out, you&rsquo;ll have milk

-      that is reasonably good. I&rsquo;ll go further than that; it will be even

-      good enough to give to the babies of the tenements, if you should have any

-      left over.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Thomas Clyde proceeded to rub his chin, with some degree of

-      concentration, whereby Dr. Strong knew that his hint had struck in.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Meantime,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, with a trace of sarcasm, &ldquo;do

-      you expect us to live on condensed milk?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not at all; on certified milk.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that mean?&rdquo; asked Miss Julia, who had a thirst

-      for information.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s a certificate, Junkum?&rdquo; retorted the doctor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I get when I pass my examinations.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Right! Well, milk coming from a farm that passes all its

-      examinations gets a certificate from the Medical Society, which keeps a

-      pretty constant watch over it. The society sees that all the cattle are

-      tested for tuberculosis once in so often; that the cows are brushed off

-      before milking; that the milking is done through a cloth, through which no

-      dirt or dust can pass, into a can that has been cleaned by steam&mdash;not

-      by contaminated water&mdash;so that no germs will remain alive in it; then

-      cooled and sealed up and delivered. From the time the milk leaves the cow

-      until it comes on your table, it hasn&rsquo;t touched anything that isn&rsquo;t

-      germ-proof. That is the system I have outlined in the paper for your

-      farmer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It sounds expensive,&rdquo; commented Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; that is the drawback. Certified milk costs from fifteen to

-      twenty cents a quart. But when you consider that nearly half the dead

-      babies were poisoned by bad milk it doesn&rsquo;t seem so expensive, does

-      it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All very well for us,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde thoughtfully. &ldquo;We

-      can afford it. But how about the thousands who can&rsquo;t?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s the pity of it. Theoretically every city should

-      maintain a milk standard up to the requirements of the medical

-      certification, and allow no milk to be sold which falls short of that. It&rsquo;s

-      feasible, and it could be done at a moderate price if we could educate the

-      farmer to it. Copenhagen&rsquo;s milk supply is as good as the best

-      certified milk in this country, because the great Danish Milk Company

-      cooperates with the farmer, and doesn&rsquo;t try to make huge profits;

-      and its product sells under five cents a quart. But, to answer your

-      question, Mr. Clyde: even a family of very moderate means could afford to

-      take enough certified milk for the baby, and it would pay in doctor&rsquo;s

-      bills saved. Older children and grown-ups aren&rsquo;t so much affected by

-      milk.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go out to the farm to-morrow,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s next?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Water, Mr. Clyde. I&rsquo;ve found out where you got your typhoid,

-      last summer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Pooh! I could have told you that,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless.

-      &ldquo;There was sewer-gas in the house. It smelled to heaven the day

-      before he was taken down.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it curious how our belief in ghosts sticks to us!&rdquo;

-      commented the doctor, chuckling,&mdash;&ldquo;malaria rising from swamps;

-      typhoid and diphtheria rising in sewer-gas; sheeted specters rising from

-      country graveyards&mdash;all in the same category.&rdquo; Grandma

-      Sharpless pushed her spectacles up on her forehead, a signal of battle

-      with her. &ldquo;Do you mean to tell me, young man, that there&rsquo;s no

-      harm in sewer-gas?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Far from it! There&rsquo;s harm enough in sewer-gas, but no germs.

-      The harm is that the gas reduces vitality, and makes one more liable to

-      disease attack. It&rsquo;s just as true of coal-gas as of sewer-gas, and

-      more true of ordinary illuminating gas than either. I&rsquo;d much rather

-      have bad plumbing in the house than even a small leak in a gas-pipe. No,

-      Mrs. Sharpless, if you waited all day at the mouth of a sewer, you&rsquo;d

-      never catch a germ from the gas. Moreover, typhoid doesn&rsquo;t develop

-      under ten days, so your odorous outbreak of the day before could have had

-      nothing to do with Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s illness.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perhaps you&rsquo;ll give us <i>your</i> theory,&rdquo; said the

-      old lady, with an elaboration of politeness which plainly meant, &ldquo;And

-      whatever it is, I don&rsquo;t propose to believe it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not mine, but the City Water Commissioner&rsquo;s. Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s

-      case was one of about eighty, all within a few weeks of each other. They

-      were all due to the criminal negligence of a city official who permitted

-      the river supply, which isn&rsquo;t fit to drink and is used only for fire

-      pressure, to flood into the mains carrying the drinking supply.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then why didn&rsquo;t the whole city get typhoid?&rdquo; asked Mr.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Because only a part of the system was flooded by the river water.

-      The problem of the city&rsquo;s experts was to find out what part was

-      being contaminated with this dilute sewage. When the typhoid began to

-      appear, the Health Department, knowing the Cypress supply to be pure,

-      suspected milk. Not until a score of cases, showing a distribution

-      distinct from any milk supply, had appeared, was suspicion directed to the

-      water supply. Then the officials of the Water Department and Health

-      Department tried a very simple but highly ingenious test. They dumped a

-      lot of salt into the intake of the river supply, and tested hydrant after

-      hydrant of the reservoir supply, until they had a complete outline of the

-      mixed waters. From that it was easy to ascertain the point of mixture, and

-      stop it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Our river water is always bad, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; said Mr.

-      Clyde. &ldquo;Last summer I had to keep Charley away from swimming-school

-      because the tank is filled from the river, and two children got typhoid

-      from swallowing some of it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All foolishness, I say,&rdquo; announced the grandmother. &ldquo;Better

-      let &lsquo;em learn to swim.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you swim at all?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong, turning to

-      the seven-year-old.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I went five strokes once,&rdquo; said Charley. &ldquo;Hum-m-m! Any

-      other swimming-school near by?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And are the children about water at all?&rdquo; Dr. Strong asked

-      the mother.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well; there are the canal and the river both near us, you know.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then it comes down to this,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;The

-      liability of typhoid from what water Charley would swallow in the tank isn&rsquo;t

-      very great. And if he should get it, the chances are we could pull him

-      through. With the best care, there should be only one chance in fifty of a

-      fatal result. But if Charley falls in the canal and, not knowing how to

-      swim, is drowned, why, that&rsquo;s the end of it. Medical science is no

-      good there. Of two dangers choose the lesser. Better let him go on with

-      the swimming, Mrs. Clyde.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, &ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;I&mdash;swanny!&rdquo;

-      This was extreme profanity for her. &ldquo;Young man, I&rsquo;m glad to

-      see for once that you&rsquo;ve got sense as well as science!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you consider the Cypress supply always safe to drink? Several

-      times it has occurred to me to outfit the house with filters,&rdquo; said

-      Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No need, so long as the present Water Department is in office,&rdquo;

-      returned Dr. Strong. &ldquo;I might almost add, no use anyway.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t filtered water good?&rdquo; asked Manny. &ldquo;They

-      have it at the gymnasium.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No house filter is absolutely sure. There&rsquo;s just one way to

-      get a guaranteeable water: distill it. But I think you can safely use the

-      city supply.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What next, the water problem being cleared up?&rdquo; asked Mr.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By no means cleared up. Assuming that you are reasonably

-      safeguarded at home, you&rsquo;re just as likely&mdash;yes, even more

-      likely&mdash;to pick up typhoid somewhere else.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why more likely?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;For some mysterious reason a man accustomed to a good water supply

-      is the easiest victim to a bad. Pittsburg, for many years the most

-      notorious of American cities for filthy drinking, is a case in point. Some

-      one pointed out that when Pittsburg was prosperous, and wages high, the

-      typhoid rate went up; and when times were hard, it went down. Dr. Matson,

-      of the Health Bureau, cleared up that point, by showing that the increase

-      in Pittsburg&rsquo;s favorite disease was mainly among the newcomers who

-      flocked to the city when the mills were running full time, to fill the

-      demand for labor. An old resident might escape, a new one might hardly

-      hope to. Dr. Matson made the interesting suggestion that perhaps those who

-      drank the diluted sewage&mdash;for that is what the river water was&mdash;right

-      along, came, in time, to develop a sort of immunity; whereas the newcomer

-      was defenseless before the bacilli.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then a man, in traveling, ought to know the water supply of every

-      city he goes to. How is he to find out?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In your case, Mr. Clyde, he&rsquo;s to find out from his Chinese

-      doctor,&rdquo; said the other smiling. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m collecting data

-      from state and city health boards, on that and other points. Air will now

-      come in for its share of attention.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Young Manny Clyde grinned. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use, Dr. Strong?&rdquo;

-      he said. &ldquo;Nothing to breathe but air, you know.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;True enough, youngster; but you can pick your air to some extent,

-      so it&rsquo;s worth while to know where it&rsquo;s good and where it&rsquo;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&mdash;that&rsquo;s the little fellow that brings

-      pneumonia and is always hanging about, looking for an opening in

-      unprotected breathing apparatus&mdash;gets in his deadly work. Somewhere I&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me that New York is unfit to breathe in!&rdquo;

-      said Mrs. Clyde, with a woman&rsquo;s love for the metropolis.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Thus far it&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s even worse to breathe steel than to breathe coal.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Any railroad track must be bad, then,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That sounds like one of those maxims of the many that only the few

-      believe,&rdquo; remarked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You won&rsquo;t practice it, but you can safely believe it,&rdquo;

-      retorted the doctor. &ldquo;The atmosphere in a day coach is always better

-      than in a parlor car, because there&rsquo;s an occasional direct draft

-      through. As for a sleeping-car,&mdash;well, I never get into one without

-      thinking of the definition in &lsquo;Life&rsquo;s&rsquo; dictionary:

-      &lsquo;Sleeping-Car&mdash;An invention for the purpose of transporting bad

-      air from one city to another.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The poor railroads!&rdquo; chuckled Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;They get

-      blamed for everything, nowadays.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It may not be the Pullman Company&rsquo;s fault that I don&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And sleep in that cold draft!&rdquo; cried Mrs Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;My dear Mrs. Clyde,&rdquo; replied the doctor suavely, &ldquo;will

-      you tell me the difference between a draft and a wind?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is it a conundrum?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; but I&rsquo;ll answer it for you. A draft is inside a house; a

-      wind outside. You&rsquo;re not afraid of wind, are you?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course not.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then to you an air-current is like a burglar. It&rsquo;s harmless

-      enough outside the room, but as soon as it comes through a window and gets

-      into the room, it&rsquo;s dangerous.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sound common sense!&rdquo; put in Granny Sharpless. &ldquo;Young

-      man, I believe you&rsquo;re older than you look.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m old enough to know that pure air is better than foul warm

-      air, anyway. Here; I want you youngsters to understand this,&rdquo; he

-      added, turning to the children. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t given his blood the right supply. His whole system

-      is weakened, and he &lsquo;catches cold,&rsquo; not from too much air, but

-      too little.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s often struck me,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;that I

-      feel better traveling in Europe than in America. Yet our Pullmans are

-      supposed to be the best in the world.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The worst!&rdquo; declared Dr. Strong forcefully. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There was a pause, in which rose the clear whisper of Bobs, appealing to

-      his mentor, Julia, for information.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Say, Junkum, how did we get so far away from home?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;High time we came back, isn&rsquo;t it, Bobs?&rdquo; approved the

-      doctor. &ldquo;Well, suppose we return by way of the school-house. All of

-      you go to Number Three but Betsey, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And I&rsquo;m go-un next year,&rdquo; announced that young lady.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perhaps not,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think,

-      Doctor, that children are liable to catch all sorts of things in the

-      public schools?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Unquestionably.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;More so than in private schools, aren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Hum! Well, yes; since they&rsquo;re brought into contact with a

-      more miscellaneous lot of comrades.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Which is exactly why I have insisted on our sticking to the regular

-      schools,&rdquo; put in Mr. Clyde, with the air of quiet decisiveness.

-      &ldquo;I want our children to be brought up like other children!&rdquo;

-      The mother shook her head dubiously. &ldquo;I wish I were sure it is the

-      right place for them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You ought to be sure. I might even say&mdash;if you will forgive

-      the implied criticism&mdash;that you ought to be surer than you are.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Alarmed at his tone, the mother leaned forward. &ldquo;Is there anything

-      the matter at Number Three?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Several things. Nothing that you need worry about immediately,

-      however. I&rsquo;ve been talking with some of the teachers, and found out

-      a few points. Charley&rsquo;s teacher, for instance, tells me that she has

-      a much harder time keeping the children up to their work in the winter

-      term than at other times.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I remember Charley&rsquo;s tantrums over his arithmetic, last

-      winter,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;My head felt funny. Kinder thick,&rdquo; defended Charley.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is bad,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;very bad. I&rsquo;ve

-      reported the teacher in that grade to Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Reported teacher?&rdquo; said Charley, his eyes assuming a

-      prominence quite startling. &ldquo;What for?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Starving her grade.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Clyde fairly bounced in her chair. &ldquo;Our children are not

-      supposed to eat at school, Dr. Strong.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Starving her grade,&rdquo; continued the doctor, &ldquo;in the most

-      important need of the human organism, air.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How do you reach that conclusion?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Evidence and experience. I remember in my college days that the

-      winter term was considered to be the most difficult in every year. The

-      curriculum didn&rsquo;t seem to show it, but every professor and every

-      undergraduate knew it. Bad air, that&rsquo;s all. The recitation rooms

-      were kept tightly closed. The human brain can&rsquo;t burn carbon and get

-      a bright flame of intelligence without a good draft, and the breathing is

-      the draft. Now, on the evidence of Charley&rsquo;s teacher, when winter

-      comes percentages go down, although the lessons are the same. So I asked

-      her about the ventilation and found that she had a superstitious dread of

-      cold.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I remember Miss Benn&rsquo;s room,&rdquo; said Julia thoughtfully.

-      &ldquo;It used to get awful hot there. I never liked that grade anyway,

-      and Bobs got such bad deportment marks.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Both of the twins had colds all the winter they were in that room,&rdquo;

-      contributed Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Up went Dr. Strong&rsquo;s hands, the long fingers doubled in, in a

-      curious gesture which only stress of feeling ever drove him to use.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;When will the substitute mothers and fathers who run our

-      schools learn about air!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Air! It&rsquo;s the first

-      cry of the newly born baby. Air! It&rsquo;s the last plea of the man with

-      the death-rattle in his throat. It&rsquo;s the one free boon, and we shut

-      it out. If I&rsquo;m here next winter, I think I&rsquo;ll load up with

-      stones and break some windows!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Lemme go with you!&rdquo; cried Charley, with the eagerness of

-      destruction proper to seven years. &ldquo;On the whole, Charley,&rdquo;

-      replied the other, chuckling a little, &ldquo;perhaps it&rsquo;s better to

-      smash traditions. Not easier, but better.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But you wouldn&rsquo;t have them study with all the windows open on

-      a zero day!&rdquo; protested Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t I! Far rather than choke them in a close room! Why,

-      in Chicago, the sickly children have special classes on the roof, or in

-      the yards, all through the cold weather. They study in overcoats and

-      mittens. And they <i>learn</i>. Not only that, but they thrive on it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde was rubbing his chin hard. &ldquo;Perhaps our school system isn&rsquo;t

-      all I bragged,&rdquo; he observed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not in all respects. You still stick to that relic of barbarism,

-      the common drinking-cup, after filtering your water. That&rsquo;s a joke!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see the point,&rdquo; confessed Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Whom

-      is the joke on?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All of you who pay for the useless filters and then settle doctors&rsquo;

-      bills for the disease spread by the drinking-cups. Don&rsquo;t you

-      understand that in the common contagious diseases, the mouth is the danger

-      point? Now, you may filter water till it&rsquo;s dry, but if in drinking

-      it you put your lips to a cup soiled by the touch of diseased lips, you&rsquo;re

-      in danger. We think too much of the water and too little of what contains

-      it. I&rsquo;ve seen a school in Auburn, New York, and I&rsquo;ve seen a

-      golf course at the Country Club in Seattle, where there isn&rsquo;t a

-      glass or cup to be found; and they have two of the best water supplies I

-      know. A tiny fountain spouts up to meet your lips, and your mouth touches

-      nothing but the running water. The water itself being pure, you can&rsquo;t

-      possibly get any infection from it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can you get me a report on that for the Board of Education?&rdquo;

-      asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s already here,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong quietly. &ldquo;That

-      is part of my Chinese job of watch-dog. One other matter. A teacher in

-      another grade, at Number Three, with whom I talked, stood with a pencil,

-      which she had taken from one of her scholars, pressed to her lips. While

-      we talked she gave it back to the child.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, land sakes!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, &ldquo;where&rsquo;s

-      the harm? I suppose the poor girl was clean, wasn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How do I know? How does anybody know? There is a case on record

-      where a teacher carried the virulent bacilli of diphtheria in her throat

-      for three months. Suppose she had been careless about putting her lips to

-      the various belongings of the children. How many of them do you suppose

-      she would have killed with the deadly poison?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t she know she had diphtheria?&rdquo; asked Junkum,

-      wide-eyed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;She hadn&rsquo;t, dear. She was what we call a &lsquo;carrier&rsquo;

-      of disease. For some reason which we can&rsquo;t find out, a &lsquo;carrier&rsquo;

-      doesn&rsquo;t fall ill, but will give the disease to any one else as

-      surely as a very sick person, if the germs from the throat reach the

-      throat or lips of others.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Some lectures on hygiene might not be amiss in Number Three,&rdquo;

-      said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what medical school inspectors are for&mdash;to teach

-      the teachers. The Board of Education should be getting it started.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What are you doing over there, Twinkles?&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde to

-      Bettina, who had slipped from his knee and was sliding her chubby fist

-      along the window-pane.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The child looked around. &ldquo;Thwat that fly,&rdquo; she explained with

-      perfect seriousness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;She has heard the other children talking about the fly-leaflets

-      that have been scattered around. Where&rsquo;s the fly, Toodles?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Up they-arr,&rdquo; replied Bettina, pointing to a far corner of

-      the pane where a big &ldquo;green-bottle&rdquo; bumped its head against

-      the glass. &ldquo;Come down, buzzy fly.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now, where,&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde, in despair, &ldquo;do you

-      suppose that wretched creature came from? I&rsquo;m so particular always

-      to keep the rooms screened and darkened.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Please&rsquo;m, it might have come from the kitchen,&rdquo;

-      suggested Katie. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a plenty of &lsquo;em there.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And before that it came from your next-door neighbor&rsquo;s

-      manure-heap,&rdquo; added Dr. Strong. &ldquo;That particular kind of fly

-      breeds only in manure. The fact is that the fly is about the nastiest

-      thing alive. Compared to it, a hog is a gentleman, and a vulture an

-      epicure. It loves filth, and unhappily, it also loves clean, household

-      foods. Therefore the path of its feet is direct between the two&mdash;from

-      your neighbor&rsquo;s stable-yard to your dinner-table.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Disgusting!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Worse than disgusting: dangerous,&rdquo; returned Dr. Strong,

-      unmoved by her distaste. &ldquo;A fly&rsquo;s feet are more than likely to

-      be covered with disease-bearing matter, which he leaves behind him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Something ought to be done about Freeman&rsquo;s manure-heap, next

-      door. I&rsquo;ll see to it,&rdquo; announced Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Doubtless you could report him for maintaining a nuisance,&rdquo;

-      admitted Dr. Strong; &ldquo;in which case he might&mdash;er&mdash;conceivably

-      retort upon you with your unscreened garbage-pails, which are hatcheries

-      for another variety of fly.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a beam in the eye for you, Tom,&rdquo; said Grandma

-      Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Meantime I&rsquo;ll have the kitchen windows and doors screened at

-      once,&rdquo; declared Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That will help,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;though it won&rsquo;t

-      cure. You can gain some idea, from this matter of the flies, how intricate

-      a social problem health really is. No man sins to himself alone, in

-      hygiene, and no man can thoroughly protect himself against the misdeeds of

-      his neighbor. It&rsquo;s true that there is such a thing as individual

-      self-defense by a sort of personal fortifying of the body&mdash;I&rsquo;ll

-      take that up some other time&mdash;but it&rsquo;s very limited. You can

-      carry the fight into the enemy&rsquo;s country and eradicate the evil

-      conditions that threaten all, only by identifying yourself with your

-      environment, and waging war on that basis. Mr. Clyde, do you know anything

-      about the row of wooden tenements in the adjoining alley?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Saddler&rsquo;s Shacks? Not much, except that a lot of Italians

-      live there.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Some live; some die. The whole settlement is a scandal of

-      overcrowding, dirt, and disease. I&rsquo;ve made out a little local health

-      report of the place, for the year. Of course, it&rsquo;s incomplete; but

-      it&rsquo;s significant. Look it over.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde read aloud as follows:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"></a>

-    </p>

-

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What do you think of it?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a bad showing.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a bad showing and a bad property. Why don&rsquo;t you

-      buy it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Who? I? Are you advising me to buy a job-lot of diseases?&rdquo;

-      queried Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well&mdash;as a protective investment. We&rsquo;d be safe here if

-      those tenements were run differently.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But we aren&rsquo;t in touch with them at all. They are around the

-      corner on another block.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nevertheless, visitors pass daily between your house and Saddler&rsquo;s

-      Shacks. One of the young men from there delivers bread, often with his

-      bare and probably filthy hands. Two of the women peddle fruit about the

-      neighborhood. What Saddler&rsquo;s Shacks get in the way of disease, you

-      may easily get by transmission from them. Further, the sanitary

-      arrangements of the shacks are primitive, not to say prehistoric, and,

-      incidentally, illegal. They are within the area of fly-travel from here,

-      so both the human and the winged disease-bearers have the best possible

-      opportunity to pick up infection in its worst form.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ugh!&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll never eat with a

-      fly again as long as I live!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t it be a simple matter to have the Bureau of Health

-      condemn the property?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It would not.&rdquo; Dr. Strong spoke with curt emphasis.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Certain features, you said, are illegal.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But pull is still stronger than law in this city.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Who owns Saddler&rsquo;s Shacks?&rdquo; asked Grandma Sharpless,

-      going with characteristic directness to the point.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Mrs. Carson Searle.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, then, it&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; asserted Mrs. Clyde.

-      &ldquo;I know Mrs. Searle very well. She&rsquo;s a leader in church and

-      charitable work. Of course, she doesn&rsquo;t know about the condition of

-      the property.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;She knows enough about it,&rdquo; retorted Dr. Strong grimly,

-      &ldquo;to go to the Mayor over the Health Officer&rsquo;s head, and put a

-      stop to Dr. Merritt&rsquo;s order for the premises to be cleaned up at the

-      owner&rsquo;s expense. She wants her profits undisturbed. And now, before

-      the conference breaks up, I propose that we organize the Household

-      Protective Association.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, can we children belong?&rdquo; cried Julia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course. There are offices and honors enough for all. Mr. Clyde

-      shall be president; Mrs. Sharpless, vice-president and secretary; Mrs.

-      Clyde, treasurer, and each one of the rest of you shall have a committee.

-      Katie, I appoint you chairman of the Committee on Food, and if any more

-      flies get into your kitchen, you can report &lsquo;em to the Committee on

-      Flies, Miss Bettina Clyde, chairman; motto, &lsquo;Thwat that fly!&rsquo;

-      Manny, you like to go to the farm; you get the Committee on Milk Supply.

-      Junkum, your committee shall be that of school conditions. Bobs, water is

-      your element. As Water Commissioner you must keep watch on the city

-      reports. I&rsquo;ll see that they are sent you regularly; and the typhoid

-      records.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t left anything for me,&rdquo; protested Charley.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t I! You&rsquo;ve got one of the biggest of all jobs,

-      air. If the windows aren&rsquo;t properly wide when the house is asleep, I

-      want to know it from you, and you&rsquo;ll have to get up early to find

-      out. If the Street Cleaning Department sweeps the air full of dust because

-      it&rsquo;s too lazy to wash down the roadway first, we&rsquo;ll make a

-      committee report to the Mayor.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Bettina, <i>alias</i> Toots, <i>alias</i> Twinkles, <i>alias</i> the

-      Cherub, trotted oyer and laid two plump hands on the doctor&rsquo;s knee.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you goin&rsquo; to be anyfing in the play?&rdquo; she

-      asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I?&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Of course, Toots. Every real

-      association has to have officers and membership, you know. I&rsquo;m the

-      Member.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      III.&mdash;REPAIRING BETTINA

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;M</span>edicine

-      would be the ideal profession if it did not involve giving pain,&rdquo;

-      said Dr. Strong, setting a paper-weight upon some school reports which had

-      just come in.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve been here three months and you haven&rsquo;t hurt any

-      one yet,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde easily.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. I&rsquo;ve been cautious, and perhaps a little cowardly. My

-      place as Chinese doctor has been such a sinecure that I&rsquo;ve let

-      things go. Moreover, I&rsquo;ve wanted to gain Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s

-      confidence as much as possible, before coming to the point.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The expression of Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s keen, good-humored face altered and

-      focused sharply. He scrutinized the doctor in silence. &ldquo;Well, let&rsquo;s

-      have it,&rdquo; he said at length. &ldquo;Is it my wife?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. It&rsquo;s Bettina.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The father winced. &ldquo;That baby!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Serious?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;On the contrary, quite simple. <i>If</i> it is handled wisely. But

-      it means&mdash;pain. Not a great deal; but still, pain.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;An operation?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;Merely a minor one. I&rsquo;ve sounded Mrs.

-      Clyde, without her knowing it, and she will oppose it. Mrs. Sharpless,

-      too, I fear. You know how women dread suffering for the children they

-      love.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Again Mr. Clyde winced. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s&mdash;it&rsquo;s necessary, of

-      course,&rdquo; he said.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not to do it would be both stupid and cruel. Shall we call in the

-      women and have it out with them?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      For reply, Mr. Clyde pressed a button and sent the servant who responded,

-      for Mrs. Clyde and her mother. Grandma Sharpless arrived first, took stock

-      of the men&rsquo;s grave faces, and sat down silently, folding her strong,

-      competent hands in her lap. But no sooner had Mrs. Clyde caught sight of

-      her husband&rsquo;s face than her hand went to her throat.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The children&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing to be alarmed about, Mrs. Clyde,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong

-      quickly. He pushed a chair toward her. &ldquo;Sit down. It&rsquo;s a

-      question of&mdash;of what I might call carpenter-work&rdquo;&mdash;the

-      mother laughed a nervous relief&mdash;&ldquo;on Betty.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Betty?&rdquo; Her fears fluttered in her voice. &ldquo;What about

-      Betty?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;She needs repairing; that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what you mean! Is she hurt?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not at all. She is breathing wrong. She breathes through her mouth.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; There was reassurance and a measure even of contempt in

-      Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s voice. &ldquo;Lots of children do that. Perhaps she&rsquo;s

-      got a little cold.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t that. This is no new thing with her. She is a

-      mouth-breather.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll see that it&rsquo;s corrected,&rdquo; promised the

-      mother.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only one thing can correct it,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong gravely.

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a difficulty that must be removed.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You mean an operation? On that baby? Do you know that she isn&rsquo;t

-      five yet? And you want to cut her with a knife&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Steady, Myra,&rdquo; came Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s full, even speech.

-      &ldquo;Dr. Strong doesn&rsquo;t <i>want</i> to do anything except what he

-      considers necessary.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Necessary! Supposing she does breathe through her mouth! What

-      excuse is that for torturing her&mdash;my baby!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll answer that, Mrs. Clyde,&rdquo; said the doctor, with

-      patient politeness. Walking over to the window he threw it up and called,

-      &ldquo;Oh, Tootles! Twinkles! Honorable Miss Cherub, come up here. I&rsquo;ve

-      got something to show you.&rdquo; And presently in came the child,

-      dragging a huge and dilapidated doll.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      She was a picture of rosy health, but, for the first time, the mother

-      noted the drooping of the lower jaw, and the slight lift of the upper lip,

-      revealing the edges of two pearly teeth. Dr. Strong took from a drawer a

-      little wooden box, adjusted a lever and, placing the ear pieces in Betty&rsquo;s

-      ears, bade her listen. But the child shook her head. Again he adjusted the

-      indicator. This time, too, she said that she heard nothing. Not until the

-      fourth change did she announce delightedly that she heard a pretty bell,

-      but that it sounded very far away.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now we&rsquo;ll try it on mother,&rdquo; said the experimenter, and

-      added in a low tone as he handed it to Mrs. Clyde, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve set

-      it two points less loud than Betty&rsquo;s mark. Can you hear it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Clyde nodded. A look of dread came into her eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now, Tootles, open your mouth,&rdquo; directed the doctor,

-      producing a little oblong metal contrivance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t got any sore froat,&rdquo; objected the young lady.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, but I want to look at the thoughts inside your head,&rdquo; he

-      explained mysteriously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      With entire confidence the child opened her mouth as wide as possible, and

-      Dr. Strong, setting the instrument far back against her tongue, applied

-      his eye to the other end.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All right, Toots,&rdquo; he said, after a moment. &ldquo;Get your

-      breath, and then let mother look.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He showed Mrs. Clyde how to press the tiny button setting aglow an

-      electric lamp and lighting up the nasal passages above the throat, which

-      were reflected on a mirror within the contrivance and thus made clear to

-      the eye. Following his instructions, she set her eye to the miniature

-      telescope as the physician pressed it against the little tongue.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, Betty,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, as the implement was again

-      withdrawn, &ldquo;you&rsquo;ve got very nice thoughts inside that wise

-      little head of yours. Now you can continue bringing up your doll in the

-      way she should go.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As the door closed behind her the mother turned to Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is she going to be deaf?&rdquo; she asked breathlessly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; he reassured her. &ldquo;That will be taken

-      care of. What did you see above the back of the throat?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Little things like tiny stalactites hanging down.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Adenoids.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Where could she have gotten adenoids?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;From her remotest imaginable ancestor, probably.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, aren&rsquo;t they a disease?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. An inheritance. The race has always had them. Probably they&rsquo;re

-      vestigial salivary glands, the use of which we&rsquo;ve outgrown.

-      Unfortunately they may overdevelop and block up the air-passages. Then

-      they have to come out.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      For the first time in the conference Grandma Sharpless gathered force and

-      speech.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Young man,&rdquo; she said solemnly&mdash;rather accusingly, in

-      fact&mdash;&ldquo;if the Lord put adenoids in the human nose he put

-      &lsquo;em there for some purpose.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Doubtless. But that purpose, whatever it may have been, no longer

-      exists.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Everything in the human body has some use,&rdquo; she persisted.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Had,&rdquo; corrected Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Not has. How about your

-      appendix?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Sharpless&rsquo;s appendix, like the wicked, had long since ceased

-      from troubling, and was now at rest in alcohol in a doctor&rsquo;s office,

-      having, previous to the change of location, given its original

-      proprietress the one bad scare of her life. Therefore, she blinked, not

-      being provided with a ready answer.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The ancestors of man,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;were endowed

-      with sundry organs, like the appendix and the adenoids, which civilized

-      man is better off without. And, as civilized man possesses a God-given

-      intelligence to tell him how to get rid of them, he wisely does so when it&rsquo;s

-      necessary.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What have the adenoids to do with Betty&rsquo;s deafness?&rdquo;

-      asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Everything. They divert the air-currents, thicken the tubes

-      connecting throat and ear, and interfere with the hearing. Don&rsquo;t let

-      that little deficiency in keenness of ear bother you, though. Most likely

-      it will pass with the removal of the adenoids. Even if it shouldn&rsquo;t,

-      it is too slight to be a handicap. But I want the child to be repaired

-      before any of the familiar and more serious adenoid difficulties are fixed

-      on her for life.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are there others?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde apprehensively.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, every imaginable kind. How could it be otherwise? Here&rsquo;s

-      the very first principle of life, the breath, being diverted from its

-      proper course, in the mouth-breather; isn&rsquo;t a general derangement of

-      functions the inevitable result? The hearing is affected, as I&rsquo;ve

-      shown you already. The body doesn&rsquo;t get its proper amount of oxygen,

-      and the digestion suffers. The lungs draw their air-supply in the wrong

-      way, and the lung capacity is diminished. The open mouth admits all kinds

-      of dust particles which inflame the throat and make it hospitable to

-      infection. By incorrect breathing the facial aspect of the mouth-breather

-      is variously modified and always for the worse; since the soft facial

-      bones of youth are altered by the continual striking of an air-current on

-      the roof of the mouth, which is pushed upward, distorting the whole face.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;None of <i>our</i> children are distorted. You won&rsquo;t find a

-      better-looking lot anywhere,&rdquo; challenged Mrs. Sharpless, the

-      grandmother&rsquo;s pride up in arms.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;True. None of them has had overdeveloped adenoids, except Betty.

-      The others all breathe through their noses. See how different their mouths

-      are from Betty&rsquo;s lifting upper lip&mdash;very fascinating now, but

-      later&mdash;Well, I&rsquo;ve gone so far as to prepare an object-lesson

-      for you. Three extreme types of the mouth-breathers are here from school

-      by my invitation to have some lemonade and cakes. They are outside now.

-      When they come in, I want each of you to make an analysis of one of them,

-      without their seeing it, of course. Talk with them about their work in

-      school. You may get ideas from that. Mrs. Sharpless, you take the taller

-      of the girls; Mrs. Clyde, you study the shorter. The boy goes to you, Mr.

-      Clyde.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The trio of visitors entered, somewhat mystified, but delighted to be the

-      guests of their friend, Dr. Strong, who had a faculty of interesting

-      children. So shrewdly did he divert and hold their attention that they

-      concluded their visit and left without having suspected the scrutiny which

-      they had undergone.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now, Mrs. Clyde,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, after the good-byes were

-      said, &ldquo;what about your girl?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing in particular except that she&rsquo;s mortally homely and

-      doesn&rsquo;t seem very bright.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Homely in what respect?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, hatchet-faced, to use a slang term.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not a slang term any more; it&rsquo;s a medical term to

-      describe a typical result of mouth-breathing. The diversion of the breath

-      destroys the even arch of the teeth, pushes the central teeth up, giving

-      that squirrel-like expression that is so unpleasantly familiar, lengthens

-      the mouth from the lower jaw&rsquo;s hanging down, and sharpens the whole

-      profile to an edge, and an ugly one. Adenoids!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;My tall girl I thought at first was dull, but I found the poor

-      thing was a little deaf,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s

-      got a horrid skin; so sallow and rough and pimply. I don&rsquo;t think her

-      digestion is good. In fact, she said she had trouble with her stomach.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Naturally. Her teeth are all out of place from facial malformation

-      caused by mouth-breathing. That means that she can&rsquo;t properly chew

-      her food. That means in turn that her digestion must suffer. That, again,

-      means a bad complexion and a debilitated constitution. Adenoids! What&rsquo;s

-      your analysis, Mr. Clyde?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That boy? He&rsquo;s two grades behind where he should be in

-      school. It takes him some time to get the drift of anything that&rsquo;s

-      said to him. I should judge his brain is weak. Anyway, I don&rsquo;t see

-      where he keeps it, for the upper part of his face is all wrong, the roof

-      of the mouth is so pushed up. The poor little chap&rsquo;s brain-pan must

-      be contracted.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perfectly correct, and all the result of adenoids again. The boy is

-      the worst example I&rsquo;ve been able to find. But all three of the

-      children are terribly handicapped; one by a painful homeliness, one by a

-      ruined digestion, and the boy by a mental deficiency&mdash;and all simply

-      and solely because they were neglected by ignorant parents and still more

-      ignorant school authorities.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Would you have the public schools deal with such details?&rdquo;

-      asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Certainly. Have you ever heard what Goler, the Health Officer of

-      Rochester, asked that city? &lsquo;Oughtn&rsquo;t we to close the schools

-      and repair the children?&rsquo; he asked, and he kept on asking, until now

-      Rochester has a regular system of looking after the noses, mouths, and

-      eyes of its young. They want their children, in that city, to start the

-      battle of life in fighting trim.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But you don&rsquo;t see many misshapen children about,&rdquo;

-      objected Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then it&rsquo;s because you don&rsquo;t look. Call to your mind

-      Hogarth&rsquo;s caricatures. Do you remember that in his crowds there are

-      always clubfooted, or humpbacked, or deformed people? In those days such

-      deformities were very common because medical science didn&rsquo;t know how

-      to correct them in the young. To-day facial deformities, to the scientific

-      eye, are quite as common, though not as obvious. We&rsquo;re just learning

-      how to correct them, and to know that the hatchet-face is a far more

-      serious clog on a human being&rsquo;s career than is the clubfoot.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If Betty had a clubfoot, of course&mdash;&rdquo; began Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course, you&rsquo;d have it repaired at whatever cost of

-      suffering. You&rsquo;d submit her to a long and serious operation; and

-      probably to the constant pain of a rigid iron frame upon her leg for

-      months, perhaps years. To obviate the deformity you&rsquo;d consider that

-      not too high a price to pay, and rightly. Well, here is the case of a more

-      far-reaching malformation, curable by a minor operation, without danger,

-      mercifully quick, with only the briefest after-effects of pain, and you

-      draw back from it. Why?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The thought of the knife on that little face. Is&mdash;is that all

-      there is to be done?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, there are the teeth. They should be looked to.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nonsense! They&rsquo;re only first teeth,&rdquo; said

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Grandma Sharpless vigorously. &ldquo;What does a doctor know about teeth?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Lots, if he knows his business. There would be fewer dyspeptics if

-      physicians in general sent their patients to the dentist more promptly,

-      and kept them in condition to chew their food.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s all very well, when people have their real, lasting

-      teeth,&rdquo; returned the grandmother. &ldquo;But Betty&rsquo;s first set

-      will be gone in a few years. Then it will be time enough to bother the

-      poor child.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Apparently, Mrs. Sharpless,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong mildly, &ldquo;you

-      consider that teeth come in crops, like berries; one crop now, a second

-      and distinct crop later. That isn&rsquo;t the way growth takes place in

-      the human mouth. The first teeth are to the second almost what the blossom

-      is to the fruit. I shall want immediately to take Betty to the dentist,

-      and have him keep watch over her mouth with the understanding that he may

-      charge a bonus on every tooth he keeps in after its time. The longer the

-      first lot lasts, the better the second lot are. But there is no use making

-      the minor repairs unless the main structure is put right first.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I must see Betty,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde abruptly, and left the

-      room. Mrs. Sharpless followed. &ldquo;Now comes the first real split.&rdquo;

-      Dr. Strong turned to Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re going to vote me

-      down.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If it comes to a pinch,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde quietly, &ldquo;my

-      wife will accept my decision.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is what I want to avoid. Where would my influence with her be,

-      if I were obliged to appeal to you on the very first test of professional

-      authority? No, I shall try to carry this through myself, even at the risk

-      of having to seem a little brutal.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde lifted his eyebrows, but he only nodded, as the door opened and

-      the two women reentered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Doctor,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, &ldquo;if, in a year from now,

-      Betty hasn&rsquo;t outgrown the mouth-breathing, I&mdash;I&mdash;you may

-      take what measures you think best.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In a year from now, the danger will be more advanced. There is not

-      the faintest chance of correction of the fault without an operation.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t help it! I can&rsquo;t stand the thought of it, now,&rdquo;

-      said Mrs. Clyde brokenly. &ldquo;You should see her, poor baby, as she

-      looks now, asleep on the lounge in the library, and even you, Doctor&rdquo;

-      (the doctor smiled a little awry at that), &ldquo;couldn&rsquo;t bear to

-      think of the blood and the pain.&rdquo; She was silent, shuddering.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;My dear Mrs. Clyde, the blood will be no more than a nosebleed, and

-      the pain won&rsquo;t amount to much, thanks to anaesthesia. Let me see.&rdquo;

-      He stepped to the door and, opening it softly, looked in, then beckoned to

-      the others to join him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The child lay asleep on her side, one cupped pink hand hanging, the other

-      back of her head. Her jaw had dropped and the corner of the mouth had

-      slackened down in an unnatural droop. The breath hissed a little between

-      the soft lips. Dr. Strong closed the door again.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he said, and there was a suggestion of the sternness

-      of judgment in the monosyllable.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I am her mother.&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde faced him, a spot of color in

-      each cheek. &ldquo;A mother is a better judge of her children than any

-      doctor can be!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You think so?&rdquo; said Dr. Strong deliberately. &ldquo;Then I

-      must set you right. Do you recall sending Charley away from the table for

-      clumsiness, two days ago?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, yes.&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s expressive eyes widened.

-      &ldquo;He overturned his glass, after my warning him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And once last week for the same thing?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, but what&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Pardon me, do you think your mother-judgment was wise then?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, really, Dr. Strong,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, flushing, &ldquo;you

-      will hardly assume the right of control of the children&rsquo;s manners&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;This is not a question of manners. There is where your error lies,&rdquo;

-      interrupted the doctor. &ldquo;Against your mother-judgment I set my

-      doctor-judgment, and I tell you now&rdquo;&mdash;his voice rose a little

-      from its accustomed polished smoothness, and took on authority&mdash;&ldquo;I

-      tell you that the boy is no more responsible for his clumsiness than Betty

-      is for bad breathing. It&rsquo;s a disease, very faint but unmistakable.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not Charley!&rdquo; said his father incredulously, &ldquo;Why, he&rsquo;s

-      as husky as a colt.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He will be, please God, in a few years, but just now he has&mdash;don&rsquo;t

-      be alarmed; it&rsquo;s nothing like so important as it sounds&mdash;he has

-      a slight heart trouble, probably the sequel to that light and perhaps

-      mismanaged diphtheria attack. It&rsquo;s quite a common result and is

-      nearly always outgrown, and it shows in almost unnoticeable lack of

-      control of hands and feet. I observed Charley&rsquo;s clumsiness long ago;

-      listened at his heart, and heard the murmur there.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you never told us!&rdquo; reproached the grandmother.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What was the use? There&rsquo;s nothing to be done; nothing that

-      needs to be done, except watch, and that I&rsquo;ve been doing. And I didn&rsquo;t

-      want to worry you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ve been punishing him for what wasn&rsquo;t his fault,&rdquo;

-      said Mrs. Clyde in a choked voice.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You have. Don&rsquo;t punish Betty for what isn&rsquo;t hers,&rdquo;

-      countered the physician, swiftly taking advantage of the opening. &ldquo;Give

-      her her chance. Mrs. Clyde, if Betty were my own, she could hardly have

-      wound herself more closely around my heartstrings. I want to see her grow

-      from a strong and beautiful child to a strong and beautiful girl, and

-      finally to a strong and beautiful woman. It rests with you. Watch her

-      breathing to-night, as she sleeps&mdash;and tell me to-morrow.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He rose and left the room. Mr. Clyde walked over and put a hand softly on

-      his wife&rsquo;s soft hair; then brushed her cheek with his lips.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s up to you, dearest,&rdquo; he said gently.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Three days later, Betty, overhanging the side fence, was heard, by her

-      shamelessly eavesdropping father, imparting information to her next-door

-      neighbor and friend.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;d ought to get a new nothe, Thally. It don&rsquo;t hurt

-      much, an&rsquo; breathin&rsquo; ith heapth more fun!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Pondering a chain of suggestions induced by this advice, Mr. Clyde walked

-      slowly to the house. As was his habit in thought, he proceeded to rub the

-      idea into his chin, which was quite pink from friction by the time he

-      reached the library. There he found Dr. Strong and Mrs. Sharpless in

-      consultation.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What are you two conspiring about?&rdquo; he asked, ceasing to rub

-      the troubled spot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Matter of school reports,&rdquo; answered the doctor. He glanced at

-      the other&rsquo;s chin and smiled. &ldquo;And what is worrying you?&rdquo;

-      he asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m wondering whether I haven&rsquo;t made a mistake.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Quite possibly. It&rsquo;s done by some of our best people,&rdquo;

-      remarked the physician dryly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not a pleasant possibility in this case. You remember quoting

-      Rochester as to closing the schools and repairing the children. To-day, as

-      I heard Betty commenting on her new nose, it suddenly came to me that I

-      was obstructing that very system of repairs by which she is benefiting,

-      for less fortunate youngsters in our schools.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong in surprise.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;As president of the Public Health League. The Superintendent of

-      Schools came to me with a complaint against Dr. Merritt, the Health

-      Officer, who, he claimed, was usurping authority in his scheme for a

-      special inspection system to examine all schoolchildren at regular

-      intervals.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ought to have been established long ago,&rdquo; declared Dr.

-      Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The Superintendent thinks otherwise. He claims that it would

-      interfere with school routine. It&rsquo;s the duty of the health

-      officials, he says, to control epidemics from without, to keep sickness

-      out of the schools, not to hunt around among the children, scaring them to

-      death about diseases that probably aren&rsquo;t there.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong muttered something which Grandma Sharpless pretended not to

-      hear. &ldquo;And you&rsquo;ve agreed to support him in that attitude?&rdquo;

-      he queried.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;ve half committed myself.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Heaven forgive you! Why, see here, Clyde, your dodo of a

-      superintendent talks of keeping sickness out of the schools. Doesn&rsquo;t

-      that mean keeping sickness out of the pupils? There&rsquo;s just one way

-      to do that: get every child into the best possible condition of repair&mdash;eyes,

-      ears, nose, throat, teeth, stomach, everything, and maintain them in that

-      state. Then disease will have a hard time breaking down the natural

-      resistance of the system. Damaged organs in a child are like flaws in a

-      ship&rsquo;s armor-plate; a vital weakening of the defenses. And remember,

-      the child is always battling against one besieging germ or another.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why can&rsquo;t medical science wipe out the germs?&rdquo; demanded

-      Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s always claiming to do such wonders.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In a few instances it can. In typhoid we fight and win the battle

-      from the outside by doing that very thing. In smallpox, and to a lesser

-      extent in diphtheria, we can build up an effective artificial barrier by

-      inoculation. But, as medical men are now coming to realize, in the other

-      important contagions of childhood, measles, whooping-cough, and scarlet

-      fever, we must fight the disease from inside the individual; that is, make

-      as nearly impregnable as possible the natural fortifications of the body

-      to resist and repel the invasion. That is what school medical inspection

-      aims at.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t rank whooping-cough and measles with scarlet

-      fever, would you?&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless incredulously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why not? Although scarlet fever has the worst after-effects,&mdash;though

-      not much more serious than those of measles,&mdash;the three are almost

-      equal so far as the death-rate is concerned.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Surely not!&rdquo; protested the old lady. &ldquo;Why, I&rsquo;d

-      rather have measles in the house ten times, or whooping-cough either, than

-      scarlet fever once.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re about ten times as likely to have.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      She looked puzzled. &ldquo;But what did you mean by saying that one of

-      &lsquo;em is as bad as the other?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That it&rsquo;s as dangerous to the community, though not to the

-      individual.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just a little deep for me, too,&rdquo; confessed Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yet it&rsquo;s perfectly simple. Here, take an example. Would you

-      rather be bitten by a rattlesnake or a mosquito?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A mosquito, of course.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Naturally. Yet a rattlesnake country is a good deal safer than a

-      mosquito country. You wouldn&rsquo;t hesitate, on account of your health,

-      to move to Arizona, where rattlesnakes live?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose not.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But you <i>would</i> be afraid to establish your family in the

-      malarious swamps of the South?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, people who die of malaria die of mosquito bite, since the

-      mosquito is the only agency of infection. Thus, it reduces to this: that

-      while the individual rattler is more dangerous than the individual

-      mosquito, the mosquito, in general, kills her thousands where the snake

-      kills one. Now&mdash;with considerable modification of the ratio&mdash;scarlet

-      fever is the rattlesnake; whooping-cough and measles are the mosquitoes.

-      It is just as important to keep measles out of a community as it is to

-      shut out scarlet fever. In fact, if you will study the records of this

-      city, you will find that in two out of the last three years, measles has

-      killed more people than scarlet fever, and whooping-cough more than either

-      of them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What are we going to do about it?&rdquo; asked the practical-minded

-      Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ah, if some one would only tell us that! In measles the worst of

-      the harm is done before the disease announces itself definitely. The most

-      contagious stage is previous to the appearance of the telltale rash. There&rsquo;s

-      nothing but a snuffling nose, and perhaps a very little fever to give

-      advance notice that the sufferer is a firebrand.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, you can&rsquo;t shut a child out of school for every little

-      sore throat,&rdquo; observed Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;As to that I&rsquo;m not so sure,&rdquo; replied the physician

-      slowly and thoughtfully. &ldquo;A recent writer on school epidemics has

-      suggested educating the public to believe that every sore throat is

-      contagious.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That isn&rsquo;t true, is it?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. Personally I believe that, while a physician is often justified

-      in deceiving his patient, he is never justified in fooling the public. In

-      the long run they find him out and his influence for good is lessened. Yet

-      that sore-throat theory is near enough true to be a strong temptation.

-      Every sore throat is suspicious; that isn&rsquo;t too much to say. And,

-      with a thorough school-inspection system, it is quite possible that

-      epidemics could be headed off by isolating the early-discovered cases of

-      sore throat. But, an epidemic of the common contagions, once well under

-      way, seems to be quite beyond any certainty of control.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you mean to say that quarantine and disinfection and isolation

-      are all useless?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. I won&rsquo;t go as far as that. They may exercise a check in

-      some cases. But I will say this: that all our cumbersome and expensive and

-      often harassing hygienic measures in the contagious diseases haven&rsquo;t

-      made good. Obviously, if they had, we should see a diminution of the ills

-      which they are supposed to limit. There is no diminution. No, we&rsquo;re

-      on the wrong tack. Until we know what the right tack is, we perhaps ought

-      to keep on doing what we can in the present line. It&rsquo;s a big,

-      complicated subject, and one that won&rsquo;t be settled until we find out

-      what scarlet fever, measles, and whooping-cough really are, and what

-      causes them. While we&rsquo;re waiting for the bacteriologist to tell us

-      that, the soundest principle of defense that we have is to keep the body

-      up to its highest pitch of resistance. That is why I support medical

-      inspection for schools as an essential measure.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;To repair the children without closing the schools, if I may modify

-      Dr. Goler&rsquo;s epigram,&rdquo; suggested Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Exactly. Eventually we shall have to build as well as repair. A

-      very curious thing is happening to Young America in the Eastern States.

-      The growing generation is shrinking in weight and height.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Which is almost contradictory enough for a paradox,&rdquo; remarked

-      Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a melancholy and literal fact. You know, there&rsquo;s a

-      height and weight basis for age upon which our school grading system

-      rests. The authorities have been obliged to reconstruct it because the

-      children are continuously growing smaller for their years. <i>There&rsquo;s</i>

-      work for the inspection force!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;d put the children on pulleys and stretch &lsquo;em out,

-      I suppose!&rdquo; gibed Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That might work, too,&rdquo; replied the doctor, unruffled. &ldquo;The

-      Procrustean system isn&rsquo;t so bad, if old Procrustes had only sent his

-      victims to the gymnasium instead of putting them to bed. Yes, a quarter of

-      an hour with the weight-pulleys every day would help undersized kiddies a

-      good deal. But principally I should want the school-inspectors to keep the

-      youngsters playing.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t have to teach a child to play,&rdquo; sniffed

-      Grandma Sharpless, with womanly scorn of mere man&rsquo;s views concerning

-      children.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Pardon me, Mrs. Sharpless, you taught your children to play.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I! Whatever makes you think that?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The simple fact that they didn&rsquo;t die in babyhood.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Sharpless looked at him with a severity not unmingled with suspicion.

-      &ldquo;Sometimes, young man,&rdquo; she observed, &ldquo;you talk like a&mdash;a&mdash;a

-      gump!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Take that, Strong!&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, joining in the doctor&rsquo;s

-      laugh against himself.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Facts may sometimes sound foolish,&rdquo; admitted Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;If they do, that&rsquo;s the fault of the speaker. And it <i>is</i>

-      a fact that every mother teaches her baby to play. Watch the cat if you

-      don&rsquo;t believe me. The wisest woman in America points out in her

-      recent book that it is the mother&rsquo;s playing with her baby which

-      rouses in it the will to live. Without that will to live none of us would

-      survive.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know who your wisest woman in America may be, but I

-      don&rsquo;t believe she knows what she is talking about,&rdquo; declared

-      Grandma Sharpless flatly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never known her when she didn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; retorted

-      the doctor. &ldquo;If Jane Addams of Hull House isn&rsquo;t an expert in

-      life, mental, moral, and physical, then there&rsquo;s no such person! Why,

-      see here, Mrs. Sharpless; do you know why a baby&rsquo;s chance of

-      survival is less in the very best possible institution without its mother,

-      than in the very worst imaginable tenement with its mother, even though

-      the mother is unable to nurse it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t as well tended, I expect.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All its physical surroundings are a thousand times more

-      advantageous: better air, better food, better temperature, better

-      safeguarding against disease; yet babies in these surroundings just pine

-      away and die. It&rsquo;s almost impossible to bring up an infant on an

-      institutional system. The infant death-rate of these well-meaning places

-      is so appalling that nobody dares tell it publicly. And it is so, simply

-      because there is no one to play with the babies. The nurses haven&rsquo;t

-      the time, though they have the instinct. I tell you, the most wonderful,

-      mystic, profound thing in all the world, to me, is the sight of a young

-      girl&rsquo;s intuitive yearning to dandle every baby she may see. That&rsquo;s

-      the universal world-old, world-wide, deep-rooted genius of motherhood,

-      which antedates the humankind, stirring within her and impelling her to

-      help keep the race alive&mdash;by playing with the baby.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;H&rsquo;m! I hadn&rsquo;t thought of it in that way,&rdquo;

-      confessed Grandma Sharpless. &ldquo;There may be something in what you

-      say, young man. But by the time children reach school age I guess they&rsquo;ve

-      learned that lesson.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not always. At least, not properly, always. Let&rsquo;s consult the

-      Committee on School of our household organization.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He sent for eight-year-old Julia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Question to lay before you, Miss Chairwoman,&rdquo; said Dr.

-      Strong. &ldquo;How many of the girls in your grade hang around the hall or

-      doorways during recess?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, lots!&rdquo; said Julia promptly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are they the bigger girls? or the smaller ones?&rdquo; The

-      Committee on School considered the matter gravely. &ldquo;Mary Hinks, she&rsquo;s

-      tall, but she&rsquo;s awful thin and sickly,&rdquo; she pronounced.

-      &ldquo;Dot Griswold and Cora Smith and Tiny Warley&mdash;why, I guess they&rsquo;re

-      most all the littlest girls in the class.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;Sure to be the undernourished, anaemic,

-      lethargic ones,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re forgetting the

-      lessons of their babyhood. Insensibly they are losing the will to live.

-      But there&rsquo;s nobody to tell them so. A thorough medical inspection

-      service would correct that. It would include school-nurses who would go to

-      the homes of the children and tell the parents what was the matter. Such a

-      system might not be warranted to keep epidemics out of our schools, but it

-      would stretch out and fill out those meager youngsters&rsquo; brains as

-      well as bodies, and fit them to combat illness if it did come. The whole

-      theory of the school&rsquo;s attitude toward the child seems to me

-      misconceived by those who have charge of the system. It assumes too much

-      in authority and avoids too much in responsibility.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Take the case of John Smith, who has two children to bring up under

-      our enlightened system of government. Government says to John Smith,

-      &lsquo;Send your children to school!&rsquo; &lsquo;Suppose I don&rsquo;t

-      wish to?&rsquo; says John Smith. &lsquo;You&rsquo;ve got to,&rsquo; says

-      Government. &lsquo;It isn&rsquo;t safe for me to have them left

-      uneducated.&rsquo; &lsquo;Will you take care of them while they&rsquo;re

-      at school?&rsquo; says John Smith. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll train their minds,&rsquo;

-      says Government. &lsquo;What about their bodies?&rsquo; says John Smith.

-      &lsquo;Hm!&rsquo; says Government; &lsquo;that&rsquo;s a horse of another

-      color.&rsquo; &lsquo;Then I&rsquo;ll come with them and see that they&rsquo;re

-      looked after physically,&rsquo; says John Smith. &lsquo;You <i>will</i>

-      not!&rsquo; says Government. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m <i>in loco &lsquo;parentis</i>,

-      while they&rsquo;re in school.&rsquo; &lsquo;Then you take the entire <i>loco</i>

-      of the <i>parentis</i>,&rsquo; says John Smith. &lsquo;If you take my

-      children away on the ground that you&rsquo;re better fitted to care for

-      their minds than I am, you ought to be at least as ready to look after

-      their health. Otherwise,&rsquo; says John Smith, &lsquo;go and teach

-      yourself to stand on your head. You can&rsquo;t teach <i>my</i> children.&rsquo;

-      Now,&rdquo; concluded Dr. Strong, &ldquo;do you see any flaws in the Smith

-      point of view?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just plain common sense,&rdquo; approved Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Clyde,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, with a twinkle, &ldquo;if you don&rsquo;t

-      stop rubbing a hole in your chin, I&rsquo;ll have to repair <i>you</i>.

-      What&rsquo;s preying on your mind?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I am trying,&rdquo; replied Mr. Clyde deliberately, &ldquo;to

-      figure out, with reference to the School Superintendent and myself, just

-      how a man who has made a fool of himself can write a letter to another man

-      who has helped the first man make a fool of himself, admitting that he&rsquo;s

-      made a fool of himself, and yet avoid embarrassment, either to the man who

-      has made a fool of himself or to the other man who aided the man in making

-      a fool of himself. Do you get that?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong rose. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a Chinese doctor,&rdquo; he observed,

-      &ldquo;not a Chinese puzzle-solver. That&rsquo;s a matter between you and

-      your ink-well. Meantime, having attained the point for which I&rsquo;ve

-      been climbing, I now declare this session adjourned.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      IV.&mdash;THE CORNER DRUG-STORE

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;N</span>o, it won&rsquo;t

-      add to the attractiveness of the neighborhood, perhaps,&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Clyde thoughtfully. &ldquo;But how convenient it will be!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde had come home with the news that a drug-store was to be opened

-      shortly on the adjacent corner. Shifting his position to dodge a

-      foliage-piercing shaft of sunlight&mdash;they were all sitting out on the

-      shady lawn, in the cool of a September afternoon&mdash;Dr. Strong shook

-      his head.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Too convenient, altogether,&rdquo; he observed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; queried Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;A drugstore is

-      like a gun in Texas: you may not need it often, but when you do need it,

-      you need it like blazes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;True enough. But most people over-patronize the drug-store.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not this family; at least, since our house-doctor came to keep us

-      well on the Chinese plan,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde gracefully.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But Dr. Strong only looked rueful. &ldquo;Your Chinese doctor has to plead

-      guilty to negligence of what has been going on under his very nose.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, not more trouble!&rdquo; pleaded Mrs. Clyde. She had come

-      through the dreaded ordeal of little Betty&rsquo;s operation for adenoids&mdash;which

-      had proved to be, after all, so slight and comparatively painless&mdash;with

-      a greatly augmented respect for and trust in Dr. Strong; but her nerves

-      still quivered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing to trouble you,&rdquo; the doctor assured her, &ldquo;but

-      enough to make me feel guilty&mdash;and stupid. Have you noticed any

-      change in Manny, lately?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Manny&rdquo; was fourteen-year-old Maynard Clyde, the oldest of the

-      children; a high school lad, tall, lathy, athletic, and good-tempered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The boy is as nervous as a witch,&rdquo; put in Grandma Sharpless.

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve noticed it since early summer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then I wish you had taught me my trade,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;Manny is so husky and active that I&rsquo;ve hardly given him a

-      thought.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, what&rsquo;s wrong with him?&rdquo; asked the father

-      anxiously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Too much drug-store,&rdquo; was the prompt reply. &ldquo;Not drugs!&rdquo;

-      cried Mrs. Clyde, horrified. &ldquo;That child!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, no; not in the sense you mean it. Wait; there he is now.

-      Manny!&rdquo; he called, raising his voice. &ldquo;Come over here a

-      minute, will you?&rdquo; The boy ambled over, and dropped down on the

-      grass. He was brown, thin, and hard-trained; but there was a nervous

-      pucker between his eyes, which his father noted for the first time.

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s this? A meeting of the Board? Anything for the

-      Committee on Milk Supply to do?&rdquo; he asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not at present,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong, &ldquo;except to answer

-      a question or two. You don&rsquo;t drink coffee, do you?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course not. I&rsquo;m trying for shortstop on the junior nine,

-      you know.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How are you making out?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Rotten!&rdquo; said the boy despondently. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t seem

-      to have any grip on myself this year. Sort o&rsquo; get the rattles.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Hm-m-m. Feel pretty thirsty after the practice, and usually stop in

-      at the soda-fountain for some of those patent soft drinks advertised to be

-      harmless but stimulating, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the boy, surprised.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said the doctor carelessly; &ldquo;three or four glasses

-      a day, I suppose?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Manny thought a moment. &ldquo;All of that,&rdquo; he said.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, you quit it,&rdquo; advised the doctor, &ldquo;if you want to

-      make the ball team. It will put you off your game worse than tea or

-      coffee. Tell the athletic instructor I said so, will you?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sure!&rdquo; said the boy. &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know there was any

-      harm in it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As Manny walked away, Dr. Strong turned to

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;I found out about Manny by accident. No wonder the boy

-      is nervous. He&rsquo;s been drinking that stuff like water, with no

-      thought of what&rsquo;s in it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What <i>is</i> in it?&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Caffeine, generally. The most widely used of the lot is a mixture

-      of fruit syrups doctored up with that drug. There&rsquo;s as much

-      nerve-excitation in a glass of it&mdash;yes, and more&mdash;than in a cup

-      of strong coffee. What would you think of a fourteen-year-old boy who

-      drank five cups of strong coffee every day?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d think his parents were fools,&rdquo; declared Grandma

-      Sharpless bluntly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Or his physician,&rdquo; suggested Dr. Strong. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve

-      seen cases of people drinking twenty to twenty-five glasses of that

-      &lsquo;harmless&rsquo; stuff every day. Of course, they were on the road

-      to nervous smash-up. But the craving for it was established and they hadn&rsquo;t

-      the nerve to stop.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The soda-fountain as a public peril,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, with a

-      smile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s more in that than can be smiled away,&rdquo; retorted

-      the doctor vigorously. &ldquo;What between nerve-foods that are simply

-      disguised &lsquo;bracers,&rsquo; and dangerous, heart-depressing dopes, like

-      bromo-seltzer, the soda-fountain does its share of damage in the

-      community.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What about soda-water; that is innocent, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;

-      asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. If the syrups are pure, soda-water is a good thing in

-      moderation. So are the mineral waters. But there is this to be said about

-      soda-water and candy, particularly the latter&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always said,&rdquo; broke in Grandma Sharpless, &ldquo;that

-      candy-eating would ruin any digestion.&rdquo;, &ldquo;Then you&rsquo;ve

-      always been wrong, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Candy, well

-      and honestly made, is excellent food at the proper time. The trouble is,

-      both with candy and with the heavy, rich soda-waters, that people are

-      continually filling up with them between meals. Now the stomach is a

-      machine with a great amount of work to do, and is entitled to some

-      consideration. Clyde, what would happen to the machines in your factory,

-      if you didn&rsquo;t give them proper intervals of rest?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They&rsquo;d be very short-lived,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s

-      a curious thing about machinery which everybody knows but nobody

-      understands: running a machine twenty-four hours a day for one week gives

-      it harder wear than running it twelve hours a day for a month. It needs a

-      regular rest.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So with the machinery of digestion,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;The

-      stomach and intestines have their hard work after meals. How are they to

-      rest up, if an odd lot of candy or a slab of rich ice-cream soda come

-      sliding down between whiles to be attended to? Eat your candy at the end

-      of a meal, if you want it. It&rsquo;s a good desert. But whatever you eat,

-      give your digestion a fair chance.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You can digest anything if you use Thingumbob Pills,&rdquo;

-      observed Mr. Clyde sardonically. &ldquo;The newspapers say so.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the kind of doctrine that makes dyspeptics,&rdquo;

-      returned Dr. Strong. &ldquo;The American stomach is the worst-abused organ

-      in creation. Saliva is the true digestive. If people would take time to

-      chew properly, half the dyspepsia-pill fakers would go out of business. If

-      they&rsquo;d take time to exercise properly, the other half would

-      disappear.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Liver pills were my regular dependence a few years ago,&rdquo;

-      remarked Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Since I took up hand-ball I haven&rsquo;t

-      needed them. But I suppose that half the business men in town think they

-      couldn&rsquo;t live without drugging themselves two or three times a week.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Undoubtedly. Tell the average American any sort of a lie in print,

-      about his digestion, and he&rsquo;ll swallow it whole, together with the

-      drug which the lie is intended to sell. Look at the Cascaret advertising.

-      Its tendency is to induce, not an occasional recourse to Cascarets, but a

-      steady use of them. Any man foolish enough to follow the advice of the

-      advertisements would form a Cascaret habit and bring his digestion into a

-      state of slavery. That sort of appeal has probably ruined more digestions

-      and spoiled more tempers than any devil-dogma ever put into type.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Castor-oil is good enough for me,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless

-      emphatically.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s good enough for anybody&mdash;that is to say, bad enough

-      and nasty enough so that there isn&rsquo;t much danger of its being

-      abused. But these infernal sugar-coated candy cathartics get a hold on a

-      man&rsquo;s intestinal organization so that it can&rsquo;t do its work

-      without &lsquo;em, and, Lord knows, it can&rsquo;t stand their stimulus

-      indefinitely. Then along comes appendicitis.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But some of the laxative medicines advertise to prevent

-      appendicitis,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong&rsquo;s face was very grim. &ldquo;Yes, they advertise.

-      Commercial travelers, because of their irregular habits, are great

-      pill-guzzlers as a class. Appendicitis is a very common complaint among

-      them. A Pittsburgh surgeon with a large practice among traveling men has

-      kept records, and he believes that more than fifty per cent of the

-      appendicitis cases he treats are caused by the &lsquo;liver-pill&rsquo;

-      and &lsquo;steady-cathartic&rsquo; habit. He explains his theory in this way.

-      The man begins taking the laxative to correct his bad habits of life.

-      Little by little he increases his dose, as the digestive mechanism grows

-      less responsive to the stimulus, until presently an overdose sets his

-      intestines churning around with a violence never intended by nature. Then,

-      under this abnormal peristalsis, as it is called, the appendix becomes

-      infected, and there&rsquo;s nothing for it but the surgeon&rsquo;s knife.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Would you have people run to the doctor and pay two dollars every

-      time their stomach got a little out of kilter?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Sharpless

-      shrewdly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Run to the doctor; run to the minister; run to the plumber; run

-      anywhere so long as you run far enough and fast enough,&rdquo; answered

-      Dr. Strong with a smile. &ldquo;A mile a day at a good clip, or three

-      miles of brisk walking would be the beginning of a readjustment. Less food

-      more slowly eaten and no strong liquors would complete the cure in nine

-      cases out of ten. The tenth case needs the doctor; not the

-      newspaper-and-drug-store pill.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But all patent medicines aren&rsquo;t bad, are they?&rdquo; asked

-      Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Some have very good testimonials.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Bought or wheedled. Any medicine which claims to <i>cure</i> is a

-      fraud and a swindle.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me, young man!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless.

-      &ldquo;You doctors are prejudiced against patent medicines, but we old

-      folks have used &lsquo;em long enough to know which are good and which are

-      bad. Now I don&rsquo;t claim but what the Indian herb remedies and the

-      &lsquo;ready reliefs&rsquo; and that lot are frauds. But my family was

-      brought up on teething powders and soothing syrups.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then you&rsquo;re fortunate,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong sternly,

-      &ldquo;that none of them has turned out to be an opium fiend.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The instant he said it, he saw, with sharp regret, that his shaft had sped

-      true to the mark. The clear, dark red of a hale old age faded from Grandma

-      Sharpless&rsquo;s cheeks. Mr. Clyde shot a quick glance of warning at him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And speaking of Indian remedies,&rdquo; went on the doctor glibly,

-      &ldquo;I remember as a boy&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Stop a minute,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless steadily. &ldquo;The

-      truth isn&rsquo;t going to hurt me. Or, if it does hurt, maybe it&rsquo;s

-      right it should. I had a younger brother who died in a sanitarium for

-      drug-habit when he was twenty-four. As a child he pretty nearly lived on

-      soothing syrups; had to have them all the time, because he was such a

-      nervous little fellow; always having earache and stomach-ache, until he

-      was eight or nine years old. Then he got better and became a strong,

-      active boy, and a robust man. After his college course he went to

-      Philadelphia, and was doing well when he contracted the morphine habit&mdash;how

-      or why, we never knew. It killed him in three years. Do you think&mdash;is

-      it possible that the soothing syrups&mdash;I&rsquo;ve heard they have

-      morphine in them&mdash;had anything to do with his ruin?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, Mrs. Sharpless,&rdquo; said the other, very gently, &ldquo;I

-      can only put it before you in this way. Here is one of the most subtle and

-      enslaving of all drugs, morphine. It is fed to a child, in the plastic and

-      formative years of life, regularly. What surer way could there be of

-      planting the seeds of drug-habit? Suppose, for illustration, we substitute

-      alcohol, which is far less dangerous. If you gave a child, from the time

-      of his second year to his eighth, let us say, two or three drinks of

-      whiskey every day, and that child, when grown up, developed into a

-      drunkard, would you think it strange?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d think it strange if he didn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Apply the same logic to opium, or its derivative, morphine. There

-      are a dozen preparations regularly used for children, containing opium, or

-      morphine, such as Mrs. Winslow&rsquo;s &lsquo;Soothing Syrup,&rsquo; and

-      Kopp&rsquo;s &lsquo;Baby Friend.&rsquo; This is well known, and it is also

-      a recognized fact that the morphine and opium habit is steadily increasing

-      in this country. Isn&rsquo;t it reasonable to infer a connection between

-      the two? Further, some of the highest authorities believe that the use of

-      these drugs in childhood predisposes to the drink habit also, later in

-      life. The nerves are unsettled; they are habituated to a morbid craving,

-      and, at a later period, that craving is liable to return in a changed

-      manifestation.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But a drug-store can&rsquo;t sell opium or morphine except on

-      prescription, can it?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It can <i>in a patent medicine</i>,&rdquo; replied the doctor.

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s one of the ugly phases of the drug business. Yet it&rsquo;s

-      possible to find honest people who believe in these dopes and even give

-      testimonials to them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Some testimonials are hard to believe,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde,

-      thankfully accepting the chance to shift the conversation to a less

-      painful phase of the topic. &ldquo;Old Mrs. Dibble in our church is

-      convinced that she owes her health to Hall&rsquo;s Catarrh Cure.&rdquo;

-      Dr. Strong smiled sardonically. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the nostrum which

-      offers one hundred dollars reward for any case it can&rsquo;t cure; and

-      when a disgusted dupe tried to get the one hundred dollars, they said he

-      hadn&rsquo;t given their remedy a sufficient trial: he&rsquo;d taken only

-      twenty-odd bottles. So your friend thinks that a useless mixture of

-      alcohol and iodide of potassium fixed her, does she?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why shouldn&rsquo;t she? She had a case of catarrh. She took three

-      bottles of the medicine, and her catarrh is all gone.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All right. Let&rsquo;s extend her line of reasoning to some other

-      cases. While old Mr. Barker, around on Halsey Street, was very ill with

-      pneumonia last month, he fell out of bed and broke his arm.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In two places,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;I saw him walking

-      up the street yesterday, all trussed up like a chicken.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Quite recovered from pneumonia, however. Then there was little Mrs.

-      Bowles: she had typhoid, you remember, and at the height of the fever a

-      strange cat got into the room and frightened her into hysterics.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But she got well,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re up

-      in the woods now.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Exactly. Moral (according to Mrs. Dibble&rsquo;s experience with

-      Hall&rsquo;s Catarrh Cure): for pneumonia, try a broken arm; in case of

-      typhoid, set a cat on the patient.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde laughed. &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;People get well in

-      spite of these patent medicines, rather than by virtue of them. <i>Post

-      hoc, non propter hoc</i>, as our lawyer friends say.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got it. The human body keeps up a sort of drug-store

-      of its own. As soon as disease fastens on it, it goes to work in a subtle

-      and mysterious way, manufacturing a cure for that disease. If it&rsquo;s

-      diphtheria, the body produces antitoxin, and we give it more to help it

-      on. If it&rsquo;s jaundice, it produces a special quality of gastric

-      juices to correct the evil conditions. In the vast majority of attacks,

-      the body drives out the disease by its own efforts; yet, if the patient

-      chances to have been idiot enough to take some quack &lsquo;cure&rsquo;

-      the credit goes to that medicine.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Or to the doctor, if it&rsquo;s a doctor&rsquo;s case,&rdquo;

-      suggested Grandma Sharpless, with a twinkle of malice.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Show me a doctor who boasts &lsquo;I can cure you,&rsquo; whether

-      by word of mouth or in print, and I&rsquo;ll show you a quack,&rdquo;

-      returned the other warmly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But what is a doctor for in a sick-room, if not to cure?&rdquo;

-      asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is a captain for on a ship?&rdquo; countered Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;He can&rsquo;t cure a storm, can he? But he can guide the vessel so

-      that she can weather it. Well, our medical captains lose a good many

-      commands; the storm is often too severe for human skill. But they save a

-      good many, too, by skillful handling.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then there is no such thing as an actual cure, in medicine?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, yes. In a sense there are several. Antitoxin may be called a

-      cure for diphtheria. Quinine is, to some extent, a specific in malaria.

-      And Ehrlich&rsquo;s famous &lsquo;606&rsquo; has been remarkably, though

-      not unfailingly, successful in that terrible blood-plague, born of

-      debauchery, which strikes the innocent through the guilty. All these

-      remedies, however, come, not through the quack and the drug-store, but

-      through the physician and the laboratory.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;May not the patent medicines, also, help to guide the physical ship

-      through the storm?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde, adopting the doctor&rsquo;s

-      simile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;On to the rocks,&rdquo; he replied quickly. &ldquo;Look at the

-      consumption cures. To many consumptives, alcohol is deadly. Yet a wretched

-      concoction like Duffy&rsquo;s Malt Whiskey, advertised to cure

-      tuberculosis, flaunts its lies everywhere. And the law is powerless to

-      check the suicidal course of the poor fools who believe and take it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, I thought the Pure Food Law stopped all that,&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Clyde innocently.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The Pure Food Law! The life has been almost crushed out of it.

-      Roosevelt whacked it over the head with his Referee Board, which granted

-      immunity to the food poisoners, and afterward the Supreme Court and

-      Wickersham treated it to a course of &lsquo;legal interpretations,&rsquo;

-      which generally signify a way to get around a good law.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But the patent medicines aren&rsquo;t allowed to make false claims

-      any more, as I understand it,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That applies only to the label on the bottle. So you&rsquo;ll find

-      that the words &lsquo;alcohol,&rsquo; &lsquo;opium,&rsquo; &lsquo;acetanilid,&rsquo;

-      &lsquo;chloral,&rsquo; and other terms of poison, have sprouted forth

-      there, in very small and inconspicuous type. But there&rsquo;s a free

-      field for the false promises on sign-boards, in the street-cars, in the

-      newspapers, everywhere. Look in the next drug-store window you pass and

-      you&rsquo;ll see &lsquo;sure cures&rsquo; exploited in terms that would

-      make Ananias feel like an amateur.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You make out a pretty poor character for the druggists, as a class,&rdquo;

-      observed Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not at all. As a class, they&rsquo;re a decent, self-respecting,

-      honorable lot of men.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then why do they stick to a bad trade?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong got to his feet. &ldquo;Let one of them answer,&rdquo; he said.

-      &ldquo;Mr. Gormley, who runs the big store in the Arcade, usually passes

-      here about this time, and I think I see him coming now.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They can talk all they like,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless

-      emphatically, as the doctor walked across to the front fence, &ldquo;but I

-      wouldn&rsquo;t be without a bottle of cough syrup in the house.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nor I without my headache tablets,&rdquo; added Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d

-      have had to give up the bridge party yesterday but for them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde shot a sharp glance, first, at his wife, then at her mother.

-      &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;d like to see the labels on your particular brands of

-      medicine,&rdquo; he remarked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing bad in mine,&rdquo; asserted Mrs. Clyde.

-      &ldquo;Mrs. Martin recommended them to me; she&rsquo;s been taking them

-      for years.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At this point Dr. Strong returned, bringing with him a slim, elderly man,

-      whose shrewd, wide eyes peered through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So you want me to give away the secrets of my trade,&rdquo; he

-      remarked good-humoredly, after the greetings. &ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t

-      object to relieving my mind, once in a while. So shoot, and if I can&rsquo;t

-      dodge, I&rsquo;ll yell.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why do you deal in patent medicines if they&rsquo;re so bad?&rdquo;

-      asked Grandma Sharpless bluntly. &ldquo;Is there such a big profit in

-      them?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No profit, worth speaking of,&rdquo; replied Mr. Gormley. &ldquo;Though

-      you&rsquo;ll note that I haven&rsquo;t admitted they are bad&mdash;as yet.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The bulk of your trade is in that class of goods, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;

-      queried Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Worse luck, it is. They&rsquo;ve got us through their hold on the

-      public. And they not only force us to be their agents, but they grind us

-      down to the very smallest profit; sometimes less than the cost of doing

-      business.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But you aren&rsquo;t compelled to deal in their medicines,&rdquo;

-      objected Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Practically I am. My really profitable trade is in filling

-      prescriptions. There I can legitimately charge, not only for the drugs,

-      but also for my special technical skill and knowledge. But in order to

-      maintain my prescription trade I must keep people coming to my store. And

-      they won&rsquo;t come unless I carry what they demand in the way of patent

-      medicines.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then there is a legitimate demand for patent medicines?&rdquo; said

-      Mr. Clyde quickly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Legitimate? Hardly. It&rsquo;s purely an inspired demand.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What makes it persist, then?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The newspapers. The patent-medicine advertisers fill the daily

-      columns with their claims, and create a demand by the force of repeated

-      falsehood. Do you know the universal formula for the cost of patent cures?

-      Here it is: Drugs, 3 per cent; manufacturing plant, 7 per cent; printing

-      ink, 90 per cent. It&rsquo;s a sickening business. If I could afford it, I&rsquo;d

-      break loose like that fellow McConnell in Chicago and put a placard of

-      warning in my show window. Here&rsquo;s a copy of the one he displays in

-      his drug-store.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Taking a card from his pocket, Mr. Gormley held it up for the circle to

-      read. The inscription was:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <i>&ldquo;Please do not ask us what </i>any old patent, medicine<i> is

-      worth, for you embarrass us, as our honest answer must be that </i>it is

-      worthless<i>. </i>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If you mean to ask us at what price we sell it, that is an entirely

-      different proposition. When sick, consult a good physician. It is the only

-      proper course. And you will find it cheaper in the end than

-      self-medication with worthless<i> &lsquo;patent&rsquo; nostrums.</i>&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Has that killed his trade in quackery?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing can kill that. It has cut it down by half, though. It&rsquo;s

-      a peculiar and disheartening fact that the public will believe the paid

-      lie of a newspaper advertisement and disregard the plain truth from an

-      expert. And see here, Dr. Strong, when you doctors get together and roast

-      the pharmaceutical trade, just remember that it&rsquo;s really the

-      newspapers and not the drug-stores that sell patent medicines.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are all of them so bad?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All that claim to <i>cure</i>. They&rsquo;re either frauds,

-      appealing to the appetite by a stiff allowance of booze, like Swamp Root

-      and Peruna, or disguised dopes,&mdash;opium, hasheesh or chloral,&mdash;masquerading

-      as soothing syrups, cough medicines, and consumption cures; or artificial

-      devices for giving yourself heart disease by the use of coal-tar chemicals

-      in the headache powders and anti-pain pills.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, you can&rsquo;t make me believe, Mr. Drug-man,&rdquo; said

-      Grandma Sharpless with a belligerent shake of her head, &ldquo;that a

-      patent medicine which keeps on being in demand for years, on its own

-      merits, hasn&rsquo;t something good in it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, ma&rsquo;am, I can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; agreed the visitor. &ldquo;I

-      wouldn&rsquo;t want to. There isn&rsquo;t any such patent medicine.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s hundreds of &lsquo;em,&rdquo; contradicted the old

-      lady, with the exaggeration of the disputant who finds the ground dropping

-      away from underfoot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not that sell on their own merits. Advertising and more advertising

-      and still more advertising is all that does it. Let any one of them drop

-      out of the newspapers and off the bill-boards, and the demand for it would

-      be dead in a year.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yet, as a student of business conditions,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde,

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m inclined to side with Mrs. Sharpless and believe that any

-      line of goods which has come down from yesterday to to-day must have some

-      merit.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The druggist took off his glasses, wiped them and waved them in the air,

-      with a flourish.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      The way to dusty death,

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      he quoted sonorously. &ldquo;We think ourselves heirs to the wisdom of the

-      ages, without stopping to consider that we&rsquo;re heirs to the

-      foolishness, also. We&rsquo;re gulled by the printed lie about Doan&rsquo;s

-      Kidney Pills, just as our fathers were by the cart-tail oratory of the

-      itinerant quack who sold the &lsquo;Wonderful Indian Secrets of Life&rsquo;

-      at one dollar per bottle.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, I hesitate to admit it,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, with a little

-      laugh, &ldquo;but we always have a few of the old remedies about.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Suppose you name some of them over,&rdquo; suggested the druggist.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Usually I keep some One-Night Cough Cure in the house. That&rsquo;s

-      harmless, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The druggist glanced at Dr. Strong, and they both grinned.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It <i>might</i> be harmless,&rdquo; said the druggist mildly,

-      &ldquo;if it didn&rsquo;t contain both morphine and hasheesh.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Goodness!&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, horrified. &ldquo;How could one

-      suppose&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By reading the label carefully,&rdquo; interjected Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;Anything else?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let me think. I&rsquo;ve always considered Jayne&rsquo;s

-      Expectorant good for the children when they have a cold.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Tastes differ,&rdquo; observed the druggist philosophically.

-      &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t consider opium good for <i>my</i> children inside

-      or outside of any expectorant. Next!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But the names <i>sound</i> so innocent!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde.

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m almost afraid to tell any more. But we always have Rexall

-      Cholera Cure on hand.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Had much cholera in the house lately?&rdquo; inquired the druggist,

-      with an affectation of extreme interest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course it&rsquo;s only for stomach-ache,&rdquo; explained Mrs.

-      Clyde. &ldquo;It certainly does cure the pain.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not cure,&mdash;drug it into unconsciousness,&rdquo; amended Mr.

-      Gormley. &ldquo;The opium in it does that. Rather a heroic remedy, opium,

-      for a little stomach-ache, don&rsquo;t you think?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What have you got to say against Kohler&rsquo;s One-Night Cough

-      Cure that I always keep by me?&rdquo; demanded Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Gormley beamed on her in deprecatory good nature. &ldquo;Who? Me?

-      Gracious! I&rsquo;ve got nothing to say against it worse than it says

-      against itself, on its label. Morphine, chloroform, and hasheesh. What

-      more <i>is</i> there to say?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How long has this house been full of assorted poisons?&rdquo; asked

-      Mr. Clyde suddenly of his wife.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now, Tom,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always been

-      careful about using them for the children. Personally, I never touch

-      patent medicines.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But at this her mother, smarting under their caller&rsquo;s criticism of

-      her cough syrup, turned on her.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What do you call those headache tablets you take?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Those? They aren&rsquo;t a patent medicine. They&rsquo;re

-      Anti-kamnia, a physician&rsquo;s prescription.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; a fine prescription they are!&rdquo; said the druggist.

-      &ldquo;Did you ever read the Anti-kamnia booklet? For whole-souled,

-      able-bodied, fore-and-aft, up-and-down stairs professional lying, it has

-      got most of the patent medicines relegated to the infant class. Harmless,

-      they say! I&rsquo;ve seen a woman take two of those things and hardly get

-      out of the door before they got in their fine work on her heart and over

-      she went like a shot rabbit.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not dead!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; but it was touch and go with her.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s in that; opium, too?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; a coal-tar chemical which puts a clamp on the heart action. One

-      or another of the coal-tar drugs is in all the headache powders. There&rsquo;s

-      a long list of deaths from them, not to mention cases of drug-habit.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Habit?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Do you mean I&rsquo;m in

-      danger of not being able to get along without the tablets?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If you take them steadily you certainly are. If you take them

-      occasionally, you&rsquo;re only in danger of dropping dead one of these

-      days.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s chin abruptly assumed a prominence which he seldom

-      permitted it. &ldquo;Well, that settles <i>that</i>,&rdquo; he observed;

-      and it was entirely unnecessary for any one present to ask any

-      amplification of the remark. Mrs. Clyde looked at her mother for sympathy&mdash;and

-      didn&rsquo;t get any.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Whenever I see a woman come into the shop,&rdquo; continued the

-      druggist, &ldquo;with a whitey-blue complexion and little gray&rsquo;

-      flabby wrinkles under her eyes, I know without asking what <i>she</i>

-      wants. She&rsquo;s a headache-powder fiend.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That queer look they have is from deterioration of the blood,&rdquo;

-      said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;The acetanilid or acetphenetidin or whatever the

-      coal-tar derivative may be, seems to kill the red corpuscles. In extreme

-      cases of this I&rsquo;ve seen blood the color of muddy water.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It certainly makes a fright of a woman. &lsquo;Orangeine&rsquo;

-      gets a lot of &lsquo;em. You&rsquo; ve seen its advertisements in the

-      street-cars. The owner of Orangeine, a Chicago man, got the habit himself:

-      used fairly to live on the stuff, until pop! went his heart. He&rsquo;s a

-      living, or, rather a dead illustration of what his own dope will do.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But what are you to do for a splitting headache?&rdquo; queried

-      Mrs. Clyde, turning to Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, unless I know what causes it,&rdquo; said Dr.

-      Strong. &ldquo;Headache isn&rsquo;t a disease. It&rsquo;s a symptom, a

-      danger signal. It&rsquo;s the body&rsquo;s way of crying for help. Drugs

-      don&rsquo;t cure a headache. They simply interrupt it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What with the headache-powders breeding the drug habit, and the

-      consumption cures and cough medicines making dope fiends, and the malt

-      whiskey cures and Perunas furnishing quiet joy to the temperance trade, I

-      sometimes wonder what we&rsquo;re coming to,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Gormley.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin thoughtfully. &ldquo;But poor people who can&rsquo;t

-      afford a doctor have no recourse but to patent medicines,&rdquo; said he.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t afford a doctor!&rdquo; exclaimed Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Why,

-      don&rsquo;t you know that nostrum-taking is the most expensive form of

-      treatment? Did you ever happen to see A. B. Frost&rsquo;s powerful cartoon

-      called &lsquo;Her Last Dollar&rsquo;? A woman, thin, bent, and ravaged

-      with disease, is buying, across the counter of a country store, a bottle

-      of some kind of &lsquo;sure cure,&rsquo; from the merchant, who serves her

-      with a smile, half-pitying, half-cynical, while her two ragged children,

-      with hunger and hope in their pinched faces, gaze wistfully at the food in

-      the glass cases. There&rsquo;s the whole tragedy of a wasted life in that

-      picture. &lsquo;Her Last Dollar!&rsquo; That&rsquo;s what the patent

-      medicine is after. A doctor at least <i>tries</i> to cure. But the patent

-      medicine shark&rsquo;s policy is to keep the sufferer buying as long as

-      there is a dollar left to buy with. Why, a nostrum that advertises heavily

-      has got to sell six bottles or seven to each victim before the cost of

-      catching that victim is defrayed. After that, the profits. Since you&rsquo;ve

-      brought up the matter of expense, I&rsquo;ll give you an instance from

-      your own household, Clyde.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Here! What&rsquo;s this?&rdquo; cried Mr. Clyde, sitting up

-      straight. &ldquo;More patent dosing?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One of the servants,&mdash;Maggie, the nurse. I&rsquo;ve got her

-      whole medical history and she&rsquo;s a prime example of the Dupe&rsquo;s

-      Progress. She&rsquo;s run the gamut of fake cures.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Something must have been the matter with her to start her off,

-      though,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the joke&mdash;or would be if it weren&rsquo;t

-      pathetic. She started out by having headaches. Not knowing any better, she

-      took headache-powders.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One for you, Myra,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Clyde to his wife, in an

-      aside.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Bad heart action and difficulty in breathing&mdash;the natural

-      result&mdash;scared her into the belief that she had heart trouble.

-      Impetus was given to this notion by an advertisement which she found in a

-      weekly, a religious weekly (God save the mark!), advising her not to drop

-      dead of heart disease. To avoid this awful fate, which was illustrated by

-      a sprightly sketch of a man falling flat on the sidewalk, she was

-      earnestly implored to try Kinsman&rsquo;s heart remedy. She did so, and,

-      of course, got worse, since the &lsquo;remedy&rsquo; was merely a swindle.

-      About this time Maggie&rsquo;s stomach began to &lsquo;act up,&rsquo;

-      partly from the medicines, partly from the original trouble which caused

-      her headaches.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t told us what that was, Strong,&rdquo; remarked

-      Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Later. Maggie now developed catarrh of the stomach, superinduced by

-      reading one of old Dr. Hartman&rsquo;s Peruna ads. She took seven bottles

-      of Peruna, and it cheered her up quite a bit&mdash;temporarily and

-      alcoholically.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then it was <i>that</i> that I smelled on her breath. And I accused

-      her of drinking,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde remorsefully.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So she had been; raw alcohol, flavored with a little caramel and

-      doctored up with a few drugs. Toward the close of her Peruna career, her

-      stomach became pretty sensitive. Also, as she wasn&rsquo;t accustomed to

-      strong liquor, her kidneys were affected somewhat. In her daily paper she

-      read a clarion call from Dr. Kilmer of the Swamp Root swindle (the real

-      Dr. Kilmer quit Swamp Root to become a cancer quack, by the way), which

-      seemed to her to diagnose her case exactly. So she &lsquo;tanked up&rsquo;

-      some more on that brand of intoxicant. Since she was constantly drugging

-      herself, the natural resistance of her body was weakened, and she got a

-      bad cold. The cough scared her almost to death; or rather, the consumption

-      cure advertisements which she took to reading did; and she spent a few

-      dollars on the fake factory which turns out Dr. King&rsquo;s New

-      Discovery. This proving worthless, she switched to Piso&rsquo;s Cure and

-      added the hasheesh habit to alcoholism. By this time she had acquired a

-      fine, typical case of patent-medicine dyspepsia. That idea never occurred

-      to her, though. She next tried Dr. Miles&rsquo;s Anti-Pain Pills (more

-      acetanilid), and finally decided&mdash;having read some advertising

-      literature on the subject&mdash;that she had cancer. And the reason she

-      was leaving you, Mrs. Clyde, was that she had decided to go to a

-      scoundrelly quack named Johnson who conducts a cancer institute in Kansas

-      City, where he fleeces unfortunates out of their money on the pretense

-      that he can cure cancer without the use of the knife.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you stop her?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde anxiously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ve stopped her! You&rsquo;ll find the remains of her

-      patent medicines in the ash-barrel. I flatter myself I&rsquo;ve fixed <i>her</i>

-      case.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Grandma Sharpless gazed at him solemnly. &ldquo;&lsquo;Any doctor who

-      claims to cure is a quack.&rsquo; Quotation from Dr. Strong,&rdquo; she

-      said.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nearly had me there,&rdquo; admitted he. &ldquo;Fortunately I didn&rsquo;t

-      use the word &lsquo;cure.&rsquo; It wasn&rsquo;t a case of cure. It was a case

-      of correcting a stupid, disastrous little blunder in mathematics.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Mathematics, eh?&rdquo; repeated Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Have you reached

-      the point where you treat disease by algebra, and triangulate a patient

-      for an operation?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not quite that. But poor Maggie suffered all her troubles solely

-      through an error in figuring by an incompetent man. A year ago she had

-      trouble with her eyes. Instead of going to a good oculist she went to one

-      of these stores which offer examinations free, and take it out in the

-      price of the glasses. The examination is worth just what free things

-      usually are worth&mdash;or less. They sold her a pair of glasses for two

-      dollars. The glasses were figured out some fifty degrees wrong, for her

-      error of vision, which was very slight, anyway. The nervous strain caused

-      by the effort of the eyes to accommodate themselves to the false glasses

-      and, later, the accumulated mass of drugs with which she&rsquo;s been

-      insulting her insides, are all that&rsquo;s the matter with Maggie.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is, the glasses caused the headaches, and the patent medicines

-      the stomach derangement,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And the general break up, though the glasses may have started both

-      before the nostrums ever got in their evil work. Nowadays, the wise

-      doctor, having an obscure stomach trouble to deal with, in the absence of

-      other explanation, looks to the eyes. Eyestrain has a most potent and

-      far-reaching influence on digestion. I know of one case of chronic

-      dyspepsia, of a year&rsquo;s standing, completely cured by a change of

-      eyeglasses.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;As a financial proposition,&rdquo; said Mr. Gormley, &ldquo;your

-      nurse must have come out at the wrong end of the horn.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Decidedly,&rdquo; confirmed the doctor. &ldquo;She spent on patent

-      medicines about forty dollars. The cancer quack would have got at least a

-      hundred dollars out of her, not counting her railroad fare. Two hundred

-      dollars would be a fair estimate of her little health-excursion among the

-      quacks. Any good physician would have sent her to an oculist, who would

-      have fitted proper glasses and saved all that expense and drugging. The

-      entire bill for doctor, oculist, and glasses might have been twenty-five

-      dollars. Yet they defend patent medicines on the ground that they&rsquo;re

-      the &lsquo;poor man&rsquo;s doctor.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Gormley rose. &ldquo;Poor man&rsquo;s undertaker, rather,&rdquo; he

-      amended. &ldquo;Well, having sufficiently blackguarded my own business, I

-      think I&rsquo;ll go. Here&rsquo;s the whole thing summed up, as I see it.

-      It pays to go to the doctor first and the druggist afterward; not to the

-      druggist first and the doctor afterward.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong walked over to the gate with him. On his return Mrs. Clyde

-      remarked:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What an interesting, thoughtful man. Are most druggists like that?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They&rsquo;re not all philosophers of the trade, like Gormley,&rdquo;

-      said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;but they have to be pretty intelligent before they

-      can pass the Pharmaceutical Board in this state, and put out their colored

-      lights.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve often meant to ask what the green and red lights in

-      front of a drug-store stand for,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;What is

-      their derivation?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Green is the official color of medical science,&rdquo; explained

-      the doctor. &ldquo;The green flag, you know, indicates the hospital corps

-      in war-time; and the degree of M.D. is signalized by a green hood in

-      academic functions.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And the red globe on the other side of the store: what does that

-      mean?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Danger,&rdquo; replied Dr. Strong grimly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      V.&mdash;THE MAGIC LENS

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;N</span>o good

-      fairy had ever bestowed such a gift as this magic lens,&rdquo; said Dr.

-      Strong, whisking Bettina up from her seat by the window and setting her on

-      his knee. &ldquo;It was most marvelously and delicately made, and

-      furnished with a lightning-quick intelligence of its own. Everything that

-      went on around it, it reported to its fortunate possessor as swiftly as

-      thought flies through that lively little brain of yours. It earned its

-      owner&rsquo;s livelihood for him; it gave him three fourths of his

-      enjoyments and amusements; it laid before him the wonderful things done

-      and being done all over the world; it guided all his life. And all that it

-      required was a little reasonable care, and such consideration as a man

-      would show to the horse that worked for him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At the beginning you said it wasn&rsquo;t a fairytale,&rdquo;

-      accused Bettina, with the gravity which five years considers befitting

-      such an occasion.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Wait. Because the owner of the magic lens found that it obeyed all

-      his orders so readily and faithfully, he began to impose on it. He made it

-      work very hard when it was tired. He set tasks for it to perform under

-      very difficult conditions. At times when it should have been resting, he

-      compelled it to minister to his amusements. When it complained, he made

-      light of its trouble.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Could it speak?&rdquo; inquired the little auditor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At least it had a way of making known its wants. In everything

-      which concerned itself it was keenly intelligent, and knew what was good

-      and bad for it, as well as what was good and bad for its owner.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t it stop working for him if he was so bad to it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only as an extreme measure. But presently, in this case, it

-      threatened to stop. So the owner took it to a cheap and poor repair-shop,

-      where the repairer put a little oil in it to make it go on working. For a

-      time it went on. Then, one morning, the owner woke up and cried out with a

-      terrible fear. For the magic light in the magic lens was gone. So for that

-      foolish man there was no work to do nor play to enjoy. The world was

-      blotted out for him. He could not know what was going on about him, except

-      by hearsay. No more was the sky blue for him, or the trees green, or the

-      flowers bright; and the faces of his friends meant nothing. He had thrown

-      away the most beautiful and wonderful of all gifts. Because it is a gift

-      bestowed on nearly all of us, most of us forgot the wonder and the beauty

-      of it. So, Honorable Miss Twinkles, do you beware how you treat the magic

-      lens which is given to you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;To me?&rdquo; cried the child; and then, with a little squeal of

-      comprehension: &ldquo;Oh, I know! My eyes. That&rsquo;s the magic lens.

-      Isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that about Bettykin&rsquo;s eyes?&rdquo; asked Mr.

-      Clyde, who had come in quietly, and had heard the finish of the allegory.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been examining them,&rdquo; explained Dr. Strong,

-      &ldquo;and the story was reward of merit for her going through with it

-      like a little soldier.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Examining her eyes? Any particular reason?&rdquo; asked the father

-      anxiously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very particular. Mrs. Clyde wishes to send her to kindergarten for

-      a year before she enters the public school. No child ought to begin school

-      without a thorough test of vision.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What did the test show in Bettykin&rsquo;s case?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing except the defects of heredity.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Heredity? My sight is pretty good; and Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s is still

-      better.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You two are not the Cherub&rsquo;s only ancestors, however,&rdquo;

-      smiled the physician. &ldquo;And you can hardly expect one or two

-      generations to recast as delicate a bit of mechanism as the eye, which has

-      been built up through millions of years of slow development. However,

-      despite the natural deficiencies, there&rsquo;s no reason in Betty why she

-      shouldn&rsquo;t start in at kindergarten next term, provided there isn&rsquo;t

-      any in the kindergarten itself.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde studied the non-committal face of his &ldquo;Chinese physician,&rdquo;

-      as he was given to calling Dr. Strong since the latter had undertaken to

-      safeguard the health of his household on the Oriental basis of being paid

-      to keep the family well and sound. &ldquo;Something is wrong with the

-      school,&rdquo; he decided.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Read what it says of itself in that first paragraph,&rdquo; replied

-      Dr. Strong, handing him a rather pretentious little booklet.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the prospectus of their &ldquo;new and scientific kindergarten,&rdquo;

-      the Misses Sarsfield warmly congratulated themselves and their prospective

-      pupils, primarily, upon the physical advantages of their school building

-      which included a large work-and-play room, &ldquo;with generous window

-      space on all sides, and finished throughout in pure, glazed white.&rdquo;

-      This description the head of the Clyde household read over twice; then he

-      stepped to the door to intercept Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s mother who was passing

-      by.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Here, Grandma,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Our Chinese tyrant had

-      diagnosed something wrong with that first page. Do you discover any kink

-      in it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not I,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless, after reading it. &ldquo;Nor in

-      the place itself. I called there yesterday. It is a beautiful room;

-      everything as shiny and clean as a pin.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yesterday was cloudy,&rdquo; observed the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It was. Yet there wasn&rsquo;t a corner of the place that wasn&rsquo;t

-      flooded with light,&rdquo; declared Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And on a clear day, with the sun pouring in from all sides and

-      being flashed back from those shiny, white walls, the unfortunate inmates

-      would be absolutely dazzled.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you mean to say that God&rsquo;s pure sunlight can hurt any one?&rdquo;

-      challenged Mrs. Sharpless, who was rather given to citing the Deity as

-      support for her own side of any question.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did you ever hear of snow-blindness?&rdquo; countered the

-      physician.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen it in the North,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s

-      not a pleasant thing to see.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Glazed white walls would give a very fair imitation of snow-glare.

-      Too much light is as bad as too little. Those walls should be tinted.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yet it says here,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, referring to his circular,

-      &ldquo;that the &lsquo;Misses Sarsfield will conduct their institution on the

-      most improved Froebelian principles.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Froebel was a great man and a wise one,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;His kindergarten system has revolutionized all teaching. But he

-      lived before the age of hygienic knowledge. I suppose that no other man

-      has wrought so much disaster to the human eye as he.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a pretty broad statement, Strong,&rdquo; objected Air.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is it? Look at the evidence. North Germany is the place where

-      Froebel first developed his system. Seventy-five per cent of the

-      population are defective of vision. Even the American children of North

-      German immigrants show a distinct excess of eye defects. You&rsquo;ve seen

-      the comic pictures representing Boston children as wearing huge goggles?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are you making an argument out of a funny-paper joke?&rdquo;

-      queried Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why not? It wouldn&rsquo;t be a joke if it hadn&rsquo;t some

-      foundation in fact. The kindergarten system got its start in America in

-      Boston. Boston has the worst eyesight of any American city; impaired

-      vision has even become hereditary there. To return to Germany: if you want

-      a shock, look up the records of suicides among school-children there.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But surely that has no connection with the eyes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Surely it has,&rdquo; controverted Dr. Strong. &ldquo;The eye is

-      the most nervous of all the organs; and nothing will break down the

-      nervous system in general more swiftly and surely than eye-strain. Even in

-      this country we are raising up a generation of neurasthenic youngsters,

-      largely from neglect of their eyes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Still, we&rsquo;ve got to educate our children,&rdquo; said Mr.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And we&rsquo;ve got to take the utmost precautions lest the

-      education cost more than it is worth, in acquired defects.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;For my part,&rdquo; announced Grandma Sharpless, &ldquo;I believe

-      in early schooling and in children learning to be useful. At the Sarsfield

-      school there were little girls no older that Bettina, who were doing

-      needlework beautifully; fine needlework at that.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Fine needlework!&rdquo; exploded Dr. Strong in a tone which Grandma

-      Sharpless afterwards described as &ldquo;damnless swearing.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s enough! See here, Clyde. Betty goes to that

-      kindergarten only over my dead job.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, well,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, amazed at the quite unwonted

-      excitement which the other exhibited, &ldquo;if you&rsquo;re dealing in

-      ultimatums, I&rsquo;ll drop out and leave the stricken field to Mrs.

-      Clyde. This kindergarten scheme is hers. Wait. I&rsquo;ll bring her. I

-      think she just came in.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What am I to fight with you about, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; asked Mrs.

-      Clyde, appearing at the door, a vision of trim prettiness in her furs and

-      veil. &ldquo;Tom didn&rsquo;t tell me the <i>casus belli</i>.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nobody in this house,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong appealing to her,

-      &ldquo;seems to deem the human eye entitled to the slightest

-      consideration. You&rsquo;ve never worn glasses; therefore you must have

-      respected your own eyesight enough to&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He stopped abruptly and scowled into Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s smiling face.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well! what&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;You look

-      as if you were going to bite.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What are you looking cross-eyed for?&rdquo; the Health Master shot

-      at her.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not! Oh, it&rsquo;s this veil, I suppose.&rdquo; She

-      lifted the heavy polka-dotted screen and tucked it over her hat. &ldquo;There,

-      that&rsquo;s more comfortable!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is it!&rdquo; said the physician with an emphasis of sardonicism.

-      &ldquo;You surprise me by admitting that much. How long have you been

-      wearing that instrument of torture?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, two hours. Perhaps three. But, Dr. Strong, it doesn&rsquo;t

-      hurt my eyes at all.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nor your head?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I <i>have</i> got a little headache,&rdquo; she confessed. &ldquo;To

-      think that a supposedly intelligent woman who has reached the age of&mdash;of&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Thirty-eight,&rdquo; said she, laughing. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not

-      ashamed of it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&mdash;Thirty-eight, without having to wear glasses, should

-      deliberately abuse her hard-working vision by distorting it! See here,&rdquo;

-      he interrupted himself, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s quite evident that I haven&rsquo;t

-      been living up to the terms of my employment. One of these evenings we&rsquo;re

-      going to have in this household a short but sharp lecture and symposium on

-      eyes. I&rsquo;ll give the lecture; and I suspect that this family will

-      furnish the symposium&mdash;of horrible examples. Where&rsquo;s Julia? As

-      she&rsquo;s the family Committee on School Conditions, I expect to get

-      some material from her, too. Meantime, Mrs. Clyde, no kindergarten for

-      Betty kin, if you please. Or, in any case, not that kindergarten.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      No further ocular demonstrations were made by Dr. Strong for several days.

-      Then, one evening, he came into the library where the whole family was

-      sitting. Grandma Sharpless, in the old-fashioned rocker, next a stand from

-      which an old-fashioned student-lamp dispensed its benign rays, was holding

-      up, with some degree of effort, a rather heavy book to the line of her

-      vision. Opposite her a soft easychair contained Robin, other-wise Bobs,

-      involuted like a currant-worm after a dose of Paris green, and

-      imaginatively treading, with the feet of enchantment, virgin expanses of

-      forest in the wake of Mr. Stewart White.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Julia, alias &ldquo;Junkum,&rdquo; his twin, was struggling against the

-      demon of ill chance as embodied in a game of solitaire, far over in a dim

-      corner. Geography enchained the mind of eight-year-old Charles, also his

-      eyes, and apparently his nose, which was stuck far down into the mapped

-      page. Near him his father, with chin doubled down over a stiff collar, was

-      internally begging leave to differ with the editorial opinions of his

-      favorite paper; while Mrs. Clyde, under the direct glare of a side-wall

-      electric cluster, unshaded, was perusing a glazed-paper magazine, which

-      threw upon her face a strong reflected light. Before the fire Bettykin was

-      retailing to her most intelligent doll the allegory of the Magic Lens.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Enter, upon this scene of domestic peace, the spirit of devastation in the

-      person of the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The horrible examples being now on exhibit,&rdquo; he remarked from

-      the doorway, &ldquo;our symposium on eyes will begin.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He says we&rsquo;re a hor&rsquo;ble example, Susan Nipper,&rdquo;

-      said Bettina confidentially, to her doll.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, I apologize, Bettykin,&rdquo; returned the doctor. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re

-      the only two sensible people in the room.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Julia promptly rose, lifted the stand with her cards on it, carried it to

-      the center of the library, and planted it so that the central light fell

-      across it from a little behind her.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One recruit to the side of common sense,&rdquo; observed the

-      physician. &ldquo;Next!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s wrong with me?&rdquo; demanded Mr. Clyde, looking up.

-      &ldquo;Newspaper print?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Newspaper print is an unavoidable evil, and by no means the worst

-      example of Gutenberg&rsquo;s art. No; the trouble with you is that your

-      neck is so scrunched down into a tight collar as to shut off a proper

-      blood supply from your head. Don&rsquo;t your eyes feel bungy?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A little. What am I going to do? I can&rsquo;t sit around after

-      dinner with no collar on.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sit up straight, then; stick your neck up out of your collar and

-      give it play. Emulate the attentive turtle! And you, Bobs, stop imitating

-      an anchovy. Uncurl! <i>Uncurl!!</i>&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      With a sigh, Robin straightened himself out. &ldquo;I was so comfortable,&rdquo;

-      he complained.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, you weren&rsquo;t. You were only absorbed. The veins on your

-      temples are fairly bulging. You might as well try to read standing on your

-      head. Get a straight-backed chair, and you&rsquo;re all right. I&rsquo;m

-      glad to see that you follow Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s good example in

-      reading by a student-lamp.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s my own lamp,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;Seventy

-      years has at least taught me how to read.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How, but not what,&rdquo; answered the Health Master. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s

-      a bad book you&rsquo;re reading.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Grandma Sharpless achieved the proud athletic feat of bounding from her

-      chair without the perceptible movement of a muscle.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Young man!&rdquo; she exclaimed in a shaking voice, &ldquo;do you

-      know what book that is?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care what book&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It is the Bible.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is it? Well, Heaven inspired the writer, but not the printer. Text

-      such as that ought to be prohibited by law. Isn&rsquo;t there a passage in

-      that Bible, &lsquo;Having eyes, ye see not&rsquo;?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, there is,&rdquo; snapped Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;And my eyes

-      have been seeing and seeing straight for a good many more years than

-      yours.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The more credit to them and the less to you, if you&rsquo;ve

-      maltreated them with such sight-murdering print as that. Haven&rsquo;t you

-      another Bible?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Grandma Sharpless sat down again. &ldquo;I have another,&rdquo; she said,

-      &ldquo;with large print; but it&rsquo;s so heavy.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Prescription: one reading-stand. Now, Mrs. Clyde.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

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

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t say that I haven&rsquo;t large print or a good

-      light,&rdquo; she said.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The print is good, but the paper bad,&rdquo; said the Health

-      Master. &ldquo;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&rsquo;ve kept the worst offender for the last.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Charley detached his nose from his geography and looked up. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s

-      me, I suppose,&rdquo; he remarked pessimistically and ungrammatically.

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m always coming in for something special. But I can&rsquo;t

-      make anything out of these old maps without digging my face down into

-      &lsquo;em.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;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&rsquo;t playing football this year?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Manny&rdquo; was the oldest son of the family, then away at school.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Mother wanted him not to, I suppose,&rdquo; said the boy.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Dr. Strong persuaded me that the

-      development he would get out of the game would be worth the risk.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It was his eyes,&rdquo; said the Health Master. &ldquo;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&mdash;or rather his

-      teachers&mdash;abused his eyes with just such outrageous demands as that

-      geography of yours. And while the eye responded then, it is demanding

-      payment now.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But a kid&rsquo;s got to study, hasn&rsquo;t he? Else he won&rsquo;t

-      keep up,&rdquo; put in Bobs, much interested.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not at the expense of the most important of his senses,&rdquo;

-      returned the Health Master. &ldquo;And never at night, at Charley&rsquo;s

-      age, or even yours, Bobs.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then he gets dropped from his classes,&rdquo; objected Bobs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But if other children go ahead, ours must,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perhaps the others who go ahead now won&rsquo;t keep ahead later.

-      There is a sentence in Wood and Woodruff&rsquo;s textbook on the eye *

-      which every public-school teacher and every parent should learn by heart.

-      It runs like this: &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     *  Commoner Diseases of the Eye, by Casey A. Wood and Thomas

-     A. Woodruff, pp. 418, 419.

-</pre>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Antelope?&rdquo; put in Bettina, who was getting weary of her

-      exclusion from the topic. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got a picture of that. It&rsquo;s

-      a little deer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So are you, Toddles,&rdquo; cried the doctor, seizing upon her with

-      one hand and Susan Nipper with the other, and setting one on each

-      shoulder, &ldquo;and we&rsquo;re going to keep those very bright twinklers

-      of yours just as fit&rsquo;as possible, both to see and be seen.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But what of Charley and the twins?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Everything right, so far. They&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In my childhood,&rdquo; observed Mrs. Sharpless, with the finality

-      proper to that classic introductory phrase, &ldquo;we thought more of our

-      brains than our eyes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;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&rsquo;t under

-      half the strain that it is in our modern, print-crowded world. The fact

-      is, we&rsquo;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.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand what you are getting at,&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Clyde, letting her magazine drop.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Have you tried walking on all fours lately?&rdquo; inquired the

-      physician.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not for a number of years.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Presumably you would find it awkward. Yet if, through some pressure

-      of necessity, the human race should have to return to the quadrupedal

-      method, the alteration in life would be less radical than we have imposed

-      upon our vision in the last few generations.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sounds like flat nonsense to me,&rdquo; said the downright Clyde.

-      &ldquo;We see just as all our ancestors saw.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Think again. Our ancestors, back a very few generations, were an

-      outdoor race living in a world of wide horizons. Their eyes could range

-      over far distances, unchecked, instead of being hemmed in most of the time

-      by four walls. They were farsighted. Indeed, their survival depended upon

-      their being far-sighted; like the animals which they killed or which

-      killed them, according as the human or the beast had the best eyes.

-      Nowadays, in order to live we must read and write. That is, the primal

-      demand upon the eye is that it shall see keenly near at hand instead of

-      far off. The whole hereditary training of the organ has been inverted, as

-      if a mountaineer should be set to diving for pearls; and the poor thing

-      hasn&rsquo;t had time to adjust itself yet. We employ our vision for close

-      work ten times as much as we did a hundred years ago and ten thousand

-      times as much as we did ten thousand years ago. But the influence of those

-      ten thousand years is still strong upon us, and the human child is born

-      with the eye of a savage or an animal.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What kind of an animal&rsquo;s eyes have I got?&rdquo; demanded

-      Bettina. &ldquo;A antelope&rsquo;s?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Almost as far-sighted,&rdquo; returned the Health Master, wriggling

-      out from under her and catching her expertly as she fell. &ldquo;And how

-      do you think an antelope would be doing fine needlework in a kindergarten?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But, Strong, few of us go blind,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;And

-      of those who do, nearly half are needlessly so. That we aren&rsquo;t all

-      groping, sightless, about the earth is due to the marvelous adaptability

-      of our eyes. And it is exactly upon that adaptability that we are so prone

-      to impose; working a willing horse to death. In the young the muscles of

-      accommodation, whereby the vision is focused, are almost incredibly

-      powerful; far more so than in the adult. The Cherub, here, could force her

-      vision to almost any kind of work and the eye would not complain much&mdash;at

-      this time. But later on the effects would be manifest. Therefore we have

-      to watch the eye very closely until it begins to grow old, which is at

-      about twelve years or so. In the adult the eye very readily lets its owner

-      know if anything is wrong. Only fools disregard that warning. But in the

-      developing years we must see to it that those muscles, set to the task of

-      overcoming generations of custom, do not overwork and upset the whole

-      nervous organization. Sometimes glasses are necessary; usually, only care.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In a few generations we&rsquo;ll all have four eyes, won&rsquo;t

-      we?&rdquo; asked Bobs, making a pair of mock spectacles with his circled

-      fingers and thumbs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, let&rsquo;s hope not. The cartoonists of prophecy always give

-      the future man spectacles. But I believe that the tendency will be the

-      other way, and that, by evolution to meet new conditions, the eye will fit

-      itself for its work, unaided, in time. Meantime, we have to pay the

-      penalty of the change. That&rsquo;s a small price for living in this

-      wonderful century.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You say that half the blind are needlessly so,&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Clyde. &ldquo;Is that from preventable disease?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;About forty per cent, of the wholly blind. But the half-blind and

-      the nervously wrecked victims of eye-strain owe their woes generally to

-      sheer carelessness and neglect. By the way, eye-strain itself may cause

-      very serious forms of disease, such as obstinate and dangerous forms of

-      indigestion, insomnia, or even St. Vitus&rsquo;s dance and epilepsy.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But you&rsquo;re not telling us anything about eye diseases, Dr.

-      Strong,&rdquo; said Julia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There speaks our Committee on School Conditions, filled full of

-      information,&rdquo; said the Health Master with a smile. &ldquo;Junkum has

-      made an important discovery, and made it in time. She has found that two

-      children recently transferred from Number 14 have red eyes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Maybe they&rsquo;ve been crying,&rdquo; suggested Bettykin.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They were when I saw them, acute Miss Twinkles, although they didn&rsquo;t

-      mean it at all. One was crying out of one eye, and one out of the other,

-      which gave them a very curious, absurd, and interesting appearance. They

-      had each a developing case of pink-eye.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Horses have pink-eye, not people,&rdquo; remarked Grandma

-      Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;To be more accurate, then, conjunctivitis. People have that; a

-      great many people, once it gets started. It looks very bad and dangerous;

-      but it isn&rsquo;t if properly cared for. Only, it&rsquo;s quite

-      contagious. Therefore the Committee on Schools, with myself as acting

-      executive, accomplished the temporary removal of those children from

-      school.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And then,&rdquo; the Committee joyously took up the tale, &ldquo;we

-      went out and trailed the pink-eye.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We did. We trailed it to its lair in School Number 14, and there we

-      found one of the most dangerous creatures which civilization still allows

-      to exist.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In the school?&rdquo; said Bettykin. &ldquo;Oo-oo! What was it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It was a Rollertowl,&rdquo; replied the doctor impressively and in

-      a sonorous voice.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I never heard of it,&rdquo; said the Cherub, awestruck. &ldquo;What

-      is it like?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He means a roller-towel, goosie,&rdquo; explained Julia. &ldquo;A

-      towel on a roller, that everybody wipes their hands and faces on.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Exactly. And because everybody uses it, any contagious disease that

-      anybody has, everybody is liable to catch. I&rsquo;d as soon put a

-      rattlesnake in a school as a roller-towel. In this case, half the grade

-      where it was had conjunctivitis. But that isn&rsquo;t the worst. There was

-      one case of trachoma in the grade; a poor little Italian whose parents

-      ignorantly sent her to an optician instead of an oculist. The optician

-      treated her for an ordinary inflammation, and now she will lose the sight

-      of one eye. Meantime, if any of the others have been infected by her,

-      through that roller-towel, there will be trouble, for trachoma is a

-      serious disease.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did you throw out the roller-towel?&rdquo; asked Charley with a

-      hopeful eye to a fray.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. We got thrown out ourselves, didn&rsquo;t we, Junkum?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Pretty near,&rdquo; corroborated Julia. &ldquo;The principal told

-      Dr. Strong that he guessed he could run his school himself and he didn&rsquo;t

-      need any interference by&mdash;by&mdash;what did he call us, Dr. Strong?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Interlopers. No, Cherub, an interloper is no relation to an

-      antelope. It was four days ago that we left that principal and went out

-      and whistled for the Fool-killer. Yesterday, the principal came down with

-      a rose-pink eye of his own; the Health Officer met him and ordered him

-      into quarantine, and the terrible and ferocious Rollertowl is now writhing

-      in its death-agonies on the ash-heap.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What about other diseases?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde after a pause.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing from me. The eye will report them itself quick enough. And

-      as soon as your eye tells you that anything is the matter with it, you

-      tell the oculist, and you&rsquo;ll probably get along all right, as far as

-      diseases go. It is not diseases that I have to worry about, as your

-      Chinese-plan physician, so much as it is to see that you give your vision

-      a fair chance. Let&rsquo;s see. Charley, you&rsquo;re the Committee on

-      Air, aren&rsquo;t you? Could you take on a little more work?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Try me,&rdquo; said the boy promptly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All right; we&rsquo;ll make you the Committee on Air and Light,

-      hereafter, with power of protest and report whenever you see your mother

-      going out in a polka-dotted, cross-eyed veil, or your grandmother reading

-      a Bible that needs burning worse than any heretic ever did, or any of the

-      others working or playing without sufficient illumination. Here endeth

-      this lecture, with a final word. This is it:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The eye is the most nervous of all the body&rsquo;s organs. Except

-      in early childhood, when it has the recklessness and overconfidence of

-      unbounded strength, it complains promptly and sharply of ill-usage. Now,

-      there are a few hundred rules about when and how to use the eyes and when

-      and how not to use them. I&rsquo;m not going to burden you with those. All

-      I&rsquo;m going to advise you is that when your eyes burn, smart, itch, or

-      feel strained, there&rsquo;s some reason for it, and you should obey the

-      warning and stop urging them to work against their protest. In fact, I

-      might sum it all up in a motto which I think I&rsquo;ll hang here in the

-      library&mdash;a terse old English slang phrase.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Mind your eye,&rsquo;&rdquo; replied the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      VI.&mdash;THE RE-MADE LADY

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of all unfortunate times!&rdquo; lamented Mrs. Clyde, her piquant

-      face twisted to an expression of comic despair. &ldquo;Why couldn&rsquo;t

-      he have given us a little more notice?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Impatiently she tossed aside the telegram which announced that her husband&rsquo;s

-      old friend, Oren Taylor, the artist, would arrive at seven o&rsquo;clock

-      that evening.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let it bother you, dear,&rdquo; said Clyde. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll

-      take him to the club for dinner.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t. Have you forgotten that I&rsquo;ve invited Louise

-      Ennis for her quarterly&mdash;well&mdash;visitation?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Clyde whistled. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s rather a poser. What business have I

-      got to have a cousin like Louise, anyway!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Upon this disloyal observation Dr. Strong walked into the library. He was

-      a very different Dr. Strong from the nerve-shaken wanderer who had dropped

-      from nowhere into the Clyde household a year previous as its physician on

-      the Chinese plan of being employed to keep the family well. The painful

-      lines of the face were smoothed out. There was a deep light of content,

-      the content of the man who has found his place and filled it, in the level

-      eyes; and about the grave and controlled set of the mouth a sort of

-      sensitive buoyancy of expression. The flesh had hardened and the spirit

-      softened in him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did you hear that, Strong?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Clyde, turning to

-      him.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I have trained ears,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong solemnly. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re

-      absolutely impervious to any speech not intended for them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Open them to this: Louise Ennis is invited for dinner to-night. So

-      is my old friend Oren Taylor, who wires to say that he&rsquo;s passing

-      through town.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is that Taylor, the artist of &lsquo;The First Parting&rsquo;? I

-      shall enjoy meeting him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, you won&rsquo;t enjoy meeting Cousin Louise,&rdquo; declared

-      Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;We ask her about four times a year, out of family piety.

-      You&rsquo;ve been lucky to escape her thus far.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Rather a painful old party, your cousin?&rdquo; inquired the

-      physician, smilingly, of Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Old? Twenty-two,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;But she looks fifty

-      and feels a hundred.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Allowing for feminine exaggeration,&rdquo; amended Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But what&rsquo;s so wrong with her?&rdquo; demanded the physician.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nerves,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Stomach,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Headaches,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Toe-aches,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Too much money,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Too much ego,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dyspepsia.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Hypochondria.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Chronic inertia.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Set it to music,&rdquo; suggested Dr. Strong, &ldquo;and sing it as

-      a duet of disease, from ablepsy to zymosis, inclusively. I shall be

-      immensely interested to observe this prodigy of ills.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have plenty of opportunity,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde

-      rather maliciously. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re to sit next to her at dinner

-      to-night.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then put Bettykin on the other side of me,&rdquo; he returned.

-      &ldquo;With that combination of elf, tyrant, and angel close at hand, I

-      can turn for relief from the grave to the cradle.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Indeed you cannot. Louise can&rsquo;t endure children. She says

-      they get on her nerves. <i>My</i> children!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now you <i>have</i> put the finishing touch to your character

-      sketch,&rdquo; observed Dr. Strong. &ldquo;A woman of child-bearing age

-      who can&rsquo;t endure children&mdash;well, she is pretty far awry.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yet I can remember Louise when she was a sweet, attractive young

-      girl,&rdquo; sighed Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;That was before her mother died,

-      and left her to the care of a father too busy making money to do anything

-      for his only child but spend it on her.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re talking about Lou Ennis, I know,&rdquo; said Grandma

-      Sharpless, who had entered in time to hear the closing words.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said. Dr. Strong. &ldquo;What is our expert

-      diagnostician&rsquo;s opinion of the case? You know I always defer to you,

-      ma&rsquo;am, on any problem that&rsquo;s under the surface of things.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;None of your soft sawder, young man!&rdquo; said the old lady, her

-      shrewd, gray eyes twinkling from her shrewd, pink face. &ldquo;My opinion

-      of Louise Ennis? I&rsquo;ll give it to you in two words. Just spoiled.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Taking my warning as I find it,&rdquo; remarked the physician,

-      rising, &ldquo;I shall now retire to put on some chain armor under my

-      evening coat, in case the Terrible Cousin attempts to stab me with an

-      oyster-fork.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The dinner was not, as Mrs. Clyde was forced to admit afterward, by any

-      means the dismal function which she had anticipated. Oren Taylor, an easy,

-      discursive, humorous talker, set the pace and was ably seconded by Grandma

-      Sharpless, whose knack of incisive and pointed comment served to spur him

-      to his best. Dr. Strong, who said little, attempted to draw Miss Ennis

-      into the current of talk, and was rewarded with an occasional flash of

-      rather acid wit, which caused the artist to look across the table

-      curiously at the girl. So far as he could do so without rudeness, the

-      physician studied his neighbor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He saw a tall, amply-built girl, with a slackened frame whose muscles had

-      forgotten how to play their part properly in holding the structure firm.

-      Her face was flaccid. Under the large but dull eyes, there was a bloodless

-      puffiness. Discontent sat enthroned at the corners of the sensitive mouth.

-      A faint, reddish eruption disfigured her chin. Her two strong assets,

-      beautifully even teeth and a wealth of soft, fine hair, failed wholly to

-      save her from being a flatly repellent woman. Dr. Strong noted further

-      that her hands were incessantly uneasy, and that she ate little and

-      without interest. Also she seemed, in a sullen way, shy. Yet, despite all

-      of these drawbacks, there was a pathetic suggestion of inherent fineness

-      about her; of qualities become decadent through disuse; a charm that

-      should have been, thwarted and perverted by a slovenly habit of life. Dr.

-      Strong set her down as a woman at war with herself, and therefore with her

-      world.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After dinner Mr. and Mrs. Clyde slipped away to see the children. The

-      artist followed Dr. Strong, to whom he had taken a liking, as most men

-      did, into the small lounging-room, where he lighted a cigar.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Too bad about that Miss Ennis, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; said Taylor

-      abruptly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      His companion looked at him interrogatively.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Such a mess,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;Such a ruin. Yet so much

-      left that isn&rsquo;t ruined. That face would be worth a lot to me for the

-      &lsquo;Poet&rsquo;s Cycle of the Months&rsquo; that I&rsquo;m painting

-      now. What a <i>November</i> she&rsquo;d make; &lsquo;November, the withered

-      mourner of glories dead and gone.&rsquo; Only I suppose she&rsquo;d resent

-      being asked to sit.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Illusions are the last assets that a woman loses,&rdquo; agreed Dr.

-      Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;To think,&rdquo; pursued the painter, &ldquo;of what her Maker

-      meant her to be, and of how she has belied it! She&rsquo;s essentially and

-      fundamentally a beautiful woman; that is why I want her for a model.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &lsquo;&ldquo;In the structure of her face, perhaps&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; and all through. Look at the set of her shoulders, and the

-      lines of her when she walks. Nothing jerry-built about her! She&rsquo;s

-      got the contours of a goddess and the finish of a mud-pie. It&rsquo;s

-      maddening.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;More maddening from the physician&rsquo;s point of view than from

-      the artist&rsquo;s. For the physician knows how needless it all is.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is she your patient?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If she were I&rsquo;d be ashamed to admit it. Give me military

-      authority and a year&rsquo;s time and if I couldn&rsquo;t fix her so that

-      she&rsquo;d be proud to pose for your picture&mdash;Good Heavens!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      From behind the drapery of the passageway appeared Louise Ennis. She took

-      two steps toward the two men and threw out her hands in an appeal which

-      was almost grotesque.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is it true?&rdquo; she cried, turning from one to the other.

-      &ldquo;Tell me, is it really true?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;My dear young lady,&rdquo; groaned Taylor, &ldquo;what can I say to

-      palliate my unpard&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nevermind that! I don&rsquo;t care. I don&rsquo;t care anything

-      about it. It&rsquo;s my own fault. I stopped and listened. I couldn&rsquo;t

-      help it. It means so much to me. You can&rsquo;t know. No man can

-      understand. Is it true that I&mdash;that my face&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Oren Taylor was an artist in more than his art: he possessed the rare

-      sense of the fit thing to do and say.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It is true,&rdquo; he answered quietly, &ldquo;that I have seen few

-      faces more justly and beautifully modeled than yours.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you,&rdquo; she said, whirling upon Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Can you

-      do what you said? Can you make me good-looking?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not I. But you yourself can.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, how? What must I do? D&mdash;d&mdash;don&rsquo;t think me a

-      fool!&rdquo; She was half-sobbing now. &ldquo;It may be silly to long so

-      bitterly to be beautiful. But I&rsquo;d give anything short of life for

-      it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not silly at all,&rdquo; returned Dr. Strong emphatically. &ldquo;On

-      the contrary, that desire is rooted in the profoundest depths of sex.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And is the best excuse for art as a profession,&rdquo; said the

-      painter, smiling.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only tell me what to do,&rdquo; she besought. &ldquo;Gently,&rdquo;

-      said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;It can&rsquo;t be done in a day. And it will be a

-      costly process.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That doesn&rsquo;t matter. If money is all&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t all. It&rsquo;s only a drop in the bucket. It will

-      cost you dear in comfort, in indulgence, in ease, in enjoyment, in habit&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll obey like a child.&rdquo; Again her hands went

-      tremulously out to him; then she covered her face with them and burst into

-      the tears of nervous exhaustion.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;This is no place for me,&rdquo; said the artist, and was about to

-      escape by the door, when Mrs. Clyde blocked his departure.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ah, you are in here,&rdquo; she said gayly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d been

-      wondering&mdash;Why, what&rsquo;s the matter? What is it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There has been an unfortunate blunder,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong

-      quickly. &ldquo;I said some foolish things which Miss Ennis overheard&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; interrupted the painter. &ldquo;The fault was mine&mdash;&rdquo;

-      And in the same breath Louise Ennis cried:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t overhear! I listened. I eavesdropped.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are you quite mad, all of you?&rdquo; demanded the hostess. &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t

-      somebody tell me what has happened?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s true,&rdquo; said the girl wildly; &ldquo;every word

-      they said. I <i>am</i> a mess.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s arms went around the girl. Sex-loyalty raised its war

-      signal flaring in her cheeks.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;<i>Who</i> said that?&rdquo; she demanded, in a tone of which Dr.

-      Strong observed afterward, &ldquo;I never before heard a woman roar under

-      her breath.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Never mind who said it,&rdquo; retorted the girl. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s

-      true anyway. It wasn&rsquo;t meant to hurt me. It didn&rsquo;t hurt me. He

-      is going to cure me; Dr. Strong is.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Cure you, Louise? Of what?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of ugliness. Of hideousness. Of being a mess.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But, my dear,&rdquo; said the older woman softly, &ldquo;you mustn&rsquo;t

-      take it to heart so, the idle word of some one who doesn&rsquo;t know you

-      at all.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; retorted the other passionately.

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve always been pretty!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A compliment straight from the heart,&rdquo; murmured the painter.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The color came into Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s smooth cheek again. &ldquo;What

-      have you promised her, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; she asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing. I have simply followed Mr. Taylor&rsquo;s lead. His is the

-      artist eye that can see beauty beneath disguises. He has told Miss Ennis

-      that she was meant to be a beautiful woman. I have told her that she can

-      be what she was meant to be if she wills, and wills hard enough.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you will take charge of her case?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That, of course, depends upon you and Mr. Clyde. If you will

-      include Miss Ennis in the family, my responsibilities will automatically

-      extend to her.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Most certainly,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;And now, Mr. Taylor,&rdquo;

-      she added, answering a look of appeal from that uncomfortable gentleman,

-      &ldquo;come and see the sketches. I really believe they are Whistler&rsquo;s.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      As they left, Dr. Strong looked down at Louise Ennis with a smile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At present I prescribe a little cold water for those eyes,&rdquo;

-      said he. &ldquo;And then some general conversation in the drawing-room.

-      Come here tomorrow at four.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;I want to begin at once.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So as to profit by the impetus of the first enthusiasm? Very well.

-      How did you come here this evening?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In my limousine.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sell it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sell my new car? At this time of year?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Store it, then.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And go about on street-cars, I suppose?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not at all. Walk.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But when it rains?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Run.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Eagerness died out of Louise Ennis&rsquo;s face. &ldquo;Oh, I know,&rdquo;

-      she said pettishly. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s that old, old exercise treatment.

-      Well, I&rsquo;ve tried that, and if you think&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      She stopped in surprise, for Dr. Strong, walking over to the door, held

-      the portière aside.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;After you,&rdquo; he said courteously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is that all the advice you have for me?&rdquo; she persisted.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;After you,&rdquo; he repeated.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;m sorry,&rdquo; she said sulkily. &ldquo;What is it

-      you want me&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Pardon me,&rdquo; he interrupted in uncompromising tones. &ldquo;I

-      am sure they are waiting for us in the other room.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You are treating me like a spoiled child,&rdquo; declared Miss

-      Ennis, stamping a period to the charge with her high French heel.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Precisely.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      She marched out of the room, and, with the physician, joined the rest of

-      the company. For the remainder of the evening she spoke little to any one

-      and not at all to Dr. Strong. But when she came to say good-night he was

-      standing apart. He held out his hand, which she could not well avoid

-      seeing.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When you get up to-morrow,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;look in the

-      mirror, [she winced] and say, &lsquo;I can be beautiful if I want to hard

-      enough.&rsquo; Good-bye.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Luncheon at the Clydes&rsquo; next day was given up to a family discussion

-      of Miss Louise Ennis, precipitated by Mr. Clyde, who rallied Dr. Strong on

-      his newest departure.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Turned beauty doctor, have you?&rdquo; he taunted good-humoredly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Trainer, rather,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You might be in better business,&rdquo; declared Mrs. Sharpless,

-      with her customary frankness. &ldquo;Beauty is only skin-deep.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s quotations,&rdquo; remarked Dr. Strong to

-      the saltcellar, &ldquo;are almost as sure to be wrong as her observations

-      are to be right.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It was a wiser man than you or I who spoke that truth about beauty.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nonsense! Beauty only skin-deep, indeed! It&rsquo;s liver-deep

-      anyway. Often it&rsquo;s soul-deep. Do you think you&rsquo;ve kept your

-      good looks, Grandma Sharpless, just by washing your skin?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you try to dodge the issue by flattery, young man,&rdquo;

-      said the old lady, the more brusquely in that she could see her son-in-law

-      grinning boyishly at the mounting color in her face. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m as

-      the Lord made me.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And as you&rsquo;ve kept yourself, by clean, sound living. Miss

-      Ennis isn&rsquo;t as the Lord made her or meant her. She&rsquo;s a mere

-      parody of it. Her basic trouble is an ailment much more prevalent among

-      intelligent people than they are willing to admit. In the books it is

-      listed under various kinds of hyphenated neurosis; but it&rsquo;s real

-      name is fool-in-the-head.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Curable?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Clyde solicitously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no known specific except removing the seat of the

-      trouble with an axe,&rdquo; announced Dr. Strong. &ldquo;But cases

-      sometimes respond to less heroic treatment.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not this case, I fear,&rdquo; put in Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Louise will

-      coddle herself into the idea that you have grossly insulted her. She won&rsquo;t

-      come back.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t she!&rdquo; exclaimed Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;Insult or

-      no insult, she would come to the bait that Dr. Strong has thrown her if

-      she had to crawl on her knees.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Come she did, prompt to the hour. From out the blustery February day she

-      lopped into the physician&rsquo;s pleasant study, slumped into a chair,

-      and held out to him a limp left hand, palm up and fingers curled.

-      Ordinarily the most punctilious of men, Dr. Strong did not move from his

-      stance before the fire. He looked at the hand.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that for?&rdquo; he inquired.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you going to feel my pulse?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nor take my temperature?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nor look at my tongue?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Certainly not. I have a quite sufficient idea of what it looks

-      like.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The tone was almost brutal. Miss Ennis began to whimper.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a m&mdash;m&mdash;mess, I know,&rdquo; she blubbered.

-      &ldquo;But you needn&rsquo;t keep telling me so.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A mess can be cleared up,&rdquo; said he more kindly, &ldquo;under

-      orders.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll do whatever you tell me, if only&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Stop! There will be no &lsquo;if&rsquo; about it. You will do as

-      you are bid, or we will drop the case right here.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, no! Don&rsquo;t drop me. I will. I promise. Only, please tell

-      me what is the matter with me.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong, smiling inwardly, recalled the diagnosis he had announced to

-      the Clydes, but did not repeat it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; he said.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But I know there must be. I have such strange symptoms. You can&rsquo;t

-      imagine.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Fumbling in her hand-bag she produced a very elegant little notebook with

-      a gold pencil attached. Dr. Strong looked at it with fascinated but

-      ominous eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve jotted down some of the symptoms here,&rdquo; she

-      continued, &ldquo;just as they occurred. You see, here&rsquo;s Thursday.

-      That was a heart attack&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let me see that book.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      She handed it to him. He carefully took the gold pencil from its socket

-      and returned it to her.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now, is there anything in this but symptoms? Any addresses that you

-      want to keep?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only one: the address of a freckle and blemish remover.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll come to that later. Meantime&mdash;&rdquo; He tossed

-      the book into the heart of the coal fire where it promptly curled up and

-      perished.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why&mdash;why&mdash;why&mdash;&rdquo; gasped the visitor,&mdash;&ldquo;how

-      dare you? What do you mean? That is an ivory-bound, gold-mounted book. It&rsquo;s

-      valuable.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I told you, I believe, that the treatment would be expensive. This

-      is only the beginning. Of all outrageous, unforgivable kinds of

-      self-coddling, the hypochondria that keeps its own autobiography is the

-      worst.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Regrettable though it is to chronicle, Miss Ennis hereupon emitted a

-      semi-yelp of rage and beat the floor with her high French heels. Instantly

-      the doctor&rsquo;s gaze shifted to her feet. Just how it happened she

-      could not remember, but her right foot, unprotected, presently hit the

-      floor with a painful thump, while the physician contemplated the shoe

-      which he had deftly removed therefrom.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Two inches and a half at least, that heel,&rdquo; he observed.

-      &ldquo;Talk about the Chinese women torturing their feet!&rdquo; He laid

-      the offending article upon the hearth, set his own soundly shod foot upon

-      it, and tweaked off two inches of heel with the fire-tongs. &ldquo;Not so

-      pretty,&rdquo; he remarked, &ldquo;but at least you can walk, and not

-      tittup in that. Give me the other.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Shocked and astounded into helplessness, she mechanically obeyed. He

-      performed his rough-and-ready repairs, and handed it back to her.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Speaking of walking,&rdquo; he said calmly, &ldquo;have you stored

-      your automobile yet?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No! I&mdash;I&mdash;I&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;After to-morrow I don&rsquo;t want you to set foot in it. Now,

-      then, we&rsquo;re going to put you through a course of questioning. Ready?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Miss Ennis settled back in her chair, with the anticipatory expression of

-      one to whom the recital of her own woe is a lingering pleasure. &ldquo;Perhaps

-      if I told you,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;just how I feel&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Never mind that. Do you drink?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; The answer came back on the rebound. &ldquo;Humph!&rdquo;

-      Dr. Strong leaned over her. She turned her head away.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You asked me as if you meant I was a drunkard,&rdquo; she

-      complained. &ldquo;Once in a while, when I have some severe nervous strain

-      to undergo, I need a stimulant.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh. Cocktail?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. A mild one.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A mild cocktail! That&rsquo;s a paradox I&rsquo;ve never

-      encountered. How often do you take these mild cocktails?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, just occasionally.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, a meal is an occasion. Before meals?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sometimes,&rdquo; she admitted reluctantly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t have one here last night.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you ate almost nothing.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is just it, you see. I need something: otherwise I have no

-      appetite.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In other words, you have formed a drink habit.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, Dr. Strong!&rdquo; It was half reproach, half insulted

-      innocence, that wail.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;After a cocktail&mdash;or two&mdash;or three,&rdquo; he looked at

-      her closely, but she would not meet his eyes, &ldquo;you eat pretty well?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, I suppose so.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And then go to bed with a headache because you&rsquo;ve stimulated

-      your appetite to more food than your run-down mechanism can rightly

-      handle.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I do have a good many headaches.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do anything for them?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. I take some harmless powders, sometimes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Harmless, eh? A harmless headache powder is like a mild cocktail.

-      It doesn&rsquo;t exist. So you&rsquo;re adding drug habit to drink habit.

-      Fortunately, it isn&rsquo;t hard to stop. It has begun to show on you

-      already, in that puffy grayness under the eyes. All the coal-tar powders

-      vitiate the blood as well as affect the heart. Sleep badly?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very often.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Take anything for that?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You mean opiates? I&rsquo;m not a fool, Doctor.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You mean you haven&rsquo;t gone quite that far,&rdquo; said the

-      other grimly. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve started in on two habits; but not the

-      worst. Well, that&rsquo;s all. Come back when you need to.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Miss Ennis&rsquo;s big, dull eyes opened wide. &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you

-      going to give me anything? Any medicine?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t need it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Or any advice?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong permitted himself a little smile at the success of his

-      strategy. &ldquo;Give it to yourself,&rdquo; he suggested. &ldquo;You

-      showed, in flashes, during the dinner talk last night, that you have both

-      wit and sense, when you choose to use them. Do it now.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The girl squirmed uncomfortably. &ldquo;I suppose you want me to give up

-      cocktails,&rdquo; she murmured in a die-away voice.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Absolutely.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And try to get along with no stimulants at all?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By no means. Fresh air and exercise ad lib.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And to stop the headache powders?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Right; go on.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And to stop thinking about my symptoms?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good! I didn&rsquo;t reckon on your inherent sense in vain.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And to walk where I have been riding?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Rain or shine.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What about diet?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All the plain food you want, at any time you really want it,

-      provided you eat slowly and chew thoroughly.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A la Fletcher?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Horace Fletcher is one of those fine fanatics whose extravagances

-      correct the average man&rsquo;s stolid stupidities. I&rsquo;ve seen his

-      fad made ridiculous, but never harmful. Try it out.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you won&rsquo;t tell me when to come back?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When you need to, I said. The moment the temptation to break over

-      the rules becomes too strong, come. And&mdash;eh&mdash;by the way&mdash;eh&mdash;don&rsquo;t

-      worry about your mirror for a while.&rdquo; Temporarily content with this,

-      the new patient went away with new hope. Wiping his brow, the doctor

-      strolled into the sitting-room where he found the family awaiting him with

-      obvious but repressed curiosity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t ethical, I suppose,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;to

-      discuss a patient&rsquo;s case with outsiders?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re not outsiders. And she&rsquo;s not my patient, in the

-      ordinary sense, since I&rsquo;m giving my services free. Moreover, I need

-      all the help I can get.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What can <i>I</i> do?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde promptly. &ldquo;Drop

-      in at her house from time to time, and cheer her up. I don&rsquo;t want

-      her to depend upon me exclusively. She has depended altogether too much on

-      doctors in the past.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde chuckled. &ldquo;Did she tell you that the European medical

-      faculty had chased her around to every spa on the Continent? Neurasthenic

-      dyspepsia, they called it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Pretty name! Seventy per cent of all dyspeptics have the seat of

-      the imagination in the stomach. The difficulty is to divert it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s your plan?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ve several, when the time comes. For the present I&rsquo;ve

-      got to get her around into condition.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Spoiled mind, spoiled body,&rdquo; remarked Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Exactly. And I&rsquo;m going to begin on the body, because that is

-      the easiest to set right. Look out for an ill-tempered cousin during the

-      next fortnight.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      His prophecy was amply confirmed by Mrs. Clyde, who made it her business,

-      amid multifarious activities, to drop in upon Miss Ennis with patient

-      frequency. On the tenth day of the &ldquo;cure,&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde reported

-      to the household physician:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If I go there again I shall probably <i>slap</i> her. She&rsquo;s

-      become simply unbearable.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Fine! She has had the nerve to

-      stick to the rules. We needn&rsquo;t overstrain her, though. I&rsquo;ll

-      have her come here tomorrow.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Accordingly, at six o&rsquo;clock in the evening of the eleventh day, the

-      patient stamped into the office, wet, bedraggled, and angry.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now look!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;You made me store my motor-car.

-      All the street-cars were crowded. My umbrella turned inside out. I&rsquo;m

-      a perfect drench. And I know I&rsquo;ll catch my death of cold.&rdquo;

-      Whereupon she laid a pathetic hand on her chest and coughed hollowly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Stick out your foot,&rdquo; ordered Dr. Strong. And, as she obeyed:

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s well. Good, sensible storm shoes. I&rsquo;ll risk your

-      taking cold. How do you feel? Better?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. Worse!&rdquo; she snapped.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose so,&rdquo; he retorted with a chuckle.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is more,&rdquo; she declared savagely, &ldquo;I look worse!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So your mirror has been failing in its mission of flattery. Too

-      bad. Now take off your coat, sit right there by the fire, and in an hour

-      you&rsquo;ll be dry as toast.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;An hour? I can&rsquo;t stay an hour!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s six o&rsquo;clock. I must go home. Besides,&rdquo; she

-      added unguardedly, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m half starved.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;<i>Indeed!</i> Had a cocktail to-day?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. Certainly not.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yet you have an appetite. A bad sign. Oh, a very bad sign&mdash;for

-      the cocktail market.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m so tired all the time. And I wake up in the morning with

-      hardly any strength to get out of bed&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Or the inclination? Which?&rdquo; broke in the doctor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And my heart gives the queerest jumps and&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Thought we&rsquo;d thrown that symptom-book into the fire. Stand

-      up, please.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      She stood. Dr. Strong noted with satisfaction how, already, the lithe and

-      well-set figure had begun to revert to its natural pose, showing that the

-      muscles were beginning to do their work. He also noted that the hands,

-      hitherto a mere <i>mélange</i> of nervously writhing fingers, hung easily

-      slack.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Your troubles,&rdquo; he said pleasantly, &ldquo;have only just

-      begun. I think you&rsquo;re strong enough now to begin work.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not,&rdquo; she protested, half weeping. &ldquo;I feel

-      faint this minute.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good, healthy hunger. Of course, if a glance in your mirror

-      convinces you that you&rsquo;ve had enough of the treatment&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Miss Ennis said something under her breath which sounded very much like

-      &ldquo;Brute!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Have you ever had a good sweat?&rdquo; he asked abruptly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Her lips curled superciliously. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not given to

-      perspiration, I&rsquo;m thankful to&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did I say &lsquo;perspire&rsquo;?&rdquo; inquired he. &ldquo;I

-      understood myself to say &lsquo;sweat.&rsquo; Have you ever&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;High time you began. Buy yourself the heaviest sweater you can find&mdash;you

-      may call it a &lsquo;perspirationer&rsquo; if you think the salesman will

-      appreciate your delicacy&mdash;and I&rsquo;ll be around to-morrow and set

-      up a punching-bag for you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is that?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A device which you strike at. The blow forces it against a board

-      and it returns and, unless you dodge nimbly, impinges upon your

-      countenance. In other words, whacks you on the nose. Prizefighters use it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose you want me to be like a prizefighter.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The most beautiful pink-and-white skin and the clearest eye I&rsquo;ve

-      ever seen belonged to a middleweight champion. Yes, I&rsquo;d like to see

-      you exactly like him in that respect. One hour every day&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I simply can&rsquo;t. I shan&rsquo;t have time. With the walking I

-      do now I&rsquo;m busy all the morning and dead tired all the afternoon;

-      and in the evening there is my bridge club&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ah, you play bridge. For money?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Naturally we don&rsquo;t play for counters.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;d give it up.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You are not employed as a censor of my morals, Dr. Strong.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; but I&rsquo;ve undertaken to censor your nerves. And gambling,

-      for a woman in your condition, is altogether too much of a strain.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The corners of Miss Ennis&rsquo;s mouth quivered babyishly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m

-      sure, then, that working like a prizefighter will be too much strain. You&rsquo;re

-      wearing me out.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a cruel tyrant,&rdquo; mocked Dr. Strong; &ldquo;and

-      worse is to come. We&rsquo;ll clear out a room in your house and put in

-      not only the punching-bag, but also pulleys and a rowing-machine. And I&rsquo;ll

-      send up an athletic instructor to see that you use them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t have him. I&rsquo;ll send him away!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By advice of your mirror?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Miss Ennis frankly and angrily wept.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now I&rsquo;ll tell you a secret about yourself.&rdquo; Miss Ennis

-      stopped weeping.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ninety-nine cases out of a hundred I couldn&rsquo;t handle as I am

-      handling your case. They would need a month&rsquo;s rest and building up

-      before they&rsquo;d be fit for real work. But you are naturally a

-      powerful, muscular woman with great physical endurance and resiliency.

-      What I am trying to do is to take advantage of your splendid equipment to

-      pull you out.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What would you do with the ordinary case?&rdquo; asked the girl,

-      interested.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, put her to bed, perhaps. Perhaps send her away to the woods.

-      Maybe set a nurse over her to see that she didn&rsquo;t take to writing

-      her symptoms down in a book. Keep her on a rigid diet, and build her up by

-      slow and dull processes. You may thank your stars that&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t thank my stars at all!&rdquo; broke in the patient,

-      as her besetting vice of self-pity asserted itself. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d much

-      rather do that than be driven like a galley-slave. I&rsquo;m too tired to

-      get any pleasure out of anything&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Even bridge?&rdquo; interposed the tormentor softly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&mdash;and when night comes I fall into bed like a helpless log.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the best news I&rsquo;ve heard yet. You&rsquo;re

-      progressing. Now take that new appetite of yours home to dinner. And don&rsquo;t

-      spoil it by eating too fast. Good-night.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Fully a fortnight later Grandma Sharpless met Dr. Strong in the hallway as

-      he came in from a walk.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What have you been doing to Louise Ennis?&rdquo; she demanded.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Lots of things. What&rsquo;s wrong now? Another fit of the sulks?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Worse,&rdquo; said the old lady in a stage whisper. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s

-      got <i>paint</i> on her face.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong laughed. &ldquo;Really? It might be worse. In fact, as a

-      symptom, it couldn&rsquo;t be better.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Young man, do you mean to tell me that face-paint is a good thing

-      for a young woman?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, no. It&rsquo;s vulgar and tawdry, as a practice. But I&rsquo;m

-      glad to know that Miss Ennis has turned to it, because it shows that she

-      recognizes her own improvement and is trying to add to it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But the stuff will ruin her skin,&rdquo; cried the scandalized old

-      lady. &ldquo;See what dreadful faces women have who use it. Look at the

-      actresses&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, look at them!&rdquo; broke in the physician. &ldquo;There is

-      no class of women in the world with such beautiful skin as the women of

-      the stage. And that in spite of hard work, doubtful habits of eating, and

-      irregular hours. Do you know why?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ll tell me that paint does it,&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Sharpless with a sniff.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not the paint itself. But the fact that in putting it on and taking

-      it off, they maintain a profound cleanliness of skin which the average

-      woman doesn&rsquo;t even understand. The real value of the successful

-      skin-lotions and creams so widely exploited lies in the massage which

-      their use compels.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Aside from the stuff on her face,&rdquo; remarked Mrs. Sharpless,

-      &ldquo;Louise looks like another woman, and acts like one. She came

-      breezing in here like a young cyclone.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Which means trouble,&rdquo; sighed Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Now that her

-      vitality is returning, it will demand something to feed on. Well, we shall

-      see.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He found his patient standing&mdash;not sitting, this time&mdash;before

-      the fireplace, with a face of gloom. Before he could greet her, she burst

-      out:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How long am I to be kept on the grind? I see nobody. I have nothing

-      to amuse me. I&rsquo;ve had a row with father.&rdquo; Dr. Strong smiled.

-      &ldquo;The servants are impertinent.&rdquo; The smile broadened. &ldquo;The

-      whole world is hateful!&rdquo; The doctor&rsquo;s face was now expanded

-      into a positive grin. &ldquo;I despise everything and everybody! I&rsquo;m

-      bored.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Passing that over for the moment for something less important,&rdquo;

-      said Dr. Strong smoothly, &ldquo;where do you buy your paint?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t paint!&rdquo; retorted the girl hotly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, your rouge. Your skin-rejuvenator. Your essence of bloom of

-      youth or whatever poetic name you call it by. Let me see the box.&rdquo;

-      Mutiny shone from the scowling face, but her hand went to her reticule and

-      emerged with a small box. It passed to the physician&rsquo;s hand and

-      thence to the fire. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll use paint if I want to,&rdquo;

-      declared the girl. &ldquo;Undoubtedly. But you&rsquo;ll use good paint if

-      you use any. Get a theatrical paper, read the ads, and send for the

-      highest grade of grease-paint. I won&rsquo;t say anything about the

-      vulgarity of the practice because I&rsquo;m not censoring your manners. I&rsquo;ll

-      only state that three months from now you won&rsquo;t want or need paint.

-      Did you get this stuff,&rdquo; he nodded toward the fireplace whence

-      issued a highly perfumed smoke, &ldquo;from that address in your deceased

-      symptom-book?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That was the firm which advertised to remove pimples, wasn&rsquo;t

-      it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Miss Ennis shrank. &ldquo;Pimple is an inexcusable word,&rdquo; she

-      protested.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Word? We&rsquo;re dealing in realities now. And pimples were an

-      inexcusable reality in your case, because they were the blossoms of

-      gluttony, torpor, and self-indulgence.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He leaned forward and looked closely at her chin. The surface, once

-      blotched and roughened, was now of a smooth and soft translucency. &ldquo;You

-      once objected to the word &lsquo;sweat,&rsquo;&rdquo; he continued.

-      &ldquo;Well, it has eliminated the more objectionable word &lsquo;pimple&rsquo;

-      from your reckoning. And it has done the job better than your

-      blemish-remover&mdash;-which leaves scars.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Her hand went to her temple, where there was a little group of

-      silvery-white patches on the skin. &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you fix that?&rdquo;

-      she asked anxiously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. Your &lsquo;remover&rsquo; was corrosive sublimate. It

-      certainly removed the blemish. It would also have removed your entire face

-      if you had used enough of it. Nothing can restore what the liquid fire has

-      burned away. That&rsquo;s the penalty you pay for foolish credulousness.

-      Fortunately, it is where it won&rsquo;t show much.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Gloom surged back into her face. &ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t make any

-      difference,&rdquo; she fretted. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m still a mess in looks

-      even if I don&rsquo;t feel so much like one.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One half of looks is expression,&rdquo; stated the doctor

-      didactically. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like yours. What&rsquo;s your religion?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      His patient stared. &ldquo;Why, I&rsquo;m a Presbyterian, I suppose.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Humph! You suppose! It doesn&rsquo;t seem to have struck in very

-      hard. Any objection to going to a Christian Science church?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Christian Science! I thought the regular doctors considered it the

-      worst kind of quackery.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The regular doctors,&rdquo; returned Dr. Strong quickly, &ldquo;once

-      considered anaesthesia, vaccination, and the germ theory as quackery. We

-      live and learn, like others. There&rsquo;s plenty of quackery in Christian

-      Science, and also quite a little good. And nowadays we&rsquo;re learning

-      to accept the good in new dogmas, and discard the bad.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you really wish me to go to the Christian Science church?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why not? You&rsquo;ll encounter there a few wild fanatics. I&rsquo;ll

-      trust your hard common sense to guard you against their proselytizing. You&rsquo;ll

-      also meet a much larger number of sweet, gentle, and cheerful people, with

-      a sweet, helpful, and cheerful philosophy of life. That&rsquo;ll help to

-      cure you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And what will they cure me of, since you say I have no disease?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They&rsquo;ll cure you of turning your mouth down at the corners

-      instead of up.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At this, the mouth referred to did, indeed, turn up at the corners, but in

-      no very pleasant wise.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You think they&rsquo;ll amuse me?&rdquo; she inquired

-      contemptuously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, as for amusement, I&rsquo;ve arranged for that. You&rsquo;re

-      bored. Very well, I expected it. It&rsquo;s a symptom, and a good one, in

-      its place. I&rsquo;ll get you a job.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Indeed! And if I don&rsquo;t want a job?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No matter what you want. You need it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Settlement work, I suppose.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing so mild. Garbage inspection.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; Louise Ennis closed her eyes in expectation of a qualm

-      of disgust. The qualm didn&rsquo;t materialize. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the

-      matter with me?&rdquo; she asked in naïve and suppressed chagrin. &ldquo;I

-      ought to feel&mdash;well, nauseated.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nonsense! Your nerves and stomach have found their poise. That&rsquo;s

-      all.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But what do I know about garbage?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You know it when you see it, don&rsquo;t you? Now, listen. There

-      has been a strike of the city teamsters. Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer,

-      wants volunteers to inspect the city and report on where conditions are

-      bad from day to day. You&rsquo;ve got intelligence. You can outwalk nine

-      men out of ten. And you can be of real service to the city. Besides, it&rsquo;s

-      doctor&rsquo;s orders.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The story of Louise Ennis&rsquo;s part in the great garbage strike, and of

-      her subsequent door-to-door canvass of housing conditions, has no place in

-      this account. After the start, Dr. Strong saw little of her; but he heard

-      much from Mrs. Clyde, who continued her frequent visits to the Ennis

-      household; not so much, as she frankly admitted, for the purpose of

-      furnishing bulletins to Dr. Strong, as because of her own growing interest

-      in and affection for the girl. And, as time went on, Strong noticed that,

-      on the occasions when he chanced to meet his patient on the street, she

-      was usually accompanied by one or another of the presentable young men of

-      the community, a fact which the physician observed with professional

-      approval rather than personal gratification.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t her health alone,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, when they

-      were discussing her, one warm day in the ensuing summer. &ldquo;These six

-      months seem to have made a new person of her. Trust the children to find

-      out character. Bettykins wants to spend half her time with Cousin Lou.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve surely worked a transformation, Strong,&rdquo; said

-      Clyde. &ldquo;But, of course, the raw material was there. You couldn&rsquo;t

-      do much for the average homely woman.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The average woman isn&rsquo;t homely,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.

-      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s got good looks either spoiled or undeveloped.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perfectly true,&rdquo; confirmed Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Any young woman

-      whose face isn&rsquo;t actually malformed can find her place in the

-      eternal scheme of beauty if she tries. Nature works toward beauty in all

-      matters of sex. Where beauty doesn&rsquo;t exist it is merely an error in

-      Nature&rsquo;s game.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then the world is pretty full of errors,&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Most of them aren&rsquo;t Nature&rsquo;s errors. They are the

-      mistakes of the foolish human. Take almost any woman, not past the age of

-      development, build up her figure to be supple and self-sustaining; give

-      her a clear eye, quick-moving blood, fresh skin, and some interest in the

-      game of life that shall keep mind and body alert&mdash;why, the radiant

-      force of her abounding health would make itself felt in a blind asylum.

-      And all this she can do for herself, with a little knowledge and a good

-      deal of will.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But that isn&rsquo;t exactly beauty, is it?&rdquo; asked Clyde,

-      puzzled.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it? In the soundest sense, I think it is. Anyway, put

-      it this way: No woman who is wholly healthy, inside and out, can fail to

-      be attractive.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I wish that painter-man could see Louise now, as an example,&rdquo;

-      said Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oren Taylor?&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Why, he can. He goes

-      East next week, and I&rsquo;ll wire him to stop over.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Oren Taylor arrived late on a warm afternoon. As he crossed the lawn,

-      Louise Ennis was playing &ldquo;catch&rdquo; with Manny Clyde. Her figure

-      swung and straightened with the lithe muscularity of a young animal. Her

-      cheek was clear pink, deepening to the warmer color of the curved lips.

-      The blue veins stood out a little against the warm, moist temples from

-      which she brushed a vagrant lock of hair. Her eyes were wide and lustrous

-      with the eager effort of the play, for the boy was throwing wide in

-      purposeful delight over her swift gracefulness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Great Heavens!&rdquo; exclaimed the artist, staring at her. &ldquo;Who

-      did that?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Strong did that,&rdquo; explained Clyde; &ldquo;as per

-      specifications.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A triumph!&rdquo; declared Taylor. &ldquo;A work of art.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong; &ldquo;a renewal of Nature.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In any case, a lady remade and better than new. My profound

-      felicitations, Dr. Strong.&rdquo; He walked over to the flushed and lovely

-      athlete. &ldquo;Miss Ennis,&rdquo; he said abruptly, &ldquo;I want your

-      permission to stay over to-morrow and sketch you. I need you in my &lsquo;Poet&rsquo;s

-      Cycle of the Months.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How do you do, Mr. Taylor?&rdquo; she returned demurely. &ldquo;Of

-      course you can sketch me, if it doesn&rsquo;t interfere with my working

-      hours.&rdquo; A quick smile rippled across her face like sunlight across

-      water. &ldquo;The same subject?&rdquo; she asked with mischievous

-      nonchalance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. Not even the same season,&rdquo; he replied emphatically,

-      coloring, as he bethought him of his &ldquo;November, the withered mourner

-      of glories dead and gone.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What part am I to play now?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let Dr. Strong name it,&rdquo; said Taylor with quick tact. &ldquo;He

-      has prepared the model.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The girl turned to the physician, a little deeper tinge of color in her

-      face.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Referred to Swinburne,&rdquo; said Strong lightly, and quoted:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      &ldquo;When the hounds of Spring are on Winter&rsquo;s traces,

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      The mother of months in valley and plain

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      Fills the shadows and windy places

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Atalanta,&rdquo; said Oren Taylor, bowing low to her; &ldquo;the

-      maiden spirit of the spring.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      VII.&mdash;THE RED PLACARD

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;W</span>ell?&rdquo;

-      questioned Mrs. Clyde, facing the Health Master haggardly, as he entered

-      the library.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, come!&rdquo; he protested with his reassuring smile. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t

-      take it so tragically. You&rsquo;ve got a pretty sick-looking boy there.

-      But any thoroughgoing fever makes a boy of nine pretty sick.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What fever?&rdquo; demanded the mother. &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s start with what it isn&rsquo;t&mdash;and thank Heaven.

-      It isn&rsquo;t typhoid. And it isn&rsquo;t diphtheria.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then it&rsquo;s&mdash;it&rsquo;s&mdash;;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s scarlet fever,&rdquo; broke in her mother, Mrs.

-      Sharpless, who had followed the doctor into the room. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s

-      what it is.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Clyde shuddered at the name. &ldquo;Has he got the rash?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. But he will have to-morrow,&rdquo; stated the old lady

-      positively.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you think so, too, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde appealed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll accept Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s judgment,&rdquo;

-      answered the physician. &ldquo;She has seen more scarlet fever in her time

-      than I, or most physicians. And experience is the true teacher of

-      diagnosis.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But you can&rsquo;t be sure!&rdquo; persisted Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;How

-      can you tell without the rash?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not in any way that I could put into words,&rdquo; said her mother.

-      &ldquo;But there&rsquo;s something in the look of the throat and something

-      about the eyes and skin&mdash;Well, I can&rsquo;t describe it, but I know

-      it as I know my own name.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There speaks the born diagnostician,&rdquo; observed the Health

-      Master. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid the verdict must stand.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then&mdash;then,&rdquo; faltered Mrs. Clyde, &ldquo;we must act at

-      once. I&rsquo;ll call up my husband at the factory.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What for?&rdquo; inquired Dr. Strong innocently. &ldquo;Why, to let

-      him know, of course.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t. When I undertook to act as Chinese-plan physician to

-      the Clyde household, I was not only to guard the family against illness as

-      well as I could, but also to save them worry. This is Saturday. Mr. Clyde

-      has had a hard, trying week in the factory. Why break up his day?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Clyde drew a long breath and her face lightened. &ldquo;Then it isn&rsquo;t

-      a serious case?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Scarlet fever is always serious. Any disease which thoroughly

-      poisons the system is. But there&rsquo;s no immediate danger; and there

-      shouldn&rsquo;t be much danger at any time to a sturdy youngster like

-      Charley, if he&rsquo;s well looked after.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But the other children!&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde turned to Mrs. Sharpless.

-      &ldquo;Where can we send them, mother?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nowhere.&rdquo; It was the doctor who answered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Surely we can&rsquo;t keep them in the house!&rdquo; cried Mrs.

-      Clyde. &ldquo;They would be certain to catch it from Charley.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By no means certain. Even if they did, that would not be the worst

-      thing that could happen.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No? What would, then?&rdquo; challenged Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That they should go out of this house, possibly carrying the poison

-      with them into some other and defenseless community.&rdquo; Dr. Strong

-      spoke a little sternly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Neither woman replied for a moment. When Mrs. Clyde spoke, it was with a

-      changed voice. &ldquo;Yes. You are right. I didn&rsquo;t think. At least I

-      thought only of my own children. It&rsquo;s hard to learn to think like a

-      mother of all children.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s as near to the divine as any human can come,&rdquo;

-      returned the Health Master gently. &ldquo;However, I think I can promise

-      you that, if the twins and Bettykin haven&rsquo;t been touched with the

-      poison already, they shan&rsquo;t get it from Charley. We&rsquo;ll

-      organize a defense&mdash;provided only the enemy hasn&rsquo;t established

-      itself already. Now the question is, where did the poison come from? We&rsquo;ll

-      have Junkum in and see if she can help us find out.&rdquo; Julia, the more

-      efficient of the eleven-year-old twins, a shrewd and observing youngster,

-      resembling, in many respects, her grandmother, came at the doctor&rsquo;s

-      summons and was told what had befallen Charley.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Junkum. Then, &ldquo;Can I nurse him?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I should think not!&rdquo; burst out her mother and grandmother in

-      a breath.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Later on you can help,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;In fact, I

-      shall probably need your help. Now, Junkum, you remember I told you

-      children a month ago that there was scarlet fever about and warned you to

-      guard your mouths and noses with special care. Can you recall whether

-      Charley has been careless?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Miss Julia took the matter under consideration. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve all

-      been, I guess,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Clara Wingate gave a party last

-      week and there was bobbing for apples, and everybody had their faces in

-      the same tub of water.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; and Irving Wingate has since come down with scarlet fever,&rdquo;

-      added Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Enough said!&rdquo; asserted the Health Master. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t

-      think of any better way to disseminate germs than an apple-bobbing

-      contest. It beats even kissing games. Well, the mischief is done.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then they&rsquo;ll all have it,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde miserably.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, let&rsquo;s hope not. Nothing is more mysterious than the way

-      contagion hits one and misses others. I should say there was at least an

-      even chance of the rest escaping. But we must regard them as suspects, and

-      report the house for quarantine.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ugh!&rdquo; shuddered Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;I hate that word. And

-      think of my husband coming home to find a flaming red placard on the

-      house!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll give him warning before he leaves the factory. And now

-      for our campaign. Item 1: a trained nurse. Item 2: a gas-range.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The trained nurse, certainly,&rdquo; agreed Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;But

-      why the gas-range? Isn&rsquo;t Charley&rsquo;s room warm enough?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Quite. The stove isn&rsquo;t for warmth; it&rsquo;s for safety. I&rsquo;m

-      going to establish a line of fire beyond which no contagion can pass. We&rsquo;ll

-      put the stove in the hall, and keep on it a tin boiler full of water just

-      at the simmering point. Everything which Charley has used or touched must

-      go into that or other boiling water as soon as it leaves the room: the

-      plates he eats from, the utensils he uses; his handkerchiefs,

-      night-clothes, towels&mdash;everything.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That will be a hard regimen to keep up,&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde objected.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Martial law,&rdquo; said the Health Master positively. &ldquo;From

-      the moment the red placard goes up, we&rsquo;re in a state of siege, and I&rsquo;m

-      in command. The rules of the camp will be simple but strict. Whoever

-      violates any of them will be liable to imprisonment in the strictest

-      quarantine. We&rsquo;ll have a household conference to-night and go over

-      the whole matter. Now I&rsquo;m going to telephone the Health Department

-      and ask Dr. Merritt to come up and quarantine us officially.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But what of Charley?&rdquo; exclaimed Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re

-      not going to keep me away from my boy?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not when you put it in that way and use that tone,&rdquo; smiled

-      Dr. Strong. &ldquo;I probably couldn&rsquo;t if I tried. Under official

-      quarantine rules you&rsquo;ll have to give up going anywhere outside the

-      house. Under our local martial law you&rsquo;re not to touch Charley or

-      anything that he handles, nor to kiss the other children. And you&rsquo;re

-      to wash your hands every time you come out of the sick-room, though it&rsquo;s

-      only to step beyond the door.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It is an order,&rdquo; said the mother gravely. &ldquo;Will he be

-      very ill, do you think?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So far the cases have been mild. His is likely to be, too. But it&rsquo;s

-      the most difficult kind of case to handle.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see that at all,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You will, when he becomes convalescent. Then is when my troubles

-      will begin. For the present the bulk of the work inside the sick-room will

-      be upon the trained nurse and Mrs. Clyde. I&rsquo;ll have my troubles

-      outside, watching the rest of the family.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Not since Dr. Strong came to the Clydes&rsquo; as guardian of their health

-      had there been an emergency meeting called of the Household Protective

-      Association, as the Health Master termed the organization which he had

-      formed (mainly for educative purposes) within the family. That evening he

-      addressed a full session, including the servants, holding up before them

-      the red placard which the Health Department had sent, and informing them

-      of the quarantine.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No school?&rdquo; inquired the practical-minded Bobs, &ldquo;Hooray!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No school for you children, until further notice,&rdquo; confirmed

-      the physician.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And no business for me, I suppose,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, frowning.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, yes. You can come and go as you please, so long as you keep

-      away from Charley&rsquo;s room. Every one is barred from Charley&rsquo;s

-      room until further instructions, except Mrs. Clyde; and she is confined

-      within military bounds, consisting of the house and yard. And now for the

-      most important thing&mdash;Rosie and Katie,&rdquo;&mdash;the cook and the

-      maid&mdash;&ldquo;pay particular heed to this&mdash;nothing of any kind

-      which comes from the sick-room is to be touched until it is disinfected,

-      except under my supervision. When I&rsquo;m not in the house, the nurse&rsquo;s

-      authority will be absolute. Now for the clinic; we&rsquo;ll look over the

-      throats of the whole crowd.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Throat inspection appeared to be the Health Master&rsquo;s favorite

-      pursuit for the next few days.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t dare open my mouth,&rdquo; protested Bobs, &ldquo;for

-      fear he&rsquo;ll peek into it and find a spot.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dr. Strong spends a lot more time watching us than he does watching

-      Charley,&rdquo; remarked Junkum. &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s the sick one, anyway&mdash;us

-      or him?&rdquo; she concluded, her resentment getting the better of her

-      grammar.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ho!&rdquo; jeered Bobs, and intoned the ancient couplet, made and

-      provided for the correction of such slips:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      &ldquo;Her ain&rsquo;t a-callin&rsquo; we,

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      Us don&rsquo;t belong to she.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Anyhow, I ain&rsquo;t sick,&rdquo; asseverated Bettina; &ldquo;but

-      he shut me up in my room for a day jus&rsquo; because my swallow worked

-      kinda hard.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If I&rsquo;m going to have scarlet fever I want to have scarlet

-      fever and get done with it!&rdquo; declared.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Bobs. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m getting tired of staying out of school. Charley&rsquo;s

-      having all the fun there is out of this, getting read to all the time by

-      that nurse and Mother.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Meantime nothing of interest was happening in the sick-room. Interesting

-      phases seldom appear in scarlet fever, which is well, since, when they do

-      appear, the patient usually dies. Not at any time did Charley evince the

-      slightest tendency to forsake a world which he had found, on the whole, to

-      be a highly satisfactory place of residence. In fact, he was going

-      comfortably along through a typically light onset of the disease; and was

-      rather less ill than he would have been with a sound case of measles.

-      Already the furrows in Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s forehead had smoothed out, and

-      Grandma Sharpless had ceased waking, in the dead of night, with a catch at

-      her heart and the totally unfounded fear that she had &ldquo;heard

-      something,&rdquo; when one morning Charley awoke, scratched a tiny flake

-      of skin off his nose, yawned, and emitted a hollow groan.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is it, Charley boy?&rdquo; asked his mother.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m tired of staying in bed,&rdquo; announced the young man.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How do you feel?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The patient sat up, the better to consider the matter. &ldquo;I feel,&rdquo;

-      he stated in positive accents, &ldquo;like a bucket of oyster stew, a

-      steak as big as my head, with onions all over it, a whole apple pie, a

-      platter of ice-cream, and a game of baseball.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Clyde laughed happily. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell the Health Master,&rdquo;

-      she said. She did, and Dr. Strong came up and looked the patient over

-      carefully.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You lie back there, young fellow,&rdquo; he ordered, &ldquo;and

-      play sick, no matter how well you feel, until I tell you different.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How about that beefsteak and pie, Doctor?&rdquo; inquired the boy

-      wistfully.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Mere prospects,&rdquo; retorted the hard-hearted physician. &ldquo;But

-      you can have some ice-cream.&rdquo; Conclave of the elders that evening to

-      consider the situation was opened by Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve now reached the critical point,&rdquo; he began.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Critical?&rdquo; gasped Mrs. Clyde, whose nerves had been

-      considerably stretched in the ten days of sick-room work. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t

-      he getting well?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s getting well quite as quickly as I want him to. Perhaps

-      a little more quickly. The fever is broken and he is beginning to peel.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then what&rsquo;s the difficulty?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just this. Charley is a sturdy boy. The light attack he&rsquo;s had

-      hasn&rsquo;t begun to exhaust his vitality. From now on, he is going to be

-      a bundle of energy, without outlet.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;From now on till when?&rdquo; It was Grandma Sharpless who wanted

-      to know.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Two weeks anyway. Perhaps more.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are you going to keep that poor child in bed for two weeks after he&rsquo;s

-      practically well?&rdquo; said the mother.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;For three weeks if the whole family will help me. It&rsquo;s not

-      going to be easy.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t that a little extreme, Strong?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only the precaution of experience. The danger-point in scarlet

-      fever isn&rsquo;t the illness; it&rsquo;s the convalescence. People think

-      that when a child is cured of a disease, he is cured of the effects of the

-      disease also. That mistake costs lives.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Because the poison is still in the system?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Rather, the effects of the poison. Though the patient may feel

-      quite well, the whole machinery of the body is out of gear. What do you do

-      when your machinery goes wrong, Clyde?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Stop it, of course.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; repeated the Health Master. &ldquo;Obviously we

-      can&rsquo;t stop the machinery of life, but we can ease it down to its

-      lowest possible strain, until it has had a chance to readjust itself. That

-      is what I want to do in Charley&rsquo;s case.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How does this poison affect the system?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If I could discover that, I&rsquo;d be sure of a place in history.

-      All we know is that no organ seems to be exempt from its sudden return

-      attack long after the disease has passed. If we ever get any complete

-      records, I venture to say that we&rsquo;ll find more children dying in

-      after years from the results of scarlet fever than die from the immediate

-      disease itself, not to mention such after-effects as deafness and

-      blindness.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve noticed that,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, &ldquo;when

-      we lived in the country. And I remember a verse on the scarlet-fever page

-      of an old almanac:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      If they run from nose or ear,

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      Watch your children for a year.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But I always set down those cases to catching cold.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Most people do. It isn&rsquo;t that. It&rsquo;s overstrain put on a

-      poisoned system. And it&rsquo;s true not of scarlet fever alone, but of

-      measles, and diphtheria, and grippe; and, in a lesser degree, of

-      whooping-cough and chicken pox.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve seen such cases in your own practice?&rdquo; asked Mr.

-      Clyde, and regretted the question as soon as he had put it, for there

-      passed over Dr. Strong&rsquo;s face the quick spasm of pain which anything

-      referring back to the hidden past before he had come to the Clyde house

-      always brought.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he replied with an effort. &ldquo;I have had such

-      cases, and lost them. I might even say, killed them in my ignorance.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, no, Dr. Strong!&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde in quick sympathy.

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t say that. Being mistaken isn&rsquo;t killing.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It is, sometimes, for a doctor. I remember one little patient who

-      had a very light case of scarlet fever. I let her get up as soon as the

-      fever broke. Three months later she developed a dropsical tendency. And

-      one day she fell dead across the doll she was playing with. The official

-      cause of death said heart disease. But I knew what it was. The next case

-      was not so wholly my fault. The boy was a spoiled child, who held his

-      parents in enslavement. They hadn&rsquo;t the strength of character to

-      keep him under control. He insisted on riding his bicycle around the yard,

-      three days after he was out of bed. Against his willfulness my protests

-      were of no account. What I should have done is to have thrown up the case;

-      but I was young and the people were my friends. Well; that boy made,

-      apparently, a complete recovery. A few weeks later I was sent for again.

-      There was some kidney trouble. I knew, before the analysis was made, what

-      it would show: nephritis. The poison had struck to the kidneys like a

-      dagger. The poor little chap dragged along for some months before he died;

-      and his mother&mdash;God forgive me if I did wrong in telling her the

-      truth, as I did for the protection of their other child&mdash;almost lost

-      her reason.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And such cases are common?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Common enough to be fairly typical. Afterward, I cited the two

-      instances in a talk before our medical society. My frankness encouraged

-      some of the other men to be frank; and the list of fatalities and

-      permanent disabilities, following scarlet fever and measles, which was

-      brought out at that meeting, nearly every case being one of rushing the

-      convalescence&mdash;well, it reformed one phase of medical procedure in&mdash;in

-      that city and county.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That settles it for Charley,&rdquo; decided Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;He

-      stays in bed until you certify him cured, if I have to hire a vaudeville

-      show to keep him amused.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;My boy is not a spoiled child!&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde proudly.

-      &ldquo;I can handle him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Maybe he wasn&rsquo;t before,&rdquo; remarked Grandma Sharpless

-      dryly; &ldquo;but I think you&rsquo;ll have your hands full now.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Therefore,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;I propose to enlist the

-      services of the whole family, including the children.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What! Let the others go to see Charley when he&rsquo;s peeling?&rdquo;

-      protested Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;They&rsquo;ll all catch it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, from the skin-flakes. That&rsquo;s the way scarlet fever

-      spreads.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is it?&rdquo; said the Health Master mildly. &ldquo;Then perhaps

-      you&rsquo;ll explain to me why doctors aren&rsquo;t the greatest danger

-      that civilization suffers from.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I suppose they disinfect themselves,&rdquo; said the old lady, in a

-      rather unconvinced tone.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s see how much that would amount to. The fine flakes of

-      skin are likely to be pretty well disseminated in a sick-room. According

-      to the old theory, every one of them is a potential disease-bearer. Now, a

-      doctor could hardly be in a sickroom without getting some of them on his

-      clothes or in his hair, as well as on his hands, which, of course, he

-      thoroughly washes on leaving the place. But that&rsquo;s the extent of his

-      disinfection. Why don&rsquo;t the flakes he carries with him spread the

-      fever among his other patients?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t ask <i>me!</i>&rdquo; said Clyde. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not

-      good at puzzles.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Many doctors still hold to the old theory. But I&rsquo;ve never met

-      one who could answer that argument. Some of the best hospitals in the

-      world discharge patients without reference to the peeling of the skin, and

-      without evil results.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How is scarlet fever caught, then?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;From the discharge from the inflamed nose and throat, or from the

-      ears if they are affected. Anything which comes in contact with this

-      poisonous mucus is dangerous. Thus, of course, the skin-flakes from the

-      lips or the hands which had been in contact with the mouth or nose might

-      carry the contagion, just as a fork or a tooth-brush or a handkerchief

-      might. Now, I&rsquo;ll risk my status in this house on the safety of

-      letting the other children visit Charley under certain restrictions.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That settles it for me,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, whose faith in his

-      friend, while not unquestioning, was fundamental; and the two women

-      agreed, though not without misgivings. Thereupon Bobs, Julia, and Bettina

-      were sent for, and the Health Master announced that Charley would hold a

-      reception on the following afternoon. There were shouts of acclamation at

-      the prospect.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But first,&rdquo; added Dr. Strong, &ldquo;there will be a

-      rehearsal in the playroom, to-morrow morning.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What do we need a rehearsal for to see Charley?&rdquo; inquired

-      Julia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;To guard yourselves, Miss Junkum,&rdquo; returned the doctor.

-      &ldquo;Possibly you don&rsquo;t know everything about scarlet fever that

-      you should know. Do you, Cherubic Miss Toots,&rdquo; he added, turning

-      upon Bettina, &ldquo;know what a contagious disease is?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said the diminutive maiden gravely, &ldquo;that if

-      you leave Charley&rsquo;s door open the jerrums will fly out and bite

-      people.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Which fairly typifies the popular opinion concerning disease

-      bacilli,&rdquo; observed Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I saw a jerrum once,&rdquo; continued the infant of the family.

-      &ldquo;It was under a stone in a creek. It had horns and a wiggly tail.

-      Just like the Devil,&rdquo; she added with an engaging smile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Betty&rsquo;s been looking at the pictures in the comic

-      supplements,&rdquo; explained her elder sister.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Popular education by the press!&rdquo; commented Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;Well, I haven&rsquo;t time for an exposition of the germ theory

-      now. The point is this: Can you children stay an hour in Charley&rsquo;s

-      room without putting a lot of things in your mouths?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, I never put anything in my mouth. You taught us better than

-      that,&rdquo; said Julia reproachfully.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The doctor was little impressed by the reproach. &ldquo;Humph!&rdquo; he

-      grunted. &ldquo;Well, suppose you stop nibbling at your hair&rdquo;&mdash;Julia&rsquo;s

-      braid flew back over her shoulder&mdash;&ldquo;and consider that, when you

-      put your fingers in your mouth, you may be putting in, also, a particle of

-      everything that your fingers have touched. And in Charley&rsquo;s room

-      there might be jerrums, as Twinkles calls them, from his mouth which would

-      be dangerous. Rehearsal at noon tomorrow.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Expectant curiosity brought the children early to the playroom whither

-      they found that the Health Master had preceded them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When&rsquo;s it going to begin?&rdquo; asked Bettina.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Presently,&rdquo; replied the master of ceremonies. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re

-      going to pretend that this is Charley&rsquo;s room. Just at present I&rsquo;m

-      busy with some work.&rdquo; He shook a notebook at them. &ldquo;Go ahead

-      and amuse yourselves till I get through.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Julia the observant noted three hues of crayon on the stand beside the

-      doctor. &ldquo;Are you going to make a sketch?&rdquo; she inquired.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Never you mind. You attend to your affairs and I&rsquo;ll attend to

-      mine.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dr. Strong is a-goin&rsquo; to make a picture of a jerrum,&rdquo;

-      Bettina informed her favorite doll, Susan Nipper, imprinting a fervent

-      kiss on the pet&rsquo;s flattened face. &ldquo;Come on an&rsquo; let&rsquo;s

-      read the paper.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong made a note in his book, with a pencil.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Want to play catch, Junkum?&rdquo; suggested Bobs to his twin.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Julia, seizing upon a glove, while Bobs, in

-      his rôle of pitcher, professionally moistened the ball.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong made another note.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      For half an hour they disported themselves in various ways while the

-      Health Master, whose eyes were roving everywhere, made frequent entries in

-      his book.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All out now,&rdquo; he ordered finally. &ldquo;Come back in five

-      minutes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Before the time was up, they were clustered at the door. Dr. Strong

-      admitted them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Does the rehearsal begin now?&rdquo; asked Bobs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all over,&rdquo; said the physician. &ldquo;Look around

-      you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ow-w-w!&rdquo; wailed Bettina. &ldquo;Look at Susan Nipper&rsquo;s

-      nose!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      That once inconspicuous feature had turned a vivid green.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And the baseball is red,&rdquo; cried Bobs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So&rsquo;s my glove,&rdquo; announced Julia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Walking over to her, the Health Master caught her left hand and smeared it

-      with blue crayon. For good measure he put a dab on her chin.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;My story-book is all blue, too,&rdquo; exclaimed the girl. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s

-      it for?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just by way of illustration,&rdquo; explained the doctor. &ldquo;The

-      mouths of all of us contain germs of one kind or another. So I&rsquo;ve

-      assumed that Bob&rsquo;s mouth has red, and Junkum&rsquo;s blue, and Miss

-      Twinkle&rsquo;s green. Every chalk mark shows where you&rsquo;ve spread

-      your germs.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then the red on the ball is where I wet my fingers for that

-      in-curve,&rdquo; said Bobs.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And on my glove is where I caught it,&rdquo; said Julia. &ldquo;But

-      what&rsquo;s the blue doing on my left hand?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; announced Bobs triumphantly. &ldquo;You got that

-      slow drop on the end of your finger and jammed your finger in your mouth.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It hurt,&rdquo; defended Julia. &ldquo;Look at the walls&mdash;and

-      the Indian clubs&mdash;and the chair.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Crayon marks were everywhere. In some places it was one color; in others

-      another; in many, a crazy pattern of red, blue, and green.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And if I carried it out,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;your faces

-      would all be as bad.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care!&rdquo; murmured Betty to Susan Nipper; &ldquo;I

-      <i>will</i> kiss you even if you do turn green.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But you mustn&rsquo;t kiss Charley,&rdquo; interposed Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;If you&rsquo;ve had enough rehearsal, we&rsquo;ll go and make our

-      call right after luncheon.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Entering the sick-room, the three visitors stood a little abashed and

-      strange. Their hearty, rough-and-tumble brother looked strangely drawn and

-      brighteyed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Hello, kids!&rdquo; said he, airily. &ldquo;Make yourselves at

-      home.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Bettykin was the first to break the ice. &ldquo;Did it hurt, Charley?&rdquo;

-      she asked, remembering her own experience with adenoids.

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     *  For this ingenious example of the crayon marks I am

-     indebted to Dr. Charles V. Chapin, Health Officer of

-     Providence, Rhode Island, and a distinguished

-     epidemiologist.

-</pre>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nope,&rdquo; said the convalescent. &ldquo;Only thing that hurts is

-      being kept in bed when I want to be up and around. What&rsquo;s new?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Much was new, there in the room, and the children took it in, wide-eyed.

-      Although it was early May, the windows were screened. All the hangings and

-      curtains had been taken out of the room, which looked bare and bright. On

-      the door of the bathroom was a huge roller-towel of soft, cloth-like

-      paper, perforated in lengths so as to be easily detachable, and below it a

-      scrap-basket, with a sign: &ldquo;Throw Paper Towels in Here to be Burned

-      after Using.&rdquo; Between the two windows was a larger sign:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <i>Keep your Fingers Away from Your Mouth and Nose. </i>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Don&rsquo;t Handle Utensils Lying About.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Don&rsquo;t Open an Unscreened Window.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After Touching Anything which may have been Contaminated Wash Your Hands

-      at Once.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Use the Paper Towels; They&rsquo;re the Only Safe Kind.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      One Dollar Reward to Any One Discovering a Fly in the Room.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Wash Your Hands Immediately After Leaving the Room.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Keep Outside the Dead-line.

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      PENALTIES

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      For First Violation of Rules&mdash;Offender Reads to Patient One Hour.

-      Second Violation&mdash;Banishment for Balance of Day.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The dead-line is that thing, I suppose,&rdquo; said Junkum,

-      pointing to a tape stretched upon standards around the bed at a distance

-      of a yard.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is it a game?&rdquo; questioned the hopeful Bettina. &ldquo;No,

-      Bettykin. It&rsquo;s a germ-cage. No germs can get out of that unless they&rsquo;re

-      carried out by somebody or something. And, in that case, they&rsquo;re

-      boiled to death on the gas-stove outside.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At this moment Charley called for a drink of water. After he had emptied

-      the glass, his mother took it out and dropped it into the disinfecting hot

-      bath. Then she washed her hands, dried them on a strip of the paper towel

-      and dropped that in the basket.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; said Julia, the observant. &ldquo;Nothing gets any

-      scarlet fever on it except what Charley touches. And everything he touches

-      has to be washed as soon as it comes out of the dead-line.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Exactly. We&rsquo;ll make a trained nurse of you, yet, Junkum,&rdquo;

-      approved the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; said Julia slowly, &ldquo;I think Bobs ought to wash

-      his hands now. Mother opened the door after handling Charley&rsquo;s

-      glass, and when he went to watch her wash the glass, he put his hand on

-      the knob.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One mark against Bobs,&rdquo; announced the doctor. &ldquo;The

-      rigor of the game.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A game it proved to be, with Charley for umpire, and a very keen umpire,

-      as he was the beneficiary of the penalties. For some days Charley quite

-      fattened on literature dispensed orally by the incautious. Presently,

-      however, they became so wary that it was hard to catch them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Then, indeed, was the doctor hard put to it to keep the invalid amused.

-      The children invented games and charades for him. A special telephone wire

-      was run to his room so that he might talk with his friends. Bobs won

-      commendations by flying a kite one windy day and passing the twine up

-      through Charley&rsquo;s window, whereby the bedridden one spent a happy

-      afternoon &ldquo;feeling her pull.&rdquo; And the next day Betty won the

-      first and only dollar by discovering a small and early fly which,

-      presumably, had crawled in by the hole bored for the kite twine. As to any

-      encroachments upon the physical quiet of his patient or the protective

-      guardianship surrounding him, the Health Master was adamant, until, on a

-      day, after examining the prisoner&rsquo;s throat and nose, and going over

-      him, as Mr. Clyde put it, &ldquo;like a man buying a horse that&rsquo;s

-      cheaper than he ought to be,&rdquo; he sent for the Health Officer.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a clean throat,&rdquo; said Dr. Merritt. &ldquo;Never

-      mind the desquamating skin. We&rsquo;ll call it off.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Whereupon Charley was raised from his bed, and having symbolically broken

-      the tape-line about his bed, headed a solemn and slow procession of the

-      entire family to the front porch where he formally took down the red

-      placard and tore it in two. The halves still ornament the playroom, as a

-      memento.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After this memorable ceremony, Mrs. Clyde retired to the library and,

-      quite contrary to her usually self-restrained nature, dissolved into

-      illogical tears, in which condition she was found by the rest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know what&rsquo;s the matter,&rdquo;

-      she sobbed, in response to her husband&rsquo;s inquiry. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s

-      just because I hated the very thought of that abominable red sign so,&mdash;as

-      if we were unclean&mdash;like lepers.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, we&rsquo;re not lepers and if we can continue in that blessed

-      state,&rdquo; remarked Dr. Strong cheerfully, &ldquo;we can escape most of

-      the ills that flesh is heir to. After all, from a scientific point of

-      view, contagion is merely the Latin synonym for a much shorter and uglier

-      word.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Which is&mdash;&rdquo; queried Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dirt,&rdquo; said the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      VIII.&mdash;HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;H</span>opeless

-      from the first,&rdquo; said old Mrs. Sharpless, with a sigh, to her

-      daughter.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Clyde nodded. &ldquo;I suppose so. And she has so much to live for,

-      too.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s this that&rsquo;s hopeless from the first?&rdquo;

-      asked the Health Master, looking up from the novel which he was enjoying

-      in what he called his &ldquo;lazy hour,&rdquo; after luncheon.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Mrs. Westerly&rsquo;s case,&rdquo; said the younger woman. &ldquo;Even

-      now that she&rsquo;s gone to the hospital, the family won&rsquo;t admit

-      that it&rsquo;s cancer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ah, of the liver, I suppose,&rdquo; commented the physician.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why on earth should you suppose that?&rdquo; demanded Mrs.

-      Sharpless suspiciously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, because cancer of the liver is the only form which could

-      possibly be regarded as hopeless from the first.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All cancer, if it is really cancer, is hopeless,&rdquo; declared

-      the old lady with vigorous dogmatism. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me. I&rsquo;ve

-      seen too many cases die and too few get well.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Were those &lsquo;few&rsquo; hopeless, too?&rdquo; inquired Dr.

-      Strong with bland slyness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I guess they weren&rsquo;t cancer, at all,&rdquo; retorted Mrs.

-      Sharpless; &ldquo;just doctors&rsquo; mistakes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Doctors do make mistakes,&rdquo; admitted the representative of the

-      profession, &ldquo;and cancer is one of the diseases where they are most

-      commonly at fault. But the error isn&rsquo;t of the kind that you suggest,

-      Grandma Sharpless. Where they go wrong so often is in mistaking cancer for

-      some less malignant trouble; not in mistaking the less malignant forms for

-      cancer. And that wastes thousands of lives every year which might have

-      been saved.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How could they have been saved?&rdquo; asked the old lady

-      combatively.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let me do the questioning for a minute, and perhaps we&rsquo;ll get

-      at that. Now, these many cases that you&rsquo;ve known: were most of the

-      fatal ones recent?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not very,&rdquo; she replied, after some consideration. &ldquo;No;

-      most of them were from ten years ago, back.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Exactly. Now, the few that recovered: when did these occur?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Within a few years.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;None of the old cases recovered?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But a fair proportion of the more recent ones have?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All these were operated on, weren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; I believe they were. But not all that were operated on lived.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did a single one of those not operated on live?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not so far as I can remember.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, there we have the truth about cancer in a few words; or,

-      anyway, a good part of the truth. Up to twenty years ago or so, cancer was

-      practically incurable. It always returned after operation. That was

-      because the surgeon thought he needed only to cut out the cancer. Now he

-      knows better; he knows that he must cut out all the tissue and the glands

-      around the obvious cancer, and thus get the root of the growth out of the

-      system.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And that cures?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In a great majority of cases, <i>if it is done early enough</i>.&rdquo;

-      The Health Master dropped his book and beat time with an emphatic

-      forefinger to his concluding words.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But Agnes Westerly&rsquo;s is cancer of the breast,&rdquo; said

-      Mrs. Clyde, as if that clinched the case against the patient.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just about the most favorable locality.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I thought it was the worst.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Where on earth do intelligent women collect their superstitions

-      about cancer?&rdquo; cried Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Carcinoma of the breast is

-      the commonest form among women, and the easiest to handle. Show me a case

-      in the first stages and, with a good surgical hospital at hand, I&rsquo;d

-      almost guarantee recovery. It&rsquo;s simply a question of removing the

-      entire breast, and sometimes the adjacent glands. Ninety per cent of the

-      early cases should get well.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But the operation itself is so terrible,&rdquo; shuddered Mrs.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Terrible? Unpleasant, I&rsquo;ll admit. But if you mean terrible in

-      the sense of dangerous, or even serious, you&rsquo;re far wrong again. The

-      percentage of mortality from the operation itself is negligible. But the

-      percentage of mortality without operation is 100 out of 100. So the choice

-      is an easy one.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They seem to hold out little hope for Agnes Westerly.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s hear about the circumstances,&rdquo; suggested Dr.

-      Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;About two years ago&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a bad beginning,&rdquo; interrupted the physician,

-      shaking his head.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&mdash;She noticed a small lump in her right breast. It didn&rsquo;t

-      trouble her much&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It seldom does at the start.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&mdash;And she didn&rsquo;t want to alarm her husband; so she said

-      nothing about it. It kept getting a little larger very slowly, but there

-      was no outside sore; so she thought it couldn&rsquo;t be serious. If it

-      were, she thought, it would pain her.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That fatal mistake! Pain is a late symptom in cancer&mdash;usually

-      too late.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It was curious the way she finally came to find out. She read an

-      advertisement in the paper, headed, &lsquo;Any Lump in Woman&rsquo;s

-      Breast is Cancer.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; I know that advertisement. It&rsquo;s put out by a scoundrel

-      named Chamlee. Surely, she didn&rsquo;t try his torturing treatment?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, no. Agnes is too intelligent for that. But it frightened her

-      into going to her doctor. He told her that a radical operation was her

-      only chance. She was terribly frightened,&mdash;more afraid of the knife

-      than of the disease, she told me,&mdash;and she insisted on delay until

-      the pain grew intolerable. And now, they say, there&rsquo;s only a slight

-      chance. Isn&rsquo;t it pitiful?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Pitiful, and typical. Mrs. Westerly, if she dies, is a type of

-      suicide, the suicide of fear and ignorance. Two years&rsquo; waiting! And

-      every day subtracting from her chance. That&rsquo;s the curse of cancer;

-      that people won&rsquo;t understand the vital necessity of promptness.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But is it true that any lump in a woman&rsquo;s breast is cancer?&rdquo;

-      asked Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; it&rsquo;s a lie; a damnable lie, circulated by that quack to

-      scare foolish women into his toils. Most of such lumps are non-malignant

-      growths. This is true, though: that any lump in a woman&rsquo;s breast is

-      suspicious. It may be cancer; or it may develop into cancer. The only

-      course is to find out.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &lsquo;&ldquo;With the knife.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t that rather a severe method for a symptom that may not

-      mean anything?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not too severe, considering the danger. Whatever the lump may be,

-      it has no business there in the breast, any more than a bullet has. If it

-      is only a small benign tumor, the process of taking it out is very simple,

-      and there is nothing further to do. While the patient is still under the

-      anaesthetic, a microscopical examination of the tissue, which can be made

-      in a few minutes in a well-equipped hospital, will determine whether the

-      growth is malignant. If so, the whole breast is taken off, and the

-      patient, in all probability, saved. If not, sew up the wound, and the

-      subject is none the worse. Much the better, in fact, for the most innocent

-      growth may develop cancer by irritation. Thirty per cent, or more, of

-      breast cancers develop in this way.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But irritation alone won&rsquo;t cause cancer, will it?&rdquo;

-      asked Mrs. Clyde, her restlessly inquiring mind reaching back, as was

-      typical of her mental processes, toward first causes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. There must be something else. What that something is, we don&rsquo;t

-      know. But we are pretty certain that it doesn&rsquo;t develop unless there

-      is irritation of some kind.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t cancer a germ disease?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nobody knows. Some day we may&mdash;probably shall&mdash;find out.

-      Meantime we have the knowledge of how to prevent it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How to prevent a disease you don&rsquo;t know the nature of?&rdquo;

-      said Mrs. Sharpless incredulously. &ldquo;That sounds like nonsense.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Does it? What about smallpox? We haven&rsquo;t any idea of what

-      smallpox really is; but we are able to control it with practical certainty

-      through vaccination.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Doctors don&rsquo;t vaccinate for cancer,&rdquo; remarked the

-      practical-minded old lady.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They have tried serums, but that is no use. As I said, the

-      immediate occasion of cancer is irritation. There is overwhelming proof

-      that an unhealing sore or irritation at any point is likely to result in

-      the development of a cancer at that point, and at least a highly probable

-      inference that, without such irritation, the disease would not develop.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then why not get rid of the irritation?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ah, there&rsquo;s the point. That&rsquo;s where the tremendous

-      life-saving could be effected. Take a very simple instance, cancer of the

-      lip. In a thousand cases recorded by one of the Johns Hopkins experts,

-      there wasn&rsquo;t one but had developed from a small sore, at first of

-      innocent nature. It isn&rsquo;t too much to say that this particular

-      manifestation of cancer is absolutely preventable. If every person with a

-      sore on the lip which doesn&rsquo;t heal within three weeks were to go to

-      a good surgeon, this hideous and defacing form of tumor would disappear

-      from the earth. As for carcinoma of the tongue, one of the least hopeful

-      of all varieties, no careful person need ever develop it. Good dentistry,

-      which keeps the mouth free of jagged tooth-edges, is half the battle. The

-      other half is caution on the part of smokers. If a white patch develops in

-      the mouth, tobacco should be given up at once. Unless the patch heals

-      within a few weeks, the patient should consult a physician, and, if

-      necessary, have it removed by a minor operation. That&rsquo;s all there is

-      to that.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But if the irritant sore is internal?&rdquo; inquired Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;To the watchful it will give evidence of its presence, usually in

-      time. If it is in the intestines or stomach, there is generally some

-      uneasiness, vague, perhaps, but still suspicious, to announce the danger.

-      Surgical records covering a long period show that eighty per cent of

-      stomach cancers were preceded by definite gastric symptoms of more than a

-      year&rsquo;s duration. If it is in the uterus, there are definite signs

-      which every woman ought to be taught to understand. And here, to go back

-      to the matter of cure, even if the discovery isn&rsquo;t made until cancer

-      has actually developed, there is an excellent chance in the early stages.

-      Cancer of the stomach used to be sure doom to a hideous death. Now, taking

-      the cases as they come, the desperate chances with the early cases, more

-      than a quarter are saved in the best surgical hospitals. Where the growth

-      is in the womb or the intestines, with reasonably early discovery, a

-      generous half should be repaired and returned to active life as good as

-      new.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That doesn&rsquo;t seem possible,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless

-      flatly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Simply because you&rsquo;ve been steeped in the fatalism which

-      surrounds cancer. That fatalism, which is so hard to combat, is what keeps

-      women from the saving hope of the knife. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve got to die

-      anyway,&rsquo; they say, &lsquo;and I&rsquo;m not going to be carved up before I

-      die.&rsquo; And so they throw away what chance they have. Oh, if only I

-      had control of the newspapers of this city for one day a week or a month,&mdash;just

-      for a half-column editorial,&mdash;what a saving of life I could effect! A

-      little simple advice in straight-out terms would teach the people of this

-      community to avoid poor Mrs. Westerly&rsquo;s fate.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And drive &lsquo;em all into the hands of the doctors,&rdquo; said

-      Mrs. Sharpless shrewdly. &ldquo;A fine fattening of fees for your trade,

-      young man.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you think so? Do you think that cancer <i>ever</i> fails to come

-      to the physician at last? And do you think the fee is less because the

-      surgeon has to do twice the amount of work with a hundredth of the hope of

-      success?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No-o-o,&rdquo; admitted the old lady, with some hesitancy; &ldquo;I

-      didn&rsquo;t think of it in that light.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Few do. Oh, for the chance to teach people to think straight about

-      this! Publicity is what we need so bitterly, and the only publicity goes

-      to the quacks who pay for it, because the local newspapers don&rsquo;t

-      want to write about &lsquo;unpleasant topics,&rsquo; forsooth!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you want a chance for some publicity in a small way?&rdquo;

-      asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do I! Show me the chance.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The Mothers&rsquo; Association meets here this afternoon. We haven&rsquo;t

-      much business on hand. Come in and talk to us for an hour.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Fine!&rdquo; said the Health Master, with enthusiasm. &ldquo;Half

-      of that time will do me. How many will be there?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;About sixty.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very well. Just have me introduced with the statement that I&rsquo;m

-      going to talk informally on a subject of importance to all of you; and

-      then help me out with a little object lesson. I&rsquo;ll want sixty sealed

-      envelopes for the members to draw.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are you conducting a lottery, young man?&rdquo; queried Grandma

-      Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In a way. Rather I&rsquo;m arranging an illustration for the great

-      lottery which Life and Death conduct.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Two hours later, the business of the meeting having been concluded, Mrs.

-      Clyde asked, from the assembled mothers, the privilege of the floor for

-      Dr. Strong, and this being granted, aroused the curiosity of the meeting

-      by requesting each member to draw an envelope from the basket which she

-      carried around, while the presiding officer introduced the speaker.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let me begin,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;with an

-      ungallant assumption. I&rsquo;m going to assume that I&rsquo;m talking to

-      a gathering of middle-aged women. That being the case, I&rsquo;m going on

-      to a very unpleasant statement, to wit, that one out of every eight women

-      here may reasonably expect to die of cancer in some form.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A little subdued flutter passed through the room, and the name of Agnes

-      Westerly was whispered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; it is Mrs. Westerly&rsquo;s case which is responsible for my

-      being here,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, who had abnormally keen hearing.

-      &ldquo;I would like to save at least part of the eight out of your number,

-      who are statistically doomed, from this probable fate. To bring the lesson

-      home to you, I have had each of you draw an envelope. Eight of these

-      represent death by cancer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Every eye in the room turned, with rather ghastly surmise, to the little

-      white squares. But old Mrs. Sharpless rose from her place, marched upon

-      the Health Master, as one who leads a charge, and in low but vehement

-      tones protested: &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t be a party to any such nonsense. The

-      idea! Scaring some woman that&rsquo;s as well as you are into nervous

-      collapse with your black dot or red cross or whatever you&rsquo;ve got

-      inside these envelopes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, Grandma Sharpless, Grandma Sharpless! Have you known me all

-      this time not to trust me further than that?&rdquo; whispered the Health

-      Master. &ldquo;Wait and see.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A little woman near the rear of the room spoke up with a fine bravado:

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not afraid. It can&rsquo;t give me cancer.&rdquo; Then a

-      pause, and a sigh of relief, which brought out a ripple of nervous

-      laughter from the rest, as she said, &ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing in mine.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nor in mine,&rdquo; added a young and pretty woman, in the second

-      row, who had furtively and swiftly employed a hatpin to satisfy her

-      curiosity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nor mine!&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Nor mine!&rdquo; added a dozen

-      voices, in varying tones of alleviated suspense.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not in any of them,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, smiling. &ldquo;My

-      little design was to arouse you collectively to a sense of the danger, not

-      to frighten you individually into hysterics.&rdquo; (At this point Mrs.

-      Sharpless sat down abruptly and fanned a resentful face.) &ldquo;The ugly

-      fact remains, however: one out of every eight here is marked for death by

-      the most dreadful of diseases, unless you do something about it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What can we do?&rdquo; inquired the minister&rsquo;s wife, in the

-      pause that followed this statement.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Educate yourselves. If, in the process, you educate others, so much

-      the better. Now I propose to tell you all about cancer in half an hour.

-      Does that sound like a large contract? When I say &lsquo;all,&rsquo; I

-      mean all that it is necessary for you to know in order to protect

-      yourselves. And, for good measure, I&rsquo;ll answer any questions&mdash;if

-      I can&mdash;within the limit of time.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What <i>is</i> cancer?&rdquo; asked a voice.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ah! There is one that I can&rsquo;t answer. No one knows. If I told

-      you that it was a malignant tumor, that would be true, but it wouldn&rsquo;t

-      be an answer, because we don&rsquo;t know the real nature and underlying

-      cause of the tumor. Whether it is caused by a germ, science has not yet

-      determined. But though we know nothing of the fundamental cause of the

-      disease, we do understand, definitely, what is the immediate causative

-      influence. It practically always arises from some local sore or

-      irritation. Therefore&mdash;and here is my first important point&mdash;it

-      is preventable.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That would be only theoretically, wouldn&rsquo;t it, Dr. Strong?&rdquo;

-      asked the little woman who had first braved the venture of the sealed

-      envelope. &ldquo;One can&rsquo;t get through life without bumps and

-      scratches.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;True. But ordinary bumps or scratches properly looked after don&rsquo;t

-      cause cancer. The sore must be an unhealing one, or the irritation a

-      continued condition, in order to be dangerous. Remember this: any sort of

-      a sore, inflammation, or scarification, external or internal, which

-      continues more than a few weeks, is an invitation to cancer. Therefore,

-      get rid of it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But suppose the injury is in the stomach, where it can&rsquo;t be

-      got at?&rdquo; asked a member.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why can&rsquo;t it be got at?&rdquo; demanded Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How can it be got at?&rdquo; retorted the questioner.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By opening up the stomach and examining it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t want anybody to open up my stomach just to see

-      what is inside it!&rdquo; declared Mrs. Sharpless vigorously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very likely not. Perhaps you&rsquo;d feel different if you&rsquo;d

-      had steady pain or indigestion for two or three years.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Does that mean cancer?&rdquo; asked a tall, sallow woman anxiously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not by any means necessarily. But it may well mean gastric ulcer,

-      and that may develop into cancer. Three fourths of the cases of carcinoma

-      of the stomach which come into the surgeon&rsquo;s hands have developed

-      from gastric ulcer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is there no cure but the knife?&rdquo; inquired Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not for the cancer. For the gastric ulcer, yes. Careful medical

-      care and diet often cure it. The trouble is that patients insist on diet

-      and drugs in cases where they have proved themselves ineffectual. Those

-      cases should come to the surgeon. But it will take long to educate the

-      public to the significance of long-continued abdominal pain or

-      indigestion. The knife is the last thing they are willing to think of.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But stomach operations are terribly dangerous, aren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;

-      inquired a member.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not any more. They were once. The operation for gastric ulcer in

-      the early stage is simple. Even developed cancer of the stomach can be

-      cured by the knife in from twenty-five to thirty per cent of the cases.

-      Without the knife, it is sure death. I&rsquo;m glad we got to the stomach

-      first, because that is the most obscure and least hopeful of the common

-      locations of the growth. In carcinoma of the breast, the most prevalent

-      form among women, there is one simple, inclusive rule of prevention and

-      cure. Any lump in the breast should be regarded, as Blood-good of Johns

-      Hopkins puts it, &lsquo;as an acute disease.&rsquo; It should come out

-      immediately. If such growths come at once to the surgeon, prevention and

-      cure together would save probably ninety per cent of those who now die

-      from this &lsquo;creeping death,&rsquo; as our parents called it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now, I&rsquo;ll ask you to imagine for the moment that I am

-      conducting a clinic, for I&rsquo;m not going to mince words in speaking of

-      cancer of the womb, the next commonest form. Any persistent irritation

-      there is a peril. If there is a slight, steady, and untimely discharge,

-      that&rsquo;s a danger signal. The woman should at once have a

-      microscopical examination made. This is simple, almost painless, and

-      practically a sure determination of whether there is cancer or not. The

-      thing to do is to find out.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But if it is cancer, is there any chance?&rdquo; asked the lady of

-      the hatpin.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Would you regard tuberculosis as hopeless?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course not.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Your parents would have. But you have profited by popular

-      education. If the public understood what to do in cancer as thoroughly as

-      they know about tuberculosis, we&rsquo;d save almost if not quite as many

-      victims from the more terrible disease. Fatalism is as out of place in the

-      one as in the other. The gist of the matter is taking the thing in time.

-      Let me read you what the chairman of the Cancer Campaign Committee of the

-      Congress of Surgeons of North America, Dr. Thomas S. Cullen, of Baltimore,

-      says: &lsquo;Surgeons are heartsick to see the many cancer patients

-      begging for operations when the disease is so far advanced that nothing

-      can be done. Cancer is in the beginning a local process and not a blood

-      disease, and in its early stages can be completely removed. When the

-      cancer is small the surgeon can, with one fourth the amount of labor,

-      accomplish ten times the amount of good.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Does that always mean the knife?&rdquo; asked a timid-looking

-      woman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Always. There is no other hope, once the malignant growth has

-      begun. But the knife is not so terrible. In fact, in the early stages it

-      is not terrible at all. Modern surgery has reduced pain to a minimum. The

-      strongest argument against dread is a visit to a well-equipped surgical

-      hospital, where one can see patients sitting up in bed and enjoying life a

-      few days after a major operation. Even at the worst, the knife is less

-      terrible than death, its certain alternative.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why do you call it the certain alternative?&rdquo; asked the

-      minister&rsquo;s wife. &ldquo;I have seen facial cancer cured by

-      concentrated ray treatment.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That wasn&rsquo;t cancer; it was lupus,&rdquo; replied Dr.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Strong; &ldquo;a wholly different thing. True cancer of the face in its

-      commonest location, the lips, is the most frequently cured of any form,

-      but only by operation. Now here&rsquo;s an interesting and suggestive

-      point; taking lip-cancer patients as they come to us, we get perhaps

-      sixty-five per cent of complete cures. With cancer of the womb, we get in

-      all not more than forty per cent of recoveries. Perhaps some of you will

-      be able to suggest the explanation for this contrast.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Because cancer of the lip isn&rsquo;t as deadly a disease,&rdquo;

-      ventured some one.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Cancer is cancer, wherever it is located. Unless it is removed it

-      is always and equally deadly.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then it is because the internal operation is so much more

-      dangerous,&rdquo; offered another member.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; uterine operations are easy and simple. It is simply because

-      the sore on the face is obvious, plain, unmistakable evidence of something

-      wrong; and the patient ordinarily gets into the surgeon&rsquo;s hands

-      early; that is, before the roots of the growth have spread and involved

-      life itself. The difference in mortality between carcinoma of the lip and

-      carcinoma of the womb is the difference between early operation and

-      delayed operation. If uterine cancer or breast cancer were discovered as

-      early as lip cancer, we&rsquo;d save practically as many of the internal

-      as we do of the external cases. And if all the lip cancer cases were

-      noticed at the first development, we&rsquo;d save ninety-five per cent of

-      them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it the business of the physician to find out about the

-      internal forms?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Often the physician hasn&rsquo;t the chance. The woman ought to do

-      the first diagnosing herself. That is, she must be taught to recognize

-      suspicious symptoms. In Germany there has been a campaign of education

-      among women on cancer of the womb. The result is that more than twice as

-      many Germans come to the operating table, in time to give a fair chance of

-      permanent recovery in this class of cases, as do Americans.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How is the American woman, who knows nothing about such matters, to

-      find out?&rdquo; queried the minister&rsquo;s wife.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There is a campaign of education now under way here. Publications

-      giving the basic facts about cancer, its prevention and cure, in simple

-      and popular form, can be had from the American Society for the Control of

-      Cancer,&mdash;Thomas M. Debevoise, secretary, 62 Cedar Street, New York

-      City; or more detailed advice can be had from the Cancer Campaign

-      Committee of the Congress of Surgeons of North America, Dr. Thomas S.

-      Cullen, chairman, 3 West Preston Street, Baltimore; or from Dr. F. R.

-      Green, 535 Dearborn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, secretary of the Council of

-      Health and Public Instruction of the American Medical Association.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why not more easily and readily one&rsquo;s own physician?&rdquo;

-      asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Women don&rsquo;t go to their own physicians early enough. It is

-      necessary that they be trained to understand symptoms which do not at

-      first seem serious enough for medical attention. Besides, I regret to

-      confess, in this matter of cancer our physicians need educating, too. They

-      are too prone to say, if they are not sure of the diagnosis, &lsquo;Wait

-      and see.&rsquo; Waiting to see is what kills three fourths of the women

-      who succumb to cancer. Let me illustrate this peril by two cases which

-      have come under my observation: The wife of a lawyer in a Western city had

-      a severe attack of stomach trouble. Her doctor, a young and open-minded

-      man, had the courage to say, T don&rsquo;t know. But I&rsquo;m afraid it&rsquo;s

-      cancer. You&rsquo;d better go to such-and-such a hospital and let them

-      see.&rsquo; The woman went. An exploratory incision was made and carcinoma

-      found in the early stage. It was cut out and to-day she is as good as new.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now, this same lawyer had a friend who had been treated for months

-      by a stomach specialist of some reputation. Under the treatment he had

-      grown steadily thinner, paler, and weaker. &lsquo;Indigestion, gastric

-      intoxication,&rsquo; the specialist repeated, parrotlike, until the man

-      himself, in his misery, began to suspect. At this point the lawyer friend

-      got hold of him and took him to the hospital where his wife had been. The

-      surgeons refused the case and sent the man away to die. Indignant, the

-      lawyer sought the superintendent of the hospital.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Why won&rsquo;t you take my friend&rsquo;s case?&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;It is inoperable.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Isn&rsquo;t it cancer of the stomach, like my wife&rsquo;s?&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Yes.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;You cured my wife. Why can&rsquo;t you cure my friend?&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The official shook his head.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I want an answer,&rdquo; insisted the lawyer.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Well, frankly,&rsquo; said the other, &lsquo;your wife&rsquo;s

-      physician knew his business. Your friend&rsquo;s physician is a fool. He

-      has killed his patient by delay.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Back home went the lawyer, and spread that story quietly. To-day

-      the specialist&rsquo;s practice is almost ruined; but he has learned an

-      expensive lesson. The moral is this: If your doctor is doubtful whether

-      your trouble is cancerous, and advises delay, get another doctor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then, there is the &lsquo;conservative&rsquo; type of practitioner,

-      who is timid about making a complete job of his operation. One of this

-      kind had the case of an acquaintance of mine who was stricken with cancer

-      of the breast. The physician, under persuasion of his patient, I presume,

-      advised excising only the tumor itself, but the husband, who had been

-      reading up on cancer, insisted on a radical operation. The entire breast

-      was removed. A year later the woman&rsquo;s unmarried sister was afflicted

-      in exactly the same way; but the discovery was made earlier, so that the

-      case was a distinctly favorable one. The girl, however, would not consent

-      to the radical operation, and the physician (the same man) declared it

-      unnecessary. The tumor alone was cut out. The cancer reappeared and

-      another operation was necessary. The girl died after cruel suffering. The

-      married sister is alive, and, five years after the operation, as sound as

-      a bell. That physician is a wiser man; also a sadder one. There&rsquo;s a

-      special moral to this, too: the operator has but one chance; he must do

-      his work thoroughly, or he might better not do it at all. When cancer

-      returns after operation&mdash;which means that the roots were not

-      eradicated&mdash;it is invariably fatal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Here are a few things which I want every one of you to remember.

-      Had I had time I&rsquo;d have had them printed for each of you to take

-      home, so important do I think them:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No cancer is hopeless when discovered early.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Most cancer, discovered early, is permanently curable.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The only cure is the knife.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Medicines are worse than useless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Delay is more than dangerous; it is deadly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The one hope, and a strong one, is prompt and radical operation. A

-      half-operation is worse than none at all.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Most, if not all, cancer is preventable by correcting the minor

-      difficulty from which it develops.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;With recognition of, and prompt action upon early symptoms, the

-      death rate can be cut down at least a half; probably more.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The fatalism which says: &lsquo;If it&rsquo;s cancer, I might as

-      well give up,&rsquo; is foolish, cowardly, and suicidal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And, finally, here is some simple advice, intelligible to any

-      thinking human being, which has been indorsed in printed form by the

-      Congress of Surgeons of North America:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Be careful of persistent sores or irritations, external or

-      internal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Be careful of yourself, without undue worry. At the first

-      suspicious symptom go to some good physician and demand the truth. Don&rsquo;t

-      wait for pain to develop.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;If the doctor suspects cancer insist that he confirm or

-      disprove his suspicions.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t be a hopeless fatalist. If it&rsquo;s cancer

-      face it bravely. With courage and prompt action the chances of recovery

-      are all in your favor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t defer an advised operation even for a day; and

-      don&rsquo;t shrink from the merciful knife, when the alternative is the

-      merciless anguish of slow death.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;For the woman who fears the knife, Dr. Charles H. Mayo, one of the

-      greatest of living surgeons, has spoken the final words: &lsquo;The risk

-      is not in surgery, but in <i>delayed surgery</i>.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I have said my say, ladies, and there are five minutes left. Has

-      any one any further questions?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There was none. But as he stepped down, Mrs. Sharpless whispered to him:

-      &ldquo;I watched them while you talked, and half of those women are

-      thinking, and thinking <i>hard</i>.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Six months thereafter, Mrs. Clyde came into the Health Master&rsquo;s

-      office one day.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just come from a sort of experience meeting of the

-      Mothers&rsquo; Club,&rdquo; she said.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What was the topic this time?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Aftermath.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of what?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Your cancer talk.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Anything definite?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Definite, indeed! Between fifteen and twenty of the members went

-      away from that meeting where you talked, suspecting themselves of cancer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s too many.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. Ten of them had their fears set at rest right away.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry to have frightened them; but one has to do a little

-      harm in aiming at almost any good.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;This was worth it. Half a dozen others had minor operations.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perhaps saving major ones later.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very likely. And four of them actually had cancer. Three out of the

-      four are going to be well women. The fourth has an even chance. Dr.

-      Strong, I don&rsquo;t think you&rsquo;ve done so good a day&rsquo;s work

-      since you brought health into this house.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I thank you,&rdquo; said the doctor simply; &ldquo;I think you are

-      right. And you&rsquo;ve given me the most profound and about the rarest

-      satisfaction with which the physician is ever rewarded.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And that is?&rdquo; she asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The practical certainty of having definitely saved human life,&rdquo;

-      said the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      IX.&mdash;THE GOOD GRAY DOCTOR

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> twenty-dollar

-      bill! Crisp, fresh, and golden, it rose monumentally from the basis of

-      nickels, dimes, and quarters which made up the customary collection of the

-      Bairdstown Memorial Church. Even the generosity of the Clyde family, who,

-      whenever they spent a week-end at Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s farm outside the

-      little city, attended the Sunday services, looked meager and insignificant

-      beside its yellow-backed splendor. Deacon Wilkes, passing the plate, gazed

-      at it in fascination. Subsequent contributors surreptitiously touched it

-      in depositing their own modest offerings, as if to make certain of its

-      substance. It was even said at the Wednesday Sewing Circle that the Rev.

-      Mr. Huddleston, from his eminence in the pulpit, had marked its colorful

-      glint with an instant and benign eye and had changed the final hymn to one

-      which specially celebrated the glory of giving.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the Clyde pew also there was one who specially noted the donor, but

-      with an expression far from benign. Dr. Strong&rsquo;s appraising glance

-      ranged over the plump and glossy perfection of the stranger, his symphonic

-      grayness, beginning at his gray-suède-shod feet, one of which

-      unobtrusively protruded into the aisle, verging upward through gray sock

-      and trouser to gray frock coat, generously cut, and terminating at the

-      sleek gray head. Even the tall hat which the man dandled on his knees was

-      gray. Against this Quakerish color-scheme the wearer&rsquo;s face stood

-      out, large, pink, and heavy-jowled, lighted by restless brown eyes. His

-      manner was at once important and reverent, and his &ldquo;amen&rdquo; a

-      masterpiece of unction. No such impressive outlander had visited

-      Bairdstown for many a moon.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      After the service the visitor went forward to speak with Mr. Huddleston.

-      At the same time Dr. Strong strolled up the aisle and contrived to pass

-      the two so, as to obtain a face-to-face view of the stranger.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At nine o&rsquo;clock to-morrow, then, and I shall be delighted to

-      see you,&rdquo; the pastor was saying as Dr. Strong passed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good-morning, Professor,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, with an accent on

-      the final word as slight as the nod which accompanied it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good-morning! Good-morning!&rdquo; returned the other heartily. But

-      his glance, as it followed the man who had accosted him, was puzzled and

-      not wholly untroubled.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Who is your munificent friend?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde, as the

-      Health Master emerged from the church and joined her husband and herself

-      in their car.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When I last ran across him he called himself Professor Graham Gray,

-      the Great Gray Benefactor,&rdquo; replied Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dresses the part, doesn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo; observed Mr. Clyde.

-      &ldquo;Where was it that you knew him?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;On the Pacific Coast, five years ago. He was then &lsquo;itinerating&rsquo;&mdash;the

-      quack term for traveling from place to place, picking up such practice as

-      may be had by flamboyant advertising. Itinerating in eyes, as he would

-      probably put it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A wandering quack oculist?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Optician, rather, since he carried his own stock of glasses. In

-      fact that&rsquo;s where his profit came in. He advertised treatment free

-      and charged two or three dollars for the glasses, special rates to

-      schoolchildren. The scheme is an old one and a devilish. Half of the

-      children in San Luis Obispo County, where I chanced upon his trail, were

-      wearing his vision-twisters by the time he was through with them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What kind of glasses were they?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sometimes magnifying lenses. Mostly just plain window glass. Few

-      children escaped him, for he would tell the parents that only prompt

-      action could avert blindness.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At least the plain glass couldn&rsquo;t hurt the children,&rdquo;

-      suggested Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t it! It couldn&rsquo;t fail to hurt them. Modify the

-      sight of a delicate instrument like a child&rsquo;s eye continuously by

-      the most transparent of barriers, and it is bound to go wrong soon. The

-      magnifying glasses are far worse. There are hundreds of children in that

-      one locality alone who will carry the stigma of his quackery throughout

-      their lives.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you think he is here with a view to practicing his amiable

-      trade?&rdquo; inquired Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only in part, if at all. I understand that he has changed his line.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How comes he by all that showy money, then?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By murder.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Clydes, accustomed to their physician&rsquo;s hammerstroke turns of

-      speech, took this under consideration.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But he wasn&rsquo;t committing murder in the church just now, I

-      suppose,&rdquo; insinuated Mrs. Clyde at length.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not directly. His immediate business there, I suspect, was bribery.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of whom?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The minister.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, come, Strong!&rdquo; protested Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Mr. Huddleston

-      isn&rsquo;t an intellectual giant, I grant you; but he&rsquo;s certainly a

-      well-meaning and honorable old fellow.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Some cynical philosopher has remarked that wicked men have a talent

-      for doing harm, but fools have a genius. Mr. Huddleston&rsquo;s goodness

-      and honesty, taken in connection with his hopeless ignorance of human

-      nature, are just so much capital to hand for a scoundrel like this Gray.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What does he expect to get for his twenty-dol-lar bill?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;First, a reputation for piety and generosity. Second, that

-      reputation duly certified to by the leading minister of the town.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In other words, a testimonial.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Precisely. For home use, and cheap at twenty dollars. Preparatory

-      to operating in a town, your itinerating quack bribes two people&mdash;if

-      he can. First, the editor of the local paper; second, the pastor of the

-      leading church. The editor usually takes the money with his eyes wide

-      open; the minister with his eyes tight shut.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How can his eyes be shut to such a business?&rdquo; asked Mrs.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Because so much dust has been thrown in them by the so-called

-      religious journals.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Surely you don&rsquo;t mean that religious journals exploit

-      quackery in their pages!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They are the mainstay of the quack and patent medicine business,&rdquo;

-      declared the Health Master. &ldquo;Leaving out the Christian Science

-      papers, which, of course, don&rsquo;t touch this dirty money, the

-      religious press of all denominations, with a few honorable individual

-      exceptions, sells out to any form of medical fraud which has a dollar to

-      spend. Is it strange that the judgment of some of the clergy, who

-      implicitly trust in their sectarian publications, becomes distorted? It&rsquo;s

-      an even chance that our Great Gray faker&rsquo;s advertisement is in the

-      religious weekly which lies on Mr. Huddleston&rsquo;s study-table at this

-      moment.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Grandma Sharpless turned around from her seat in front, where she always

-      ensconced herself so that, as she put it, she could see what was coming in

-      time to jump. &ldquo;I know it is,&rdquo; she stated quietly. &ldquo;For

-      while I was waiting in the parsonage last week I picked up the &lsquo;Church

-      Pillar&rsquo; and saw it there.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Trust Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s eyes not to miss anything that

-      comes within their range,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, I missed the sense of that advertisement till just now,&rdquo;

-      retorted the old lady. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just remembered about this Graham

-      Gray.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What about him?&rdquo; asked the Health Master with eagerness, for

-      Mrs. Sharpless&rsquo;s memory was as reliable for retaining salient facts

-      as her vision was for discerning them. &ldquo;Do you know him?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only by his works. Last year a traveling doctor of that name

-      stopped over at Greenvale, twenty miles down the river, and gave some of

-      his lectures to Suffering Womanhood, or some such folderol. He got hold of

-      Sally Griffin, niece of our farmer here, while she was visiting there.

-      Sally&rsquo;s as sound as a pippin, except for an occasional spell of

-      fool-in-the-head, and I guess no school of doctoring ever helps that

-      common ailment much. Well, this Gray got her scared out of her wits with

-      symptoms, and sold her twenty-five dollars&rsquo; worth of medicine to

-      cure her of something or other she didn&rsquo;t have. Cured!&rdquo;

-      sniffed the lively narrator. &ldquo;If I hadn&rsquo;t taken the stuff away

-      from her and locked it up, I expect she&rsquo;d be in the churchyard by

-      now.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The whole philosophy of quackery explicated and punctured, by one

-      who knows,&rdquo; chuckled Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;None of your palaver with me, young man!&rdquo; returned the brisk

-      old lady, who was devoted to the Health Master, and showed it by a policy

-      of determined opposition of the letter and whole-hearted support of the

-      spirit and deed, in all things. &ldquo;Probably he knows as much as most

-      of your regular doctors, at that!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At least he seems to know human nature. That&rsquo;s the strong

-      point of the charlatan. But have you got any of his medicine left?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes; I think I can lay my hands on what&rsquo;s left of it. I

-      remember that Sally boohooed like a baby, grown woman that she is, when I

-      took it away from her.&rdquo; Dr. Strong&rsquo;s eyebrows went up sharply.

-      &ldquo;As soon as we get to the house I&rsquo;ll look it up.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      On their arrival at the roomy old farmstead which Mr. Clyde had remodeled

-      and modernized for what he called &ldquo;an occasional three days of grace&rdquo;

-      from his business in the city of Worthington, Grandma Sharpless set about

-      the search, and presently came to the living-room bearing in one hand a

-      large bottle and in the other a newspaper.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Since you&rsquo;re interested in Professor Gray,&rdquo; she said,

-      &ldquo;here&rsquo;s what he says about himself in yesterday&rsquo;s

-      &lsquo;Bairdstown Bugle.&rsquo; I do think,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;that

-      the Honorable Silas Harris might be in better business with his paper than

-      publishing such truck as this. Listen to it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      <i>GOSPEL HERBS WILL CURE YOUR ILLS</i>

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      <i>Women of Bairdstown; Read your Bible! Revelation 22d chapter, 2d verse.

-      God promises that &ldquo;the Herbs of the field shall heal the nations.&rdquo;

-      In a vision from above, the holy secret has been revealed to me. Alone of

-      all men, I can brew this miracle-working elixir.</i>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The blasphemous old slinkum!&rdquo; Grandma Sharpless interrupted

-      herself to say angrily. &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t even quote the Scriptures

-      right!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, blasphemy is a small matter for a rascal of his kind,&rdquo;

-      said the Health Master lightly. &ldquo;Go on.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      She read on:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <i>Come to me, ye women who suffer, and I will give you relief. All those

-      wasting and wearing ailments from which the tender sex suffers, vanish

-      like mist before the healing, revivifying influence of Gospel Herbs.

-      Supposed incurable diseases: Rheumatism, Dropsy, Diabetes and all kidney

-      ills, Stomach Trouble, Scrofula, Blood Poison, even the dreaded scourge,

-      Consumption, yield at once to this remedy. </i>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Though my special message is to women, I will not withhold this boon from

-      any suffering human. Come one and all, rich and poor, young and old, of

-      either sex. Your money refunded if I do not cure you. Public meeting

-      Monday and Tuesday evenings, at eight o&rsquo;clock sharp in the Scatcherd

-      Opera House; admission free to all. Private consultation at the Mallory

-      Hotel, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Remember, I

-      cure where the doctors fail; or no pay.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Prof. Graham Gray,

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Great Gray Benefactor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Sharpless held out for the general view the advertisement, which

-      occupied, in huge type, two thirds of a page of the &ldquo;Bugle.&rdquo;

-      The remainder of the page was taken up with testimonials to the marvelous

-      effects of the Gospel Herbs. Most of the letters were from far-away towns,

-      but there were a few from the general vicinity of Bairdsville.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Meantime Dr. Strong had been delicately tasting and smelling the contents

-      of the bottle, which were thick and reddish.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What do you make out is in it?&rdquo; asked Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Death&mdash;and a few worse things. Grandma Sharpless, you say that

-      the girl cried for this after you took it from her?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not only that; she wrote to the Professor for more. And when it

-      came I smashed the bottle.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You ought to have the honorary degree of M.D. Well, it&rsquo;s

-      pretty plain, but to make sure I&rsquo;ll send this to Worthington for an

-      analysis.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So our friend, the gray wolf, is going to prowl in Bairdstown for

-      the next three days!&rdquo; Thomas Clyde began to rub his chin softly;

-      then not so softly; and presently quite hard. His wife watched him with

-      troubled eyes. When his hand came down to rest upon his knee, it was

-      doubled into a very competent-looking fist. His face set in the expression

-      which the newspapers of his own city had dubbed, after the tenement

-      campaign of the year before, &ldquo;Clyde&rsquo;s fighting smile.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, Tom!&rdquo; broke out his wife, &ldquo;what kind of trouble are

-      you going to get into now?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Trouble?&rdquo; repeated the head of the family, in well-simulated

-      surprise. &ldquo;Why, dear, I wasn&rsquo;t even thinking of trouble&mdash;for

-      myself. But I believe it is time for a little action. Let&rsquo;s call

-      this a household meeting&rdquo; (this was one of the established methods

-      of the Clyde clan) &ldquo;and find out. As it isn&rsquo;t a family affair,

-      we won&rsquo;t call in the children this time. Strong, what, if anything,

-      are we going to do about this stranger in our midst? Are we going to let

-      him take us in?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The question is,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong quickly, &ldquo;whether the

-      Clyde family is willing to loan its subsidized physician temporarily to

-      the city of Bairdstown.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;On the Chinese plan,&rdquo; supplemented Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Certainly. On the Chinese plan of trying to save the community from

-      a visitation instead of waiting to cure them of the incurable results of

-      it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By visitation I suppose you mean Professor Gray?&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Exactly. I should rank him rather higher than an epidemic of

-      scarlet fever, as an ally of damage and death.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll vote &lsquo;Yes,&rsquo;&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde rather

-      plaintively. &ldquo;Only, I wish you two men didn&rsquo;t have so much

-      Irish in your temperament.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I scorn your insinuation,&rdquo; replied her husband. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m

-      the original dove of peace, but this Gray person ruffles my plumage. What

-      do you say, Grandma?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Bairdstown is my own place, partly. I know the people and they know

-      me and I won&rsquo;t sit quiet and see &lsquo;em put upon. I vote &lsquo;Yes.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Make it unanimous!&rdquo; said Clyde. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the first

-      move of the army of relief? I&rsquo;m in on this somewhere, Strong.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Contribute your car for a couple of days, then, and we&rsquo;ll go

-      out on a still hunt for the elusive clue and the shy and retiring

-      evidence. In other words, we&rsquo;ll scour the county, and look up some

-      of these local testimonials which the Great Gray One gathered in last

-      year, and now prints in the &lsquo;Bugle.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll stop in town and see Mr. Huddleston to-morrow,&rdquo;

-      said Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You won&rsquo;t get any results,&rdquo; prophesied the Health

-      Master. &ldquo;But, anyway, get him to come to the Gray lecture on Tuesday

-      evening. We&rsquo;ll need him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      During the ensuing two and a half days and two nights Mrs. Clyde had

-      speech of her husband but once; and that was at 2 a.m. when he woke her up

-      to tell her that he was having the time of his life, and she replied by

-      asking him whether he had let the cat in, and returned to her dreams.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Bairdstown&rsquo;s Suffering Womanhood&mdash;as per advertisement&mdash;turned

-      out extensively and self-commiseratingly to the free lecture of Tuesday

-      evening, bringing with them a considerable admixture of the male populace,

-      curious, cynical, or expectant. On the platform sat a number of &ldquo;special

-      guests,&rdquo; including the Rev. Mr. Huddleston, mild of face and white

-      of hair, and the Honorable Silas Harris, owner of the &ldquo;Bugle.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Cured&rdquo; patients, to the number of half a dozen, fidgeted in

-      the seats of honor with expressions of conscious and pleasurable

-      importance.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They appear to be enjoying poor health quite literally,&rdquo;

-      whispered Clyde to Dr. Strong, as the two, begrimed with the dust of a

-      long day&rsquo;s travel just finished, slipped quietly into side seats.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At once the entertainment began. A lank, harshfaced, muscular man whom

-      Professor Gray introduced as his assistant, seated himself at the piano,

-      and struck a chord, whereupon the Professor, in a powerful voice, sang

-      what he termed the &ldquo;Hymn of Healing,&rdquo; inviting the audience to

-      &ldquo;assist&rdquo; in the chorus, which gem of poesy ran as follows:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      &ldquo;Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed!

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      Trust in the gospel advice.

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field;

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      Healed without money or price.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Some poetic license in that last line,&rdquo; murmured Clyde to his

-      companion.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The next portion of our programme,&rdquo; announced the Great Gray

-      Benefactor, &ldquo;will be corroborative readings from the Good Book.&rdquo;

-      And he proceeded to deliver in oratorical style sundry Bible quotations so

-      patched together and garbled as to ascribe, inferentially, miraculous

-      powers to the Gospel Herbs. Then came the lecture proper, which was merely

-      an amplification of the &ldquo;Bugle&rdquo; advertisement, interspersed

-      with almanac funny stories and old jokes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And now, before our demonstration,&rdquo; concluded Professor

-      Graham Gray, &ldquo;if there is any here seeking enlightenment or help,

-      let him rise. This is your meeting, dear friends, as much as mine; free to

-      your voices and your needs, as well as to your welcome presence here. I

-      court inquiry and fair investigation. Any questions? If not, we&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One moment!&rdquo; The whole assemblage turned, as on a single

-      pivot, to the side aisle where Dr. Strong had risen and now stood, tall,

-      straight, and composed, waiting for silence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Our friend on the right has the floor,&rdquo; said the Professor

-      suavely.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You state that this God-given secret remedy was imparted to you for

-      the relief of human misery?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Thousands of grateful patients attest it, my friend.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then, with human beings suffering and dying all about you, why do

-      you continue to profit by keeping it secret?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Down sat the questioner. A murmur rose and ran, as the logic of the

-      question struck home. But the quack had his answer pat.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Does not the Good Book say that the laborer is worthy of his hire?

-      Do your regular physicians, of whom I understand you are one, treat cases

-      for nothing? Ah,&rdquo; he went on, outstretching his hands to the

-      audience with a gesture of appeal, &ldquo;the injustice which I have

-      suffered from the jealousy and envy of the medical profession! Never do I

-      enter a town without curing many unfortunates that the regular doctors

-      have given up as hopeless. Hence the violence of their attacks upon me.

-      But I forgive them their prejudice, as I pity their ignorance.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Some applause followed the enunciation of this noble sentiment.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We have with us to-night,&rdquo; pursued the speaker, quick to

-      catch the veering sentiment, &ldquo;a number of these marvelous cures. You

-      shall hear from the very mouths of the saved ones testimony beyond cavil.

-      I will call first on Mrs. Amanda Gryce, wife of Mr. Stanley Gryce, the

-      well and favorably known laundryman. Speak up clearly, Mrs. Gryce, and

-      tell your story.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s two years now that I been doctorin&rsquo;,&rdquo; said

-      the lady thus adjured, in a fluttering voice. &ldquo;I doctored with a

-      allopathic physician here, an&rsquo; with a homypath over to Roxton, an&rsquo;

-      with a osty-path down to Worthington, an&rsquo; with Peruny in betwixt, an&rsquo;

-      they didn&rsquo;t any of &lsquo;em do me no good till I tried Professor

-      Gray. He seen how I felt without askin&rsquo; me a question. He just

-      pulled down my eyelid an&rsquo; looked at it. &lsquo;You&rsquo;re all run down;

-      gone!&rsquo; says he. An&rsquo; thet&rsquo;s jest what I was. So he

-      treated me with his herb medicine an&rsquo; I feel like a new woman. An&rsquo;

-      I give Professor Graham Gray the credit an&rsquo; the thanks of a saved

-      woman.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not to mention seven dollars an&rsquo; a half,&rdquo; supplemented

-      a mournful drawl from the audience.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You hush, Stan Gryce!&rdquo; cried the healed one, shrill above the

-      laughter of the ribald. &ldquo;Would you begrutch a few mizzable dollars

-      for your poor, sufferin&rsquo; wife&rsquo;s health?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An alarmed child of ten was next led forward and recited in sing-song

-      measure:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&mdash;had&mdash;the&mdash;fits&mdash;for&mdash;most&mdash;three&mdash;years&mdash;and&mdash;I&mdash;was&mdash;cured&mdash;by

-      Gospel&mdash;Herbs&mdash;and&mdash;I&mdash;have&mdash;come&mdash;here&mdash;to&mdash;say&mdash;God&mdash;bless&mdash;my&mdash;dear

-      benefactor&mdash;Professor&mdash;Graham&mdash;Gray,&rdquo;&mdash;and sat

-      down hard at the last word, whereupon a tenor squeak in the far gallery

-      took up the refrain:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;d scarcex peckwon of my yage

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      To speakin public on the stage.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Again there was a surge of mirth, and the lecturer frowned with concern.

-      But he quickly covered whatever misgivings he might have had by bringing

-      forward other &ldquo;testimonies&rdquo;: old Miss Smithson whose

-      nervousness had been quite dispelled by two doses of the herbs; Auntie

-      Thomas (colored) whose &ldquo;misery&rdquo; had vanished before the

-      wonder-working treatment; and the Widow Carlin, whose boy had been &ldquo;spittin&rsquo;

-      blood like as if he was churchyard doomed,&rdquo; but hadn&rsquo;t had a

-      bad coughing spell since taking the panacea. And all this time Dr. Strong

-      sat quiet in his seat, with a face of darkening sternness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You have heard your fellow-citizens,&rdquo; the lecturer took up

-      his theme again, &ldquo;testify to the efficacy of my methods. And you see

-      on this rostrum with me that grand and good old man, the worthy pastor of

-      so many of you, my dear and honored friend&mdash;I feel that I may call

-      him friend, since I have his approval of my humble labors&mdash;the

-      Reverend Doctor Huddleston. You see also here, lending the support of his

-      valued presence, the Honorable Silas Harris, whom you have twice honored

-      by sending him to the state legislature. Their presence is the proudest

-      testimonial to my professional character. In Mr. Harris&rsquo;s fearless

-      and independent journal you have read the sworn evidence of those who have

-      been cured by my Godgiven remedies; evidence which is beyond challenge&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I challenge it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong, who had been hopefully awaiting some such opening, was on his

-      feet again.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You have had your say!&rdquo; cried Professor Gray, menacing him

-      with a shaking hand. &ldquo;These people don&rsquo;t want to hear you.

-      They understand your motives. You can&rsquo;t run this meeting.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The gesture was a signal. The raw-boned accompanist, whose secondary

-      function was that of bouncer, made a quick advance from the rear, reached

-      for the unsuspicious Health Master&mdash;and recoiled from the impact of

-      Mr. Thomas Clyde&rsquo;s solid shoulder so sharply that only the side wall

-      checked his subsidence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Better stay out of harm&rsquo;s way, my friend,&rdquo; suggested

-      Clyde amiably.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Immediately the hall was in an uproar. The more timid of the women were

-      making for the exits, when a high, shrill voice, calling for order

-      strenuously, quelled the racket, and a very fat man waddled down the

-      middle aisle, to be greeted by cries of &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s the Mayor.&rdquo;

-      Several excited volunteers explained the situation to him from as many

-      different points of view, while Professor Graham Gray bellowed his appeal

-      from the platform.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All I want is fair play. They&rsquo;re trying to break up my

-      meeting.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; returned Dr. Strong&rsquo;s calm voice. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m

-      more than anxious to have it continue.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      With a happy inspiration, Mr. Clyde jumped up on his bench.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I move Mayor Allen take the chair!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Professor

-      Gray says that he courts fair investigation. Let&rsquo;s give it to him,

-      in order.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A shout of acclaim greeted this suggestion. Bairdstown&rsquo;s Suffering

-      Womanhood and Bored Manhood was getting more out of a free admission than

-      it had ever had in its life before. Ponderously the obese Mayor hoisted

-      his weight up the steps and shook hands with the reluctant lecturer. He

-      then invited Dr. Strong to come to the platform.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;This is my meeting!&rdquo; protested the Great Gray Benefactor.

-      &ldquo;I hired this hall and paid good money for it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You said it was our meeting as much as yours!&rdquo; roared an

-      insurgent from the crowd, and a chorus of substantiation followed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ten minutes will be all that I want,&rdquo; announced Dr. Strong as

-      he took a chair next the Mayor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s fair!&rdquo; shrilled the Chairman. &ldquo;On the

-      Professor&rsquo;s own invitation.&rdquo; In a tone lowered to the alarmed

-      quack&rsquo;s ear, he added: &ldquo;Of course, you can back out if you

-      want to. But I&rsquo;d advise you to do it quick if you&rsquo;re going to

-      do it at all. This is a queer-tempered town.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      So significant was his tone that the other judged advance to be safer than

-      retreat. Therefore, summoning all his assurance, he sought, in an

-      impassioned speech, to win back his hearers. He was a natural orator, and,

-      when he reached his peroration, he had a large part of his audience with

-      him again. In the flush of renewed confidence he made a grave tactical

-      error, just when he should have closed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let this hireling of the Doctors&rsquo; Trust, the trust that would

-      strangle all honest competition, answer these if he can!&rdquo; he

-      shouted, shaking the page of testimonials before his adversary&rsquo;s

-      face. &ldquo;Let him confute the evidence of these good and honorable

-      women who have appeared here to-night; women who have no selfish aims to

-      subserve. Let him impugn the motives of the reverend clergyman and of the

-      honored statesman who sit here with me. Let him do this, or let him shrink

-      from this hall in the shame and dishonor which he seeks to heap upon one

-      whose sole ambition it is to relieve suffering and banish pain and death.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There was hearty applause as the speaker sat down and Dr. Strong arose to

-      face a gathering now turned for the most part hostile. He wasted no time

-      in introduction or argument. &ldquo;Mr. Chairman,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;Professor

-      Gray rests his case on his testimonials. With Mr. Clyde I have

-      investigated a number of them, and will give you my results. Here are half

-      a dozen testimonials to the value of one of his nostrums, the Benefaction

-      Pills, from women who have been cured, so they state, of diseases ranging

-      from eczema through indigestion to consumption. All, please note, by the

-      same wonderful medicine. And here,&rdquo; he drew a small box from his

-      pocket, &ldquo;is a sample of the medicine. I have just had it analyzed.

-      What do you suppose they are? Sugar! Just plain sugar and nothing else.&rdquo;

-      Professor Gray leaped to his feet. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t deny the cures!&rdquo;

-      he thundered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t deny that these people are well to-day. And I don&rsquo;t

-      deny that the testimonials from them are genuine, as documents. But your

-      sugar pills had no more to do with the cure than so much moonshine.

-      Listen, you people! Here is the core and secret of quackery:

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All diseases tend to cure themselves, through the natural

-      resistance of the body. But for that we should all be dead. This man, or

-      some other of his kind, comes along with his promises and pills, and when

-      the patient recovers from the disease in the natural course of events, he

-      claims the credit. Meantime, he is selling sugar at about one hundred

-      dollars per pound.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Sugar,&rdquo; said the quack, quick-wittedly. &ldquo;But what kind

-      of sugar? This sugar, as he calls it, is crystal precipitated from the

-      extract of these healing herbs. No chemist can determine its properties by

-      any analysis.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very well turned,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, with a smile. &ldquo;I

-      can&rsquo;t immediately disprove that, though I could with time. But,

-      whatever the case with his sugar, any chemist can analyze this.&rdquo; He

-      held up a small bottle, half filled with a red-brown liquid. &ldquo;This

-      is the Extract of Gospel Herbs. Now, let us see what this does.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He referred to his copy of the &ldquo;Bugle,&rdquo; containing the

-      testimonials. &ldquo;Here is Mrs. Sarah Jenkins, of the neighboring town

-      of Maresco, where Professor Gray lectured a year ago, cured of Bright&rsquo;s

-      disease and dropsy; Miss Allie Wheat, of Weedsport, cured of cancer of the

-      stomach; and Mrs. Howard Cleary, of Roxton, wholly relieved of nervous

-      breakdown and insomnia. All genuine testimonials. Mr. Clyde and I have

-      traced them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Professor Gray raised his head with a flash of triumph. &ldquo;You see!&rdquo;

-      he cried. &ldquo;He has to admit the genuineness of my testimonials!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of your testimonials; yes. But what about your cures? Mrs. Jenkins

-      has, as she said, ceased to suffer from her ills. She died of Bright&rsquo;s

-      disease and dropsy three months after Professor Gray cured her of them.

-      Miss Wheat, whose cancer was purely imaginary, is now a hopeless wreck, in

-      a sanitarium whither the Gospel Herbs drove her. Mrs. Cleary&mdash;but let

-      me read what she testified to. Here it is in the paper with a picture of

-      the Cleary home:&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <i>Dear Professor Gray: You have indeed been a benefactor to me. Before

-      our baby was born my husband and I were the happiest of couples. Then I

-      became a nervous wreck. I couldn&rsquo;t sleep. I was cross and irritable.

-      My nerves seemed all on fire. Your first treatment worked wonders. I slept

-      like a log. Since then I have not been without Gospel Herbs in the house,

-      and I am a well woman. </i>

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      (Signed) Mrs. Howard Cleary.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That was a year ago,&rdquo; continued Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Yesterday

-      we visited the Cleary home. We found a broken husband and a deserted baby.

-      The young wife we traced to Worthington, where we discovered her&mdash;well,

-      I won&rsquo;t name to this audience the sort of place we found her in.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But so far as there can be a hell on this earth, she had descended

-      into it, and this,&rdquo; he held the vial high to view, &ldquo;<i>this</i>

-      sent her there.&rdquo; His fingers opened; there was a crisp little crash

-      of glass, and the red-brown liquid crept and spread along the floor, like

-      blood.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Morphine,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Morphine, which enslaves

-      the body and destroys the soul. There are your Gospel Herbs!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A murmur rose, and deepened into a growl. The Great Gray Benefactor, his

-      face livid, sprang forward.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Lies!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;All lies! Where&rsquo;s his proof?

-      What&rsquo;s he got to show? Nothing but his own say-so. If there&rsquo;s

-      a law in the land, I&rsquo;ll make him sweat for this. Mr. Huddleston, I

-      appeal to you for justice.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We shall be glad to hear from the Reverend Mr. Huddleston,&rdquo;

-      mildly suggested the chairman, who was evincing an enjoyment of the

-      proceedings quite puzzling to Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The old clergyman got slowly to his feet. His mild, weak face was

-      troubled. &ldquo;Let us bear and forbear,&rdquo; he pleaded in a tremulous

-      voice. &ldquo;I cannot believe these charges against our good friend,

-      Professor Gray. I am sure that he is a good and worthy man. He has given

-      most liberally to the church. I am informed that he is a member of his

-      home church in good and regular standing, and I find in the editorial

-      columns of the &lsquo;Church Pillar&rsquo; a warm encomium upon his

-      beneficent work, advising all to try his remedies. Surely our friend, Dr.

-      Strong, has been led astray by mistaken zeal.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only yesterday two members of my congregation, most estimable

-      ladies, called to see me and told me how they had benefited by a visit

-      just made to Professor Gray. He had treated them with his new Gospel

-      Elixir, of which he has spoken to me. There was evidence of its efficacy

-      in their very bearing and demeanor&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I should say there was! <i>And</i> in their breath. Did you smell

-      it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The interruption came in a very clear, positive, and distinct contralto.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Great Grimes&rsquo;s grass-green ghost!&rdquo; exclaimed Mr. Thomas

-      Clyde, quite audibly amidst the startled hush. &ldquo;Grandma Sharpless is

-      among those present!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;I&mdash;I do not think,&rdquo; began the clergyman,

-      aghast, &ldquo;that the matter occurred to me.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Because, if <i>you</i> didn&rsquo;t, <i>I</i> did,&rdquo; continued

-      the voice composedly. &ldquo;They reeked of liquor.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The tension to which the gathering had been strung abruptly loosened in

-      mirth.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Mrs. Sharpless will please take the platform,&rdquo; invited the

-      Mayor-chairman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, I&rsquo;ll do my talking from here.&rdquo; The old lady stood

-      up, a straight, solid, uncompromising figure, in the center of the floor.

-      &ldquo;I met those two ladies in the parsonage hall,&rdquo; she explained.

-      &ldquo;They were coming out as I was going in. They stopped to talk to me.

-      They both talked at once. I wouldn&rsquo;t want to say that they were&mdash;well&mdash;exactly&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Spifflicated,&rdquo; suggested a helpful voice from the far rear.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Spifflicated; thank you,&rdquo; accepted the speaker. &ldquo;But

-      they certainly were&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Lit up,&rdquo; volunteered another first-aid to the hesitant.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, lit up. One of them loaned me her bottle. If I&rsquo;m any

-      judge of bad whiskey, that was it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      An appreciative roar from the house testified to the fact that Mrs.

-      Sharpless had her audience in hand.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;As for you women on the stage,&rdquo; she pursued, rising to her

-      topic, &ldquo;I know what&rsquo;s wrong with you.&lsquo;Mandy Gryce, if

-      you&rsquo;d tend more to your house and less to your symptoms, you wouldn&rsquo;t

-      be flitting from allopathic bud to homoeopathic flower like a bumblebee

-      with the stomach-ache.&rdquo; (&ldquo;Hear, hear!&rdquo; from Mr. Gryce.)

-      &ldquo;Lizzie Tompy, your fits are nine tenths temper. I&rsquo;d cure you

-      of &lsquo;em without morphine. Miss Smithson, if you&rsquo;d quit strong

-      green tea, three times a day, those nerves of yours would give you a

-      fairer chance&mdash;and your neighbors, too.&rdquo; (Tearful sniffs from

-      Miss Smithson.)

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Auntie Thomas, you wait and see what your rheumatism says to you

-      to-morrow, when the dope has died out of your system. Susan Carlin, you

-      ought to be home this minute, looking after your sick boy, instead of on a

-      stage, in your best bib and tucker, giving testimonials to you-don&rsquo;t-know-what-all

-      poison.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Bairdstown&rsquo;s Suffering Womanhood!&rdquo; exclaimed the

-      vigorous old lady, her color rising with her voice. &ldquo;Go home! Go

-      home, you poor, self-coddling fussybuddies, to your washboards and your

-      sewing-machines and forget your imaginary symptoms.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There!&rdquo; she drew a long breath, looking about over the group

-      of wilting testimonial-givers. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the first speech I have

-      ever made, and I guess it&rsquo;ll be the last. But before I stop, I&rsquo;ve

-      got a word to say to you, Professor Graham Gray. Bless us! Where&rsquo;s

-      the man gone?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Professor Gray,&rdquo; announced the chairman with a twinkle in his

-      voice, &ldquo;has retired to obtain fresh evidence. At least, that is what

-      he <i>said</i> he had gone for.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      From the main floor came a hoarse suggestion which had the words &ldquo;tar

-      and feathers&rdquo; in it. It was cut short by a metallic shriek from

-      without, followed by a heavy rumbling.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Something seems to tell me,&rdquo; said the fat Mayor solemnly,

-      &ldquo;that the 9.30 express, which just whistled for the crossing, is the

-      heavier by about two hundred pounds of Great Gray Benefactor clinging to

-      the rear platform, and happy to be there.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And your money back if not benefited,&rdquo; piped a reedy voice

-      from the front, whereupon there was another roar.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The bright particular star of these proceedings having left, is

-      there anything else to come before the meeting?&rdquo; inquired the

-      chairman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to have one more word,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;Friends, as one quack is, all quacks are. They differ only in

-      method and degree. Every one of them plays a game with stacked cards, in

-      which you are his victims, and Death is his partner. And the puller-in for

-      this game is the press.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You have heard to-night how a good and wellmeaning clergyman has

-      been made stool-pigeon for this murderous charlatan, through the lying of

-      a religious&mdash;God save the mark!&mdash;weekly. That publication is

-      beyond our reach. But there is one here at home which did the quack&rsquo;s

-      work for him, and took his money for doing it. I suggest that the

-      Honorable Silas Harris explain!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m running my paper as a business proposition,&rdquo;

-      growled the baited editor and owner of the &lsquo;Bugle,&rsquo; &ldquo;and

-      I&rsquo;m running it to suit myself and this community.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re running it to suit the crooked and cruel advertisers

-      who prey on this community,&rdquo; retorted the other. &ldquo;And you&rsquo;ve

-      served them further in the legislature, where you voted to kill the

-      patent-medicine bill, last session, in protection of your own profits.

-      Good profits, too. One third of all your advertising is medical quackery

-      which takes good money out of this town by sheer swindling; money which

-      ought to stay in town and be spent on the legitimate local products

-      advertised in your paper. If I were a local advertiser, I&rsquo;d want to

-      know why.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If that&rsquo;s the case,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Stanley Gryce, quick

-      to catch the point, &ldquo;I guess you owe my family seven dollars an&rsquo;

-      a half, Silas, and till it&rsquo;s paid up you can just drop my laundry

-      announcement out of your columns.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I guess I&rsquo;ll stay out for a spell, too,&rdquo; supplemented

-      Mr. Corson, the hay and feed man. &ldquo;For a week, my ad&rsquo;s been

-      swamped by Swamp Root so deep you can&rsquo;t see it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;While you&rsquo;re about it,&rdquo; added a third, &ldquo;leave me

-      out. I&rsquo;m kinder sick of appearin&rsquo; between a poisonous headache

-      powder and a consumption dope. Folks&rsquo;ll be accusin&rsquo; me of

-      seekin&rsquo; trade untimely.&rdquo; This was greeted with a whoop, for

-      the speaker was the local undertaker.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve got a league for Clean Advertising in Worthington,&rdquo;

-      announced Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Why not organize something of the kind here?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Help!&rdquo; shouted the Honorable Silas, throwing up his hands.

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t shoot! I holler &lsquo;Enough!&rsquo; As soon as the

-      contracts are out, I&rsquo;ll quit. There&rsquo;s no money in

-      patent-medicine advertising any more for the small paper, anyway.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, we&rsquo;ve done our evening&rsquo;s chores, I reckon,&rdquo;

-      remarked the chairman. &ldquo;A motion to adjourn will now be in order.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Move we adjourn with the chorus of the &lsquo;Hymn of Healing,&rsquo;&rdquo;

-      piped the wag with the reedy voice, and the audience filed out,

-      uproariously and profanely singing:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      &ldquo;Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed!

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      Trust in the gospel advice.

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent15">

-      Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field;

-    </p>

-    <p class="indent20">

-      Healed without money or price.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br />

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, young man,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, coming forward to

-      join the Health Master, &ldquo;you certainly carried out your programme.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I?&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, affectionately tucking the old lady&rsquo;s

-      arm under his. &ldquo;To you the honors of war. I only squelched a quack.

-      You taught Bairds-town&rsquo;s self-coddling womanhood a lesson that will

-      go down the generations.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What I want to know,&rdquo; said the Mayor, advancing to shake

-      hands with Mrs. Sharpless, &ldquo;is this: what&rsquo;s a fussybuddy?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A fussybuddy,&rdquo; instructed Grandma Sharpless wisely, &ldquo;is

-      a woman who catches a stomach-ache from a patent-medicine almanac. What I

-      want to know, Tom Allen, is what you had against the man. I seemed to get

-      an inkling that you didn&rsquo;t exactly like him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s forgotten me,&rdquo; chuckled the Mayor, &ldquo;but I

-      haven&rsquo;t forgotten him. Fifteen years ago he came along here

-      horse-doctoring and poisoned a perfectly good mare for me. He won&rsquo;t

-      try to poison this town again in a hurry. You finished him, Mrs.

-      Sharpless, you and Dr. Strong.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What <i>I</i> want to know,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;is

-      how poor old Mr. Huddleston feels about that contribution, now.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A month later he found out. Traveling by trolley one evening, he felt a

-      hand on his shoulder, and turned to face Professor Graham Gray.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No hard feelings, I hope,&rdquo; said the quack with superb

-      urbanity. &ldquo;All in the way of business, I take it. I&rsquo;d have

-      done the same to you, if you&rsquo;d come butting in on my trade. Say, but

-      that old lady was a Tartar! She cooked my goose in Bairdstown. For all

-      that, I got an unsolicited testimonial from there two weeks ago that&rsquo;s

-      a wonder. Anonymous, too. Not a word of writing with it to tell who the

-      grateful patient might be.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What was it?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong with polite interest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A twenty-dollar bill. Now, <i>what</i> do you think of that?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      When Dr. Strong spoke again&mdash;and the Great Gray Benefactor has always

-      regarded this as the most inconsequential reply he ever received to a

-      plain question&mdash;it was after a long and thoughtful pause.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said he with conviction, &ldquo;that I&rsquo;ll

-      start in going to church again, next Sunday.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      X.&mdash;THE HOUSE THAT CAUGHT COLD

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;C</span>an you cure

-      a cold?&rdquo; asked Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      A flare from the soft-coal fire flickered across the library, revealing a

-      smile on the Health Master&rsquo;s face.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Am I a millionaire?&rdquo; he countered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not from your salary as Chinese physician to the Clydes,&rdquo;

-      laughed the head of that family.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If I could cure a cold, I should be, easily, more than that. I&rsquo;d

-      be the foremost medical discoverer of the day.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then you can&rsquo;t cure a cold,&rdquo; pursued Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What <i>is</i> a cold?&rdquo; countered the Health Master in that

-      insinuating tone of voice which he employed to provoke the old lady into

-      one of those frequent verbal encounters so thoroughly enjoyed by both of

-      them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;An ordinary common cold in the head. You know what I mean perfectly

-      well, young man. The kind you catch by getting into drafts.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, <i>that!</i> Well, you see, there&rsquo;s no such thing.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No such thing as a cold in the head, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; said Julia,

-      looking up from her book. &ldquo;Why, we&rsquo;ve all had &lsquo;em, loads

-      of times.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And Bettina is coming down with one now, if I&rsquo;m any judge,&rdquo;

-      said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s had the sniffles all day.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s hope it isn&rsquo;t a cold. Maybe it&rsquo;s only

-      chicken-pox or mumps.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are you wishing chicken-pox and mumps on my baby?&rdquo; cried Mrs.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      In the three years during which Dr. Strong had been the &ldquo;Chinese

-      physician&rdquo; of the household, earning his salary by keeping his

-      patients well instead of curing them when ill, Mrs. Clyde had never quite

-      learned to guard against the surprises which so often pointed the Health

-      Master&rsquo;s truths.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not by any means; I&rsquo;m only hoping for the lesser of evils.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But mumps and chicken-pox are real diseases,&rdquo; protested

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you think that a &lsquo;cold,&rsquo; as you call it, isn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, no,&rdquo; said Clyde hesitantly. &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t call

-      it a disease, any more than I&rsquo;d call a sprain a broken leg.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But it is. A very real, serious disease. Its actual name is coryza.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Bogy-talk,&rdquo; commented Grandma Sharpless scornfully. &ldquo;Big

-      names for little things.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not a little thing at all, as we should all realize if our official

-      death-records really dealt in facts.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Death-records?&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless incredulously. &ldquo;People

-      don&rsquo;t die of colds, do they?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Hundreds every year; all around us.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, <i>I</i> never hear of it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are you sure? Think back and recall how many of your friends&rsquo;

-      obituary notices include some such sentence as this: &lsquo;Last Thursday

-      evening Mr. Smith caught a severe cold, from which he took to his bed on

-      Saturday, and did not leave it again until his death yesterday morning?&rsquo;

-      Doesn&rsquo;t that sound familiar?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So familiar,&rdquo; cried Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;that I believe the

-      newspapers keep it set up in type.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But the newspaper always goes on to say that Mr. Smith developed

-      pneumonia or grip or bronchitis, and died of that, not of the cold,&rdquo;

-      objected Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, yes. In the mortality records poor Smith usually appears under

-      the heading of one of the well-recognized diseases. It would hardly be

-      respectable to die of a cold, would it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t <i>die</i> of the cold,&rdquo; insisted the old

-      lady. &ldquo;He catches the cold and dies of something else.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If I take a dose of poison,&rdquo; the Health Master mildly

-      propounded, &ldquo;and fall down and break my neck, what do I die of?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s no parallel,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless. &ldquo;And

-      even if it is,&rdquo; she added, tacitly abandoning that ground, &ldquo;we&rsquo;ve

-      always had colds and we always will have &lsquo;em.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not with my approval, at least,&rdquo; remarked the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I guess Providence won&rsquo;t wait for your approval, young man.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then you regard coryza as a dispensation of Providence? The

-      Presbyterian doctrine of foreordination, applied to the human nose,&rdquo;

-      smiled the physician. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re all predestined to the ailment,

-      and therefore might as well get out our handkerchiefs and prepare to

-      sneeze our poor sinful heads off. Is that about it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, it isn&rsquo;t! This is a green December and it means a full

-      churchyard. We&rsquo;re in for a regular cold-breeding season.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nonsense! Weather doesn&rsquo;t breed colds.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What does, then?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A very mean and lively little germ. He&rsquo;s rather more

-      poisonous than the chicken-pox and mumps variety, although he hasn&rsquo;t

-      as bad a name. In grown-ups he prepares the soil, so to speak, for other

-      germs, by getting all through the system and weakening its resistant

-      powers, thereby laying it open to the attacks of such enemies as the

-      pneumococcus, which is always waiting just around the corner of the tongue

-      to give us pneumonia. Or bronchitis may develop, or tonsillitis, or

-      diphtheria, or kidney trouble, or indeed almost anything. I once heard an

-      eminent lecturer happily describe the coryza bacillus as the bad little

-      boy of the gang who, having once broken into the system, turns around and

-      calls back to the bigger boys: &lsquo;Come on in, fellers. The door&rsquo;s

-      open.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;With children the coryza-bug makes various trouble without

-      necessarily inviting the others in. A great proportion of the serious

-      ear-troubles come from colds; all the way from earache to mastoiditis, and

-      the consequent necessity of quick operations to save the patient&rsquo;s

-      life. Almost any of the organs may be impaired by the activity of the

-      little pest. And yet as intelligent a family as this&rdquo;&mdash;he

-      looked around the circle&mdash;&ldquo;considers it a &lsquo;mere cold.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why haven&rsquo;t you told us before?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde

-      bluntly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A just reproach,&rdquo; admitted the Health Master. &ldquo;Not

-      having been attacked, I haven&rsquo;t considered defense&mdash;a wretched

-      principle in health matters. In fact, I&rsquo;ve let the little matters of

-      life go, too much, in my interest in the bigger.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But what about Bettina?&rdquo; said the mother anxiously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s have her in,&rdquo; said the Health Master, and the

-      six-year-old presently trotted into the room, announcing through a

-      somewhat reddened nose, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m all stobbed ub; and Katie rubbed

-      me with goose-grease, and I don&rsquo;d wand to take any paregoric.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Paregoric?&rdquo; said the physician. &ldquo;Opium? I guess not.

-      Off to bed with you, Toots, and we&rsquo;ll try to exorcise the demon with

-      hot-water bottles and extra blankets.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Following her usual custom of kissing everybody good-night around the

-      circle, Bettina held up her arms to her sister, who was nearest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; said the Health Master. &ldquo;No kissing.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not even my mamma?&rdquo; queried the child. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m

-      afraid not. You remember when Charley had scarlet fever he wasn&rsquo;t

-      allowed even to be very near any of you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But scarlet fever is the most contagious of any of the diseases,

-      isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; asked Julia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not as contagious as a cold in the head.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how contagious a cold is,&rdquo; said Grandma

-      Sharpless; &ldquo;but I do know this: once it gets into a house, it goes

-      through it like wildfire.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then the house ought to be ashamed of itself. That&rsquo;s sheer

-      carelessness.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Half the kids in our school have got stopped-up noses,&rdquo;

-      contributed Charley.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why hasn&rsquo;t the Committee on Schools reported the fact?&rdquo;

-      demanded the Health Master, turning an accusing eye on Julia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why&mdash;why, I didn&rsquo;t think of it,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;I

-      didn&rsquo;t think it was anything.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, you didn&rsquo;t! Well, if what Charley says is correct, I

-      should think your school ought to be put under epidemic regimen.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;d have a fine row with the Board of Education, trying to

-      persuade them to special action for any such cause as that,&rdquo;

-      remarked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s the measure of their intelligence, then,&rdquo;

-      returned the Health Master. &ldquo;Sickness is sickness, just as surely as

-      a flame is fire; and there is no telling, once it&rsquo;s well started,

-      how much damage it may do.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But a cold is only in the head, or rather, in the nose,&rdquo;

-      persisted Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s where you&rsquo;re wrong. Coryza is a disease of the

-      whole system, and it weakens the whole system. The symptoms are most

-      apparent in the nose and mouth: and it is from the nose and mouth that the

-      disease is spread. But if you&rsquo;ve got the cold you&rsquo;ve got it in

-      every corner of your being. You won&rsquo;t be convinced of its

-      importance, I suppose, until I can produce facts and figures. I only hope

-      they won&rsquo;t be producible from this house. But by the end of the

-      season I&rsquo;ll hope to have them. Meantime we&rsquo;ll isolate

-      Bettykin.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Bettina was duly isolated. Meanwhile the active little coryza bacillus had

-      got its grip on Mr. Clyde, who for three days attended to his business

-      with streaming eyes, and then retired, in the company of various hot-water

-      bags, bottles, and foot-warmers, to the sanctuary of his own bedroom,

-      where he led a private and morose existence for one week. His general

-      manager succeeded to his desk; likewise, to his contaminated pencils,

-      erasers, and other implements, whereby he alternately sneezed and

-      objurgated himself into the care of a doctor, with the general and

-      unsatisfactory result that the balance-sheet of Clyde &amp; Co.,

-      Manufacturers, showed an obvious loss for the month&mdash;as it happened,

-      most unfortunately, an unusually busy month&mdash;of some three thousand

-      dollars, directly traceable to that unconsidered trifle, a cold in the

-      head.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At that you got off cheap,&rdquo; argued the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was three months after the invasion of the Clyde household by Bettina&rsquo;s

-      coryza germ.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad somebody considers it cheap!&rdquo; observed Mr.

-      Clyde. &ldquo;Personally I should rather have taken a trip to Europe on my

-      share of that three thousand dollars.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yet you were lucky,&rdquo; asserted Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Bettykin got

-      through her earache without any permanent damage. Robin&rsquo;s attack

-      passed off without complications. Your own onset didn&rsquo;t involve any

-      organ more vital than your bank account. And the rest of us escaped.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t it prove what I said,&rdquo; demanded Grandma

-      Sharpless; &ldquo;that a cold in the head is only a cold in the head?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Answer is No,&rsquo; as Togo would put it,&rdquo; replied

-      the Health Master. &ldquo;In fact, I&rsquo;ve got proof here of quite the

-      opposite, which I desire to present to this gathering.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;This meeting of the Household Protective Association is hereby

-      called to order!&rdquo; announced Mr. Clyde, in the official tones proper

-      to the occasion. The children put aside their various occupations and

-      assumed a solemn and businesslike aspect which was part of the game.

-      &ldquo;The lone official member will now report,&rdquo; concluded the

-      chairman.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let the Health Officer of the city report for me,&rdquo; said Dr.

-      Strong, taking a printed leaflet from his pocket. &ldquo;He is one of

-      those rare officials who aren&rsquo;t afraid to tell people what they don&rsquo;t

-      know, and may not want to know. Listen to what Dr. Merritt has to say.&rdquo;

-      And he read:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;The death-rate of the city for the month of February, like

-      the rate for December and January, is abnormally high, being a shade over

-      ten per cent above the normal for this time of year. While the causes of

-      mortality range through the commoner diseases, with a special rise in

-      pulmonary troubles, it is evident that the increase must be due to some

-      special cause. In the opinion of the Bureau of Health this cause is the

-      despised and infectious &ldquo;cold,&rdquo; more properly known as coryza,

-      which has been epidemic this winter in the city. Although the epidemic

-      wave is now receding, its disastrous aftereffects may be looked for in

-      high mortality rates for some months. Should a similar onset occur again,

-      the city will be asked to consider seriously a thorough school campaign,

-      with careful isolation of all suspicious cases.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did you write that, young man?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Sharpless

-      suspiciously.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, no; I didn&rsquo;t <i>write</i> it,&rdquo; answered the Health

-      Master. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go as far as to admit, however, that Dr. Merritt

-      listens politely to my humble suggestions when I offer them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Humph! Ten per cent increase. What is that in real figures?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Twenty-five extra deaths a month,&rdquo; said Manny Clyde, a

-      growing expert on local statistics.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Seventy-five needless deaths for the three months, and more to

-      come,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;besides all the disability,

-      loss of time and earning power and strength, and all the pain and

-      suffering&mdash;which things never get into the vital statistics, worse

-      luck! So much to the account of the busy little coryza-bug.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t the Health Bureau do something?&rdquo; asked the

-      practical Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not much, until its public is better educated,&rdquo; said Dr.

-      Strong wearily. &ldquo;The present business of a health official is to try

-      and beat the fool-killer off from his natural prey with a printed tract.

-      It&rsquo;s quite a job, when you come to consider it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What he ought to have, is the club of the law!&rdquo; said Mr.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Precisely. The people won&rsquo;t give it to him. In this household

-      we&rsquo;re better off, since we can make our own laws. Since Betty&rsquo;s

-      attack we&rsquo;ve tried out the isolation plan pretty effectually; and we&rsquo;ve

-      followed, as well as might be, the rule of avoiding contact with people

-      having coryza.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      He glanced up at a flamboyant poster which Mrs. Clyde, who had a natural

-      gift of draftsmanship, had made in a spirit of mischief, entitling it

-      &ldquo;The Red Nose as a Danger Signal.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;As much truth as fun in that,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;But, at

-      the best, we can&rsquo;t live among people and avoid all danger. In fact,

-      avoidance is only the outer line of defense. The inner line is symbolized

-      by a homely rule, &lsquo;Keep Comfortable.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s comfort to do with keeping well?&rdquo; asked Grandma

-      Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What are your nerves for?&rdquo; retorted Dr. Strong with his

-      quizzical smile.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Young man,&rdquo; said the old lady plaintively, &ldquo;did I ever

-      ask you a question that you didn&rsquo;t fire another back at me before it

-      was fairly out of my mouth? My nerves, if I let myself have any, wouldn&rsquo;t

-      be for anything except to plague me.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, those are pampered nerves. Normal nerves are to warn you. They&rsquo;re

-      to tell you whether the little things of life are right with you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And if they&rsquo;re not?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, then you&rsquo;re uncomfortable. Which is to say, there&rsquo;s

-      something wrong; and something wrong means, in time, a lessening of

-      vitality, and when you let down your body&rsquo;s vitality you&rsquo;re

-      simply saying to any germ that may happen along, &lsquo;Come right in and

-      make yourself at home.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perhaps you remember when the house caught cold, how shocked

-      Grandma Sharpless was at my saying that colds aren&rsquo;t caught in a

-      draft. Well, they&rsquo;re not. Yet I ought to have qualified that. Now,

-      what is a draft? Air in motion. If there is one thing about air that we

-      thoroughly know, it&rsquo;s this: that moving air is infinitely better for

-      us than still air. Even bad, stale air, if stirred vigorously into motion,

-      seems to purify itself and become breathable and good. Now, the danger of

-      a draft is that it may mean a sudden change of the body&rsquo;s

-      temperature. Nobody thinks that wind is unhealthful, because when you&rsquo;re

-      out in the wind&mdash;which is the biggest and freest kind of a draft&mdash;you&rsquo;re

-      prepared for it. If not, your nerves say to you, &lsquo;Move faster; get

-      warm.&rsquo; It&rsquo;s the same indoors. If the draft chills you, your

-      nerves will tell you so. Therefore, mind your nerves. Otherwise, you&rsquo;ll

-      become specially receptive to the coryza germ and when you&rsquo;ve caught

-      <i>that</i>, you&rsquo;ll have caught cold.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I wish,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;that my nerves would tell

-      me why I feel so logy every morning. They don&rsquo;t say anything

-      definite. It isn&rsquo;t indigestion exactly. But I feel slow and inert

-      after breakfast, as if my stomach hadn&rsquo;t any enthusiasm in its job.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Breakfast is the only meal I don&rsquo;t have with you, so I don&rsquo;t

-      know,&rdquo; replied the Health Master, who was a very early riser.

-      &ldquo;But I should say you were eating the wrong things, perhaps.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How could that be?&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Tom has the

-      simplest kind of breakfast, and it&rsquo;s the same every day.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, there you are.&rdquo; The Health Master&rsquo;s tone assumed

-      that the solution was found.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Where are we?&rdquo; queried Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m up in the

-      air!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is this remarkably regular breakfast?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Eggs, rolls, and coffee.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh! Eggs every morning?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Two of them. Medium boiled.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not even the method is varied. Same eggs, same preparation every

-      morning, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. That&rsquo;s my winter breakfast only.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Very well; four or five months in the year. No wonder your poor

-      stomach gets bored.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter with eggs, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; inquired

-      Manny. &ldquo;They let us have &lsquo;em, in training.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing is the matter with two eggs, or twenty. But when you come

-      to two hundred, there&rsquo;s something very obvious the matter&mdash;monotony.

-      Your stomach is a machine, it&rsquo;s true, but it&rsquo;s a human

-      machine. It demands variety.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then Charles ought to be a model. He wants everything from soup to

-      pie.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A thoroughly normal desire for a growing boy.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He eats an awful lot of meat,&rdquo; observed Julia, who was a

-      somewhat fastidious young lady. &ldquo;My Sunday-school teacher calls

-      meat-eaters human tigers.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s too easy a generalization, Junkum,&rdquo; replied

-      the Health Master. &ldquo;With equal logic she could say that

-      vegetable-eaters are human cows.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But the vegetarians make very strong arguments,&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A lot of pale-eyed, weak-blooded nibblers!&rdquo; stated Grandma

-      Sharpless. &ldquo;If meat weren&rsquo;t good for us, we wouldn&rsquo;t

-      have been eating it all these generations.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;True enough. Perhaps we eat a little too much of it, particularly

-      in the warm months. But in winter it&rsquo;s practically a necessity.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Some of the big athletes say they&rsquo;re vegetarians,&rdquo; said

-      Manny.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There are individual cases,&rdquo; admitted the Health Master;

-      &ldquo;but in the long run it doesn&rsquo;t work. A vegetarian race is,

-      generally speaking, small of stature and build, and less efficient than a

-      meat-eating race. The rule of eating is solid food, sound food, plenty of

-      it, and a good variety. Give your stomach a fair chance: don&rsquo;t

-      overload it, don&rsquo;t understock it, and don&rsquo;t let it get bored.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      For some time Miss Bettina had been conducting a quiet and strategic

-      advance upon the Health Master, and now by a sudden onslaught she captured

-      his knee and, perching herself thereon, put a soft and chubby hand under

-      his chin.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You want something, Miss Toodles,&rdquo; he accused with a

-      formidable frown. &ldquo;None of your wheedling ways with me! Out with it!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Candy,&rdquo; said the child, in no way impressed by his severity.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Candy, indeed! When?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Now. Any time. Lots of it. Lots of sugar, too.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Betty&rsquo;s developing <i>such</i> a sweet tooth!&rdquo; mourned

-      her mother. &ldquo;I have to limit her rigidly.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t let the child stuff herself on sweets all the

-      time,&rdquo; protested Grandma Sharpless, scandalized.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nor on anything else. But if she craves sweets, why not let her

-      have them at the proper time?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, in my day children ate plain food and were thankful.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Hm! I&rsquo;m a little dubious about the thankfulness. And in your

-      day children died more frequently and more easily than in ours.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They weren&rsquo;t pampered to death on candy, anyway!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Possibly they weren&rsquo;t pampered quite enough. Take the Cherub,

-      here,&rdquo; he tossed Betty in the air and whisked her to his shoulder.

-      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s a perfect little bundle of energy, always in motion.

-      She needs energy-producing food to keep going, coal for that engine. Sugar

-      is almost pure carbon; that is, coal in digestible form. Of course she

-      wants sweets. Her little body is logical.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But isn&rsquo;t it bad for her teeth?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; nor for her last year&rsquo;s overshoes or her tin dog&rsquo;s

-      left hind leg,&rdquo; chuckled the Health Master. &ldquo;Sometimes I

-      marvel that the race has survived all the superstitions surrounding food

-      and drink.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In my father&rsquo;s household,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;the

-      family principle was never to drink anything with meals. The mixture of

-      solids and liquids was held to be bad. Another superstition, I suppose.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At that rate, bread and milk would be rank poison,&rdquo; said Dr.

-      Strong. &ldquo;Next to food, water has got the finest incrustation of

-      old-wives&rsquo; warnings. Now, there&rsquo;s some doubt whether a man

-      should eat whenever he wants to. Appetite, in the highly nervous American

-      organization, is sometimes tricky. But thirst is trustworthy. The normal

-      man is perfectly safe in drinking all the water he wants whenever he wants

-      it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I can still remember the agonies that I suffered when, as a boy, I

-      had scarlet fever, and they would allow me almost no water,&rdquo; said

-      Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One of medicine&rsquo;s direst errors,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.

-      &ldquo;Nobody will ever know how much that false and cruel system has

-      added to our death-rate in the past. To-day a practitioner who kept water

-      from a fever patient&mdash;unless there were unusual complications&mdash;would

-      be properly citable for malpractice. By the way,&rdquo; he continued,

-      &ldquo;we&rsquo;re changing our views about feeding in long illnesses.

-      Typhoid patients have always been kept down to the lowest possible diet,

-      nothing but milk. Now, some of the big hospitals are feeding typhoid

-      cases, right through the fever, on foods carefully selected for their heat

-      and energy values, with the result that not only has the patient more

-      strength to fight the disease, but he pulls through practically free from

-      the emaciation which has always been regarded as inevitable.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can I have my candy?&rdquo; inquired Bettina, holding to her own

-      point.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If it&rsquo;s good, sound candy. Now I&rsquo;m going to utter an

-      awful heresy. Generally speaking, and in moderation, what you want is good

-      for you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Pure anarchy,&rdquo; laughed Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not at all; the law of the body, always demanding what is best for

-      its development.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, I want,&rdquo; declared Robin, with a sudden energy, &ldquo;to

-      take off these hot, scratchy flannels.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Too late now,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;until spring.

-      You&rsquo;ve been wearing them all winter. But another year, if I have my

-      way, you won&rsquo;t have to put them on.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;d let him tempt pneumonia by going through a winter with

-      light summer underwear?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Unless you get out an injunction against me,&rdquo; smiled the

-      physician. &ldquo;Bobs had a pretty tough time of it for the first week

-      when he changed to flannels. He&rsquo;s thin-skinned, and the rough wool

-      irritated him pretty badly. In fact, he had a slight fever for two days.

-      It isn&rsquo;t worth that suffering. Besides, he&rsquo;s a full-blooded

-      youngster, and doesn&rsquo;t need the extra warmth. You can&rsquo;t dress

-      all children alike in material any more than you can dress them all from

-      the same pattern.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then I want to leave off mine, too,&rdquo; announced Charles.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nonsense! You little ruffian, you could wear sandpaper on that skin

-      of yours. Don&rsquo;t talk to me, or next time I see you without your

-      overcoat I&rsquo;ll order a hair shirt for you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never thought much about the children&rsquo;s clothes,

-      except to change between the seasons,&rdquo; confessed Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;I

-      supposed that was all there is to it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not wholly. I once knew a man who died from changing his necktie.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Did he put on a red tie with a pink shirt?&rdquo; interestedly

-      queried Manny, who had reached the age where attire was becoming a vital

-      interest.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He changed abruptly from the big puff-tie which he had worn all

-      winter, and which was a regular chest-protector, to a skimpy bow, thereby

-      exposing a weak chest and getting pneumonia quite naturally. Yet he was

-      ordinarily a cautious old gentleman, and shifted the weight of his

-      underclothes by the calendar&mdash;a rather stupid thing to do, by the

-      way.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;On the first of November,&rdquo; began Grandma Sharpless severely&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes, I know,&rdquo; cut in the Health Master. &ldquo;Your whole

-      family went into flannels whether the thermometer was twenty or seventy.

-      And we&rsquo;ve seen it both, more than once on that date.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What harm did it ever do them?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Bodily discomfort. In other words, lessened vitality. Think how

-      much nervous wear is suffered by a child itching and squirming in a

-      scratchy suit of heavy flannels on a warm day.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Children can&rsquo;t be changing from one weight to another every

-      day, can they?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No need of that. But in the fall and spring we can regulate that

-      matter a little more by the thermometer, and a little less by the almanac.

-      There is also the consideration of controlling heat. Now, Charley, what

-      would you think of a man who, in June, say, with the mercury at

-      seventy-five, wandered around in a heavy suit and his winter flannels.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d think he was sick,&rdquo; said the nine-year-old

-      promptly, &ldquo;or else foolish. But what makes you ask me?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just by way of calling your attention to the thermometer, which in

-      this room stands at seventy-nine. And here we all sit, dressed twenty-five

-      per cent warmer than if we were out doors in a June temperature several

-      degrees colder. You&rsquo;re the Committee on Air and Light, Charley. I

-      think this matter of heat ought to come within your province.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And it makes you feel so cold when you go out,&rdquo; said Julia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Of course. We Americans live in one of the most trying climates in

-      the world, and we add to its rigors by heating our houses like incubators.

-      No room over seventy, ought to be the rule.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard to work in a cold room,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not when you&rsquo;re used to it. The Chicago schools that have

-      started winter roof classes for sickly children, find that the average of

-      learning capacity goes up markedly in the cold, clean air.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But they can&rsquo;t be as comfortable,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Much more so. As soon as the children get used to it, they love it,

-      and they object strenuously to going back into the close rooms. The body

-      grasps and assimilates the truth; the mind responds.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, I like to be comfortable as well as anybody,&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Sharpless, &ldquo;but I don&rsquo;t consider it the chief end of life.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not the chief end,&rdquo; assented Dr. Strong; &ldquo;the chief

-      means.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Comfort and health,&rdquo; mused Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;It seems a

-      natural combination.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The most natural in the world. Let me put it into an allegory.

-      Health is the main line, the broad line, the easy line. It&rsquo;s the

-      simple line to travel, because comfort keeps pointing it out. Essentially

-      it is the line of the least resistance. The trouble with most of us is we&rsquo;re

-      always unconsciously taking transfers to the cross-lines. The transfer may

-      be Carelessness, or Slothfulness, or Gluttony, or one of the Dissipations

-      in food, drink, work or play; or it may be even Egotism, which is

-      sometimes a poison: but they all take you to Sick Street. Don&rsquo;t get

-      a transfer down Sick Street. The road is rough, the scenery dismal, and at

-      the end is the cemetery.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the end of all roads,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then in Heaven&rsquo;s name,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;let

-      us take the longest and sunniest route and sing as we go!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      XI. THE BESIEGED CITY

-    </h2>

-    <p>

-      To Bettina falls the credit of setting the match to the train. That

-      lively-minded young lady had possessed herself of a large, red square of

-      cardboard, upon which, in the midst of the Clyde family circle, she

-      wrought mightily with a paint-brush.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What comes after p in &lsquo;diphtheria,&rsquo; Charley?&rdquo; she

-      presently appealed to her next older brother.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Charley considered the matter with head aslant. &ldquo;Another p,&rdquo;

-      he answered, tactfully postponing the evil moment.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t look right,&rdquo; announced the Cherub, after a

-      moment&rsquo;s contemplation. &ldquo;Dr. Strong, how do you spell &lsquo;diphtheria&rsquo;?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I? Why, Toots, I spell it with a capital, but leave off the final

-      x,&rdquo; replied the Health Master cheerfully. &ldquo;What kind of a game

-      are you playing? Quarantining your dolls?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t a game.&rdquo; Betty could be, on occasion, quite a

-      self-contained young person.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What is it, then, if I&rsquo;m not prying too far into personal

-      matters?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s for Eula Simms to put on her house.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The Simmses <i>will</i> be pleased,&rdquo; remarked Julia.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They ought to be,&rdquo; said Betty complacently. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t

-      suppose they can afford a regular one like the one we put up when Charley

-      had scarlet fever, two years ago. And Eula&rsquo;s big sister&rsquo;s got

-      diphtheria,&rdquo; she added quite casually.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; The Health Master straightened up sharply

-      in his chair. &ldquo;How do you know that, Twinkles?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Eula told me across the fence this morning. She&rsquo;s excused

-      from school. Three other houses on the street have got it, too. I&rsquo;m

-      going to make placards for them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And do the work in play that the Health Department ought to be

-      doing in the deadliest earnest! What on earth is Dr. Merritt thinking of?&rdquo;

-      And he went to the telephone to call up the Health Officer and find out.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We&rsquo;re due for a bad diphtheria year, too,&rdquo; observed

-      Grandma Sharpless, whose commentaries on practical matters, being always

-      the boiled-down essence of first-hand observation, carried weight in the

-      household. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve noticed that it swings around about once in

-      every five or six years. And it was six years ago we had that bad

-      epidemic.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then there is the influenza epidemic of last spring to consider,&rdquo;

-      said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Dr. Strong told us then that we&rsquo;d have to

-      pay for that for months. So, I suppose, the city is still in a weakened

-      condition and easy soil for diphtheria or any other epidemic.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s measles already in our school,&rdquo; said Julia.

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;ll help, too.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why haven&rsquo;t you reported it, Junkum?&rdquo; asked her father.

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re Chairman of the Committee on School Conditions of the

-      Clyde Household Protective Association.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;We only found out to-day,&rdquo; said Bobs, &ldquo;when they told

-      us maybe school would close.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Three years I&rsquo;ve been President of the Public Health League,&rdquo;

-      remarked Mr. Clyde with a wry face, &ldquo;and nothing has happened. Now

-      that I&rsquo;m just about retiring I hope there isn&rsquo;t going to be

-      serious trouble. What does the Health Department say, Strong?&rdquo; he

-      inquired, turning as the Health Master entered.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Something very wrong there. Merritt won&rsquo;t talk over the

-      &lsquo;phone. Wants me to come down.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;This evening?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. He&rsquo;s ill, himself, and badly worried. What do <i>you</i>

-      think?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It looks like some skullduggery,&rdquo; declared Mr. Clyde,

-      borrowing one of his mother-in-law&rsquo;s expressive words. &ldquo;Is it

-      possible that reports of diphtheria are being suppressed, and that is why

-      the infected houses are not placarded?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If it is, we&rsquo;re in for trouble. As I told you, when I

-      undertook the Chinese job of keeping this household in health,&rdquo;

-      continued the Health Master, addressing the family, &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t

-      reliably protect a family in a community which doesn&rsquo;t protect

-      itself. There are too many loopholes through which infection may

-      penetrate. So the Protective Association, in self-defense, may have to

-      spur up the city to its own defense. First, though, I&rsquo;m going over

-      the throats of this family and take cultures.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t think,&rdquo; began the mother anxiously, &ldquo;that

-      the children&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; I don&rsquo;t think they&rsquo;ve got it. But the

-      bacteriological analysis will show.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I hate to have it done,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, shuddering. &ldquo;It

-      seems so&mdash;so inviting of trouble.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Superstition,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, smiling. &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t

-      you just as anxious to find out that they <i>haven&rsquo;t</i> got the

-      infection as that they have? Come on, Bettykin; you&rsquo;re first.&rdquo;

-      And, having prepared his material, he swabbed the throats of the whole

-      company, after which he took the cultures with him to Dr. Merritt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      It was late when he returned, but he went direct to Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s

-      room.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s worse than I thought, Clyde,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re

-      in the first stage of a bad epidemic. The reports have been suppressed by

-      Mullins, the Deputy Health Officer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What did he do that for?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;To cover his own inefficiency. He is City Bacteriologist, also, and

-      the law requires him, in time of epidemic, to make bacteriological

-      analyses. He doesn&rsquo;t know how. So he simply pigeonholed the case

-      reports as they came in.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How did such a rascal ever get the job?&rdquo; asked Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Political pull. The most destructive of all the causes of death

-      which never get into the mortality records,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong

-      bitterly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How many cases?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Three or four hundred, at least. It&rsquo;s got a good start. And

-      more than that of measles. While he was in the business of suppressing,

-      Mullins threw a lot of measles reports aside, too. I don&rsquo;t like the

-      prospect.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The first thing to do,&rdquo; decided Mr. Clyde, with customary

-      energy, &ldquo;is to get Dr. Mullins out. I&rsquo;ll call an emergency

-      meeting of the Public Health League to-morrow. By the way, Julia has some

-      matters to report from school.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, suppose we call an emergency meeting of our own of the

-      Household Protective Association for to-morrow evening,&rdquo; suggested

-      Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Since we&rsquo;re facing an epidemic, we may as well

-      fortify the youngsters as soundly as possible.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Directly after dinner on the following evening the Association was called

-      to order by Mr. Clyde, presiding. It was a full meeting except for

-      Maynard, who had not returned for dinner. First Dr. Strong reported that

-      the cultures from the throats of the family had turned out &ldquo;negative.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So we don&rsquo;t have to worry about that,&rdquo; he remarked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Whereupon Mrs. Clyde and her mother drew long breaths of relief.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And now for the Committee on School Conditions,&rdquo; said Mr.

-      Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All I&rsquo;ve heard of in our school is measles,&rdquo; announced

-      Julia. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a lot of the boys and girls away.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No diphtheria?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I asked Miss Brown that at recess, and she looked queer and said,

-      &lsquo;None that we know of.&rsquo; But I heard of some cases in the

-      Academy; so I told Manny.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why Manny?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s Chairman of the Committee on Milk, and the Bliss

-      children from our dairy go to the Academy.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That explains why Maynard isn&rsquo;t here, then,&rdquo; said the

-      grandmother. &ldquo;I suppose he&rsquo;s gone out to the farm.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes. He took the interurban trolley out, to make sure that they&rsquo;d

-      be careful about keeping the children away from the dairy.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good team-work, Junkum,&rdquo; approved the presiding officer.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And I asked Mary and Jim Bliss to come around to-morrow to see Dr.

-      Strong and have him look at their throats.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You ought to be drawing a salary from the city, young lady,&rdquo;

-      said the Health Master warmly. &ldquo;You may have stopped a milk-route

-      infection; one of the hardest kind to trace down.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They&rsquo;re talking of closing school after to-morrow,&rdquo;

-      concluded the girl.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The very worst thing they could do,&rdquo; declared Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The very best, I should think,&rdquo; controverted Grandma

-      Sharpless, who never hesitated to take issue with any authority, pending

-      elucidation of the question under discussion. &ldquo;If you group a lot of

-      children close together it stands to reason they&rsquo;ll catch the

-      disease from each other.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not unless you group them too close. Arm&rsquo;s length is the

-      striking distance of a contagious disease. <i>There&rsquo;s</i> a truth

-      for all of us to remember all the time.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If it <i>is</i> a truth,&rdquo; challenged Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;One

-      of the surest and one of the most important,&rdquo; averred the Health

-      Master. &ldquo;The only substance that carries the contagion of diphtheria

-      or measles is the mucus from the nose or throat of an infected person. As

-      far as that can be coughed or sneezed is the danger area. Of course, any

-      article contaminated with it is dangerous also. But a hygienically

-      conducted schoolroom is as safe a place as could be found. I&rsquo;d like

-      to run a school in time of epidemic. I&rsquo;d make it a distributing

-      agency for health instead of disease.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How would you manage that?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;By controlling and training the pupils hygienically. Don&rsquo;t

-      you see that school attendance offers the one best chance of keeping track

-      of such an epidemic, among the very ones who are most liable to it, the

-      children? Diphtheria is contagious in the early stages, as soon as the

-      throat begins to get sore, and before the patient is really ill. Just now

-      there is an indeterminate number of children in every one of our schools

-      who have incipient diphtheria. What is the one important thing to do about

-      them?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Find out who they are,&rdquo; said Julia quickly. &ldquo;Exactly.

-      If you close school to-morrow and scatter the scholars far and wide in

-      their homes, how are we going to find out this essential fact? In their

-      own homes, with no one to watch their physical condition, they will go on

-      developing the illness unsuspected for days, maybe, and spread it about

-      them in the process of development. Whereas, if we keep them in school

-      under a system of constant inspection, we shall discover these cases and

-      surround them with safeguards. Why, if a fireman should throw dynamite

-      into a burning house and scatter the flaming material over several blocks,

-      he&rsquo;d be locked up as insane. Yet here we propose to scatter the fire

-      of contagion throughout the city. It&rsquo;s criminal idiocy!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;If we could only be sure of controlling it in the schools,&rdquo;

-      said Grandma Sharpless, still doubtful.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At least we can do much toward it. As a matter of fact the best

-      authorities are very doubtful whether diphtheria is a &lsquo;school

-      disease,&rsquo; anyway. There is more evidence, though not conclusive,

-      that measles is.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Surely we don&rsquo;t have to consider measles now, in the face of

-      the greater danger.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Most emphatically we do. For one thing, it will increase the

-      diphtheria rate. A child weakened by measles is so much the more liable to

-      catch any other disease which may be rife. Besides, measles spreads so

-      rapidly that it often kills a greater total than more dangerous illnesses.

-      We must prepare for a double warfare.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At the Public Health League meeting,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;the

-      objections to closing the schools came from those who feared that an

-      official acknowledgment that the city had an epidemic would hurt business.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A viciously wrong reason for being right,&rdquo; said the Health

-      Master. &ldquo;By the way, I suppose that Dr. Mullins will be Acting

-      Health Officer, now that Merritt is unfortunately out of it. Merritt went

-      to the hospital in collapse after the session of the Board of Education at

-      which he appeared, to argue for keeping the schools open.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Clyde. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve blocked Mullins off. But

-      it&rsquo;s the next step that is troubling me. What would you do, Strong,

-      if you were in control?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Put a medical inspector in every school,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong

-      instantly. &ldquo;Send home every child with the snuffles or an inflamed

-      throat. And send with him full warning and instructions to the parents.

-      Have daily inspection and instruction of all pupils.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Can you make school children understand?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why not? It is merely a matter of telling them repeatedly: &lsquo;Keep

-      your fingers and other objects away from your mouth and nose. Wash your

-      hands frequently. Brush your teeth and rinse your mouth well. And keep

-      your distance. Remember, that the striking distance of disease is arm&rsquo;s

-      length.&rsquo; Then I would break class every hour, throw open every

-      window, and march the children around for five minutes. This for the sake

-      of improved general condition. Penalize the pupils for any violation of

-      hygienic regulations. Hygienic martial law for war-time.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; applauded Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;So much for the schools.

-      What about the general public?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Educate them to the necessity of watching for danger signals; the

-      running nose, the sore throat, the tiny pimples on the inside of the mouth

-      or cheek which are the first sign of measles. Above all, furnish free

-      anti-toxin. Make it free to all. This is no time to be higgling over

-      pennies.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like the principle of coddling our citizens by giving

-      to those who can afford to pay.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Better coddled citizens than dead children. Unless you give out

-      free anti-toxin, physicians to families where every dollar counts will

-      say, &lsquo;Oh, it may not be diphtheria. We&rsquo;ll wait and see, and maybe

-      save the extra dollars.&rsquo; Diphtheria doesn&rsquo;t wait. It strikes.

-      Then there is the vitally important use of anti-toxin as a preventive. To

-      render a whole family immune, where there is exposure from a known case of

-      diphtheria, is expensive at the present rates, but is the most valuable

-      expedient known. It is so much easier to prevent than to cure.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All right; I give in. What else?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Education, education, education; always education of the public,

-      till the last flame is stamped out. Get the press, first; that is the most

-      direct and far-reaching agency. Then organize public meetings, lectures,

-      addresses in churches and Sunday schools, talks wherever you can get

-      people together to listen. That is what I&rsquo;d do.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Go ahead and do it, then.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Easily said,&rdquo; smiled the Health Master. &ldquo;Who am I, to

-      practice what I preach?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Provisional Health Officer of Worthington,&rdquo; came the quick

-      answer. &ldquo;I have the Mayor&rsquo;s assurance that he will appoint you

-      to-morrow if you will take the job.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll do it,&rdquo; said the Health Master, blinking a little

-      with the suddenness of the announcement, but speaking unhesitatingly,

-      &ldquo;on two conditions: open schools and free anti-toxin.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll get that arranged with the Mayor. Meantime, you have

-      unlimited leave of absence as Chinese physician to the Clyde household.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But the Household Protective Association will have to back me,&rdquo;

-      said Dr. Strong, as the meeting broke up. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t get along

-      without you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Swiftly and terribly moves an epidemic, once it has gained headway. And

-      silence and concealment had fostered this onset from the first. Despite

-      the best efforts of the new Health Officer, within a week the streets of

-      the city were abloom with the malign flower of the scarlet for diphtheria

-      and the yellow for measles.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;First we must find out where we stand,&rdquo; Dr. Strong told his

-      subordinates; and, enlisting the services of the great body of physicians,&mdash;there

-      is no other class of men so trained and inspired to altruistic public

-      service as the medical profession,&mdash;he instituted a house-to-house

-      search for hidden or undiscovered cases. From the best among his

-      volunteers he chose a body of auxiliary school inspectors, one for every

-      school, whom he held to their daily régime with military rigor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But my patients are dying while I am looking after a roomful of

-      healthy children,&rdquo; objected one of them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You can save twenty lives by early detection of the disease, in the

-      time it takes to save one by treatment,&rdquo; retorted the

-      disciplinarian. &ldquo;In war the individual must sometimes be sacrificed.

-      And this is war.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The one bright spot in the early days of the battle was Public School

-      Number Three which the twins and Bettina attended. The medical inspector

-      who had this assignment was young, intelligent, and an enthusiast. Backed

-      by Dr. Strong, and effectively aided by the Clyde children, he enforced a

-      system which brought prompt results. In every instance where a pupil was

-      sent home under suspicion,&mdash;and the first day&rsquo;s inspection

-      brought to light three cases of incipient diphtheria, and fifteen which

-      developed into measles, besides a score of suspicious symptoms,&mdash;Julia,

-      or Robin Clyde, or one of the teachers went along to deliver printed

-      instructions as to the defense of the household, and to explain to the

-      family the vital necessity of heeding the regulations until such time as

-      the physician could come and determine the nature of the ailment. Within a

-      week, amidst growing panic and peril, Number Three was standing like an

-      isle of safety. After that time, not a single new case of either disease

-      developed from exposure within its limits, and in only two families

-      represented in the school was there any spread of contagion.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the following-up into the house that does it,&rdquo;

-      said Dr. Strong, at an early morning meeting of the Household Protective

-      Association (he still insisted on occasional short sessions, in spite of

-      the overwhelming demands on his time and energies, on the ground that

-      these were &ldquo;the only chances I get to feel the support of full

-      understanding and sympathy&rdquo;), &ldquo;that and the checking-up of the

-      three carriers we found.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s a carrier?&rdquo; asked Bettina, who had an

-      unquenchable thirst for finding out things.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A carrier, Toodlekins, is a perfectly well person who has the germs

-      of disease in his throat. Why he doesn&rsquo;t fall ill himself, we don&rsquo;t

-      know. He can give the disease to another person just as well as if he were

-      in the worst stages of it himself. Every epidemic develops a number of

-      carriers. One of the greatest arguments for inspection is that it brings

-      to light these people, who constitute the most difficult and dangerous

-      phase of infection, because they go on spreading the disease without being

-      suspected. Now, I&rsquo;ve got ours from Number Three quarantined. If I

-      could catch every carrier in town, I&rsquo;d guarantee to be in control of

-      the situation in three weeks.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Our reports show over twenty of them discovered and isolated,&rdquo;

-      said Mrs. Clyde, who had turned her abounding energies to the organization

-      of a corps of visiting nurses.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Perhaps I&rsquo;d better say something about carriers in my next

-      talk,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, whose natural gift as a ready and

-      convincing speaker, unsuspected by herself as well as her family until the

-      night when she had met and routed the itinerating quack on his own

-      platform, was now being turned to account in the campaign for short talks

-      before Sunday schools and club gatherings.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Develop it as part of the arm&rsquo;s-length idea,&rdquo; suggested

-      the Health Master. &ldquo;Any person may be a carrier and therefore a

-      peril on too close contact. Tell &lsquo;em that in words of one syllable.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Never use any other kind when I mean it,&rdquo; answered Mrs.

-      Sharpless. &ldquo;What about that party at Mrs. Ellery&rsquo;s, Manny?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got that fixed,&rdquo; replied Maynard Clyde, who had

-      been acting as general factotum for the household in its various lines of

-      endeavor. &ldquo;Mrs. Ellery gave a party to our crowd Friday night,&rdquo;

-      he explained to Dr. Strong, &ldquo;and Monday one of the Ellery girls came

-      down with diphtheria.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What have you done about it?&rdquo; asked the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Notified all the people who were there. That was easy. The trouble

-      is that a lot of the fellows have gone back to college since: to Hamilton,

-      Michigan, Wisconsin, Harvard, Columbia,&mdash;I suppose there were a dozen

-      colleges represented.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you think that&rsquo;s too wide a field for the follow-up

-      system?&rdquo; asked his father.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why, no,&rdquo; said the boy thoughtfully. &ldquo;I figured that

-      starting a new epidemic would be worse than adding to an old one. So I

-      went to Mrs. Ellery and got a list of her guests, and I wrote to every

-      college the fellows have gone back to, and wrote to the fellows

-      themselves. They probably won&rsquo;t thank me for it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;They ought to give you a life-saving medal each,&rdquo; declared

-      Dr. Strong. &ldquo;As for the situation here&rdquo;&mdash;his face

-      darkened&mdash;&ldquo;we&rsquo;re not making any general headway. The

-      public isn&rsquo;t aroused, and it won&rsquo;t be until we can get the

-      newspapers to take up the fight. The thing that discourages me is that

-      they won&rsquo;t help. I don&rsquo;t understand it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you? I do,&rdquo; said Clyde grimly. &ldquo;Their

-      advertisers won&rsquo;t let &lsquo;em print anything about it. As I told

-      you in the matter of closing the schools, business is frightened. The

-      department stores, theaters, and other big advertisers are afraid that the

-      truth about the epidemic would scare away trade. So they are compelling

-      the papers to keep quiet.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Idiots!&rdquo; cried Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Suppressing news is like

-      suppressing gas. The longer you do it, the more violent the inevitable

-      explosion. But when I called on the editors, they didn&rsquo;t say

-      anything to me about the advertising pressure. It was, &lsquo;We should be

-      glad to help in any way, Dr. Strong. But an alarmist policy is not for the

-      best interests of Worthington; and the good of our community must always

-      be the first consideration.&rsquo;&mdash;Bah! The variations I&rsquo; ve

-      heard on that sickening theme today! The &lsquo;Press,&rsquo; the &lsquo;Clarion,&rsquo;

-      the &lsquo;Evening News,&rsquo; the &lsquo;Telegram, the &lsquo;Observer&rsquo;&mdash;all

-      of &lsquo;em.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t mention the &lsquo;Star,&rsquo;&rdquo; said

-      Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That rag? It&rsquo;s against everything decent and for everything

-      rotten in this town,&rdquo; said Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;When I need a danger signal,&rdquo; observed the old lady with her

-      most positive air, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll wave any kind of rag. The &lsquo;Star&rsquo;

-      has circulation.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; admitted the Health Master, &ldquo;and among the very

-      class we want to reach. But what&rsquo;s the use?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;m

-      going to find out.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      One hour later she walked into the editorial sanctum of Mr. &ldquo;Bart&rdquo;

-      Snyder, editor, proprietor, and controlling mind of as &ldquo;yellow&rdquo;

-      a sheet as ever subsisted on a combination of enterprise, real

-      journalistic ability, and blackmail. Mr. Snyder sat in a perfect slump of

-      apparent languor, his body sagging back into his tilted chair, one foot

-      across his desk, the other trailing like a broken wing along the floor,

-      his shrewd, lined face uplifted at an acute angle with the cigar he was

-      chewing, and his green hat achieving the most rakish effect possible to a

-      third slant. His brilliant gray eyes were narrowed into a hard twinkle as

-      he surveyed his visitor.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Siddown,&rdquo; he grunted, and shoved a chair toward her with the

-      grounded foot.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Grandma Sharpless did not &ldquo;siddown.&rdquo; Instead she marched over

-      to a spot directly in front of him, halted, and looked straight into the

-      hard, humorous face.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Bartholomew Snyder,&rdquo; said she crisply, &ldquo;I knew you when

-      you were a boy. I knew your mother, too. She was a decent woman. Take off

-      that hat.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Snyder jaw fell so unpremeditatedly that the Snyder cigar dropped upon

-      the littered floor. One third of a second later, the Snyder foot descended

-      upon it (and it was a twenty-cent cigar, too) as the Snyder chair reverted

-      to the perpendicular, and the Snyder hat came off. The Snyder countenance

-      quivered into articulation and therefrom came a stunned, &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll

-      be&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No, you don&rsquo;t! Not in <i>my</i> presence,&rdquo; cut in his

-      visitor. &ldquo;Now, you listen.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m listening,&rdquo; he assured her in a strangled murmur.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      She seated herself and threw a quality of rigidity into her backbone

-      calculated to impress if not actually to appeal. &ldquo;I want your help,&rdquo;

-      she said.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Fine, fat way you&rsquo;ve got of opening up a request for a favor,&rdquo;

-      he retorted, recovering himself somewhat, and in a particularly

-      discouraging voice. But the shrewd old judge of human nature before him

-      marked the little pursing at the corners of the mouth. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll

-      bet I know what it is.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet all the money I&rsquo;ve got in the bank and my best

-      gold tooth thrown in you don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; was the prompt retort.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a sporting proposition, all right,&rdquo; cried the

-      editor in great admiration. &ldquo;I thought you was going to ask me to

-      let up on the city administration now you&rsquo;ve got one of the fat jobs

-      in the family, with your Dr. Strong.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a good thing you don&rsquo;t have to make guesses for a

-      living,&rdquo; returned his caller scornfully. &ldquo;Pitch into the

-      administration as hard as you like. I don&rsquo;t care. All I want is for

-      you to print the news about this diphtheria epidemic.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Is that all?&rdquo; There was a profound sardonicism in the final

-      word.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Come to think of it, it isn&rsquo;t. I want you to print some

-      editorials, too, telling people how to take care of themselves while the

-      disease is spreading.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Anything more?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, you might do the same thing about the measles epidemic.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Harr-rr-rr!&rdquo; It was a singular growl, not wholly compounded

-      of wrath and disgust. &ldquo;Doc Strong send you here?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No; he didn&rsquo;t!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t bite me. I believe you.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Will you publish some articles?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Look-a-here, Mrs. Sharpless; the &lsquo;Star&rsquo; is a business

-      proposition. Its business is to make money for me. That&rsquo;s all it&rsquo;s

-      here for. People say some pretty tough things about me and the paper.

-      Well, we&rsquo;re pretty tough. We can stand &lsquo;em. Let &lsquo;em

-      talk, so long as I get the circulation and the advertising and the cash.

-      Now, you want me to print something for you. Come down to brass tacks;

-      what is there in it for me?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A chance to be of some real use to your city for once in your life,&rdquo;

-      answered Grandma Sharpless mildly. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t that enough?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Bart Snyder threw back his head and laughed immoderately. &ldquo;Say, I

-      like you,&rdquo; he gurgled. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got nerve. Me a good

-      Samaritan! It&rsquo;s so rich, I&rsquo;m half a mind to go you, if it wasn&rsquo;t

-      for losing the advertising. Wha&rsquo; d&rsquo; ye want me to say, anyway,

-      just for curiosity and cussedness?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Just give the people plain talk,&rdquo; explained the visitor.

-      &ldquo;Talk to &lsquo;em in your editorials as if you had &lsquo;em by the

-      buttonhole. Say to them: &lsquo;Do you want to get diphtheria? Well, you

-      don&rsquo;t need to. It&rsquo;s just as easy to avoid it as to have it.

-      Are you anxious to have measles in your house? It&rsquo;s for you to

-      decide. All you need is to take reasonable care against it. Infectious

-      disease only kills foo&mdash;careless people.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let it go at &lsquo;fools,&rsquo;&rdquo; interjected Mr. Snyder,

-      smiting his thigh. &ldquo;Go on.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then I&rsquo;d give them simple, straight advice; tell them how to

-      recognize the early symptoms; how and where to get anti-toxin. And I&rsquo;d

-      scare &lsquo;em, too. I&rsquo;d tell &lsquo;em there are five thousand

-      cases of the two diseases in town, and there will be ten thousand in a

-      week unless something is done.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Up rose the editor-proprietor, kicked over his own chair, whirled Mrs.

-      Sharpless&rsquo;s chair with its human burden to the desk, thrust a pencil

-      into her hand, and slapped down a pad before her.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Write it,&rdquo; he adjured her.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Who? Me?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Sharpless, her astonishment momentarily

-      overwhelming her grammar. &ldquo;Bless you, man! I&rsquo;m no writer.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Talk it, then, and make your pencil take down the talk. I&rsquo;ll

-      be back in a minute.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      That minute stretched to a good half-hour, during which period Grandma

-      Sharpless talked to her pencil. When Mr. Snyder returned, he had with him

-      a mournful-looking man who, he explained occultly, &ldquo;holds down our

-      city desk.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;This is our new Health Editor,&rdquo; chuckled Snyder, indicating

-      Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;How many cases did you say there were in town, ma&rsquo;am?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Five thousand or more.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The city editor whistled whisperingly. &ldquo;Where do you get that?&rdquo;

-      he asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;From Dr. Strong.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s news,&rdquo; said the desk man. &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t

-      suppose it was half so bad. If only we dared print it!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No other paper in town dares,&rdquo; suggested the visitor

-      insinuatingly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Makes it all the more news,&rdquo; remarked Snyder. &ldquo;What if

-      we played it up for a big feature, eh?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Advertisers,&rdquo; said the city editor significantly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let &lsquo;em drop out. They&rsquo;ll come back quick enough, when

-      we&rsquo;ve shown up one or two and told why they quit us. And think of

-      the splash we can make! Only paper in the city that dares tell the truth.

-      We&rsquo;ll rub that into our highly respectable rivals. I&rsquo;ll make

-      you a proposition,&rdquo; he added, turning to his caller.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Make it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You know I&rsquo;ve hammered at Tom Clyde pretty hard. I don&rsquo;t

-      cotton to that saintly, holier-than-thou reform bunch at all. Well, let

-      Clyde come into the &lsquo;Star&rsquo; with a signed statement as

-      President of the Public Health League, and we&rsquo;ll make it the basis

-      of a campaign that will rip this town wide open for a couple of weeks. I&rsquo;d

-      like to see him in my paper, after all the roasting we&rsquo;ve handed

-      him.&rdquo; And the malicious face wrinkled into another grin.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve bought a bargain,&rdquo; stated Mrs. Sharpless.

-      &ldquo;The statement will be ready to-night. And another from Dr. Strong

-      for good measure.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Fine business!&rdquo; ejaculated the &ldquo;Star&rsquo;s&rdquo;

-      owner. &ldquo;Not open to a reasonable offer in the newspaper game, are

-      you?&rdquo; he added, laughing. &ldquo;No? Well, I&rsquo;m sorry.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Would there be any use in my seeing the editors of the other

-      papers?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Watch them fall in line,&rdquo; was the grim response. &ldquo;Before

-      we&rsquo;ve been out a day, they&rsquo;ll be tumbling over each other to

-      make the dear, deluded public believe that they&rsquo;re the real pioneers

-      in saving the city from the deadly germ.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, here are my notes, if you can make anything out of them.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Eh? Notes?&rdquo; said the newspaper man, who had been glancing at

-      the sheets over Mrs. Sharp-less&rsquo;s shoulder. &ldquo;Oh&mdash;ah. Yes,

-      of course. All right. Glad to have metcher,&rdquo; he added, politely

-      ushering her to the door. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll send a reporter up for the

-      statements at eight o&rsquo;clock.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Thank you very much, Bartholomew Snyder,&rdquo; said Grandma

-      Sharpless, shaking hands.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not a bit of it! Thanks the other way. You&rsquo;ve given me a good

-      tip in my own game. Watch me&mdash;us&mdash;wake &lsquo;em up to-morrow.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Only the combined insistence of Grandma Sharpless and diplomacy of the

-      Health Master overrode Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s angry objections to &ldquo;going

-      into that filthy sheet&rdquo; when the matter was broached to him that

-      evening. For the good of the cause he finally acceded. And next morning

-      the &ldquo;Star&rdquo; was a sight! It blazed in red captions. It squirmed

-      and wriggled with illustrations of alleged germs. It shrieked in

-      stentorian headlines. If the city had been beset by all the dogs of war,

-      it couldn&rsquo;t have blared more martial defiance against the enemy. It

-      held its competitors up to infinite scorn and derision as mean-spirited

-      shirks and cowards, and slathered itself with fulsome praises as the only

-      original prop of truth and righteousness. And, as the centerpoint and core

-      of all this, flaunted-the statement and signature of the Honorable Thomas

-      Clyde, President of the Worthington Public Health League&mdash;with

-      photograph. The face of Mr. Clyde, as he confronted this outrage upon his

-      sensibilities at the breakfast table, was gloom itself until he turned to

-      the editorial page. Then he emitted a whoop of glee. For there,

-      double-leaded and double-headed was a Health Column, by &ldquo;Our Special

-      Writer, Grandma Sharpless, the Wisest Woman in Worthington. She will

-      contribute opinions and advice on the epidemic to the &lsquo;Star&rsquo;

-      exclusively.&rdquo; (Mr. Snyder had taken a chance with this latter

-      statement.)

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Let me see,&rdquo; gasped the old lady, when her son-in-law made

-      known the cause of his mirth. Then, &ldquo;They&rsquo;ve published that

-      stuff of mine just as I wrote it. I didn&rsquo;t dream it was for print.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what makes it so bully,&rdquo; said the Health Master.

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got the editorial trick of confidential, convincing,

-      man-to-man talk down fine. What&rsquo;s more, you&rsquo;ll have to keep it

-      up, now. Your friend, Snyder, has fairly caught you. Well, we need an

-      official organ in the household.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Vowing that she couldn&rsquo;t and wouldn&rsquo;t do it, nevertheless the

-      new &ldquo;editor&rdquo; began to think of so many things that she wanted

-      to say that, each day, when a messenger arrived from the &ldquo;Star&rdquo;

-      with a polite request for &ldquo;copy,&rdquo; there was a telling column

-      ready of the Health Master&rsquo;s wisdom, simplified and pointed by

-      Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s own pungent, crisp, vigorous, and homely style.

-      Thanks largely to this, the &ldquo;Star&rdquo; became the mouthpiece of an

-      anti-epidemic campaign which speedily enlisted the whole city.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      But the &ldquo;yellow&rdquo; was not to have the field to itself. Once the

-      cat was out of the bag, the other papers not only recognized it as a cat

-      with great uproar, but, so to speak, proceeded to tie a can to its tail

-      and pelt it through the streets of the city. As a matter of fact, no

-      newspaper wishes to be hampered in the publishing of legitimate news; and

-      it was only by the sternest threats of withdrawal of patronage that the

-      large advertisers had hitherto succeeded in coercing the press of

-      Worthington. Further coercion was useless, now that the facts had found

-      their way into type. With great unanimity and an enthusiasm none the less

-      genuine for having been repressed, the papers rushed into the breach. The

-      &ldquo;Clarion&rdquo; organized an Anti-Infection League of School

-      Children, with officers and banners. The &ldquo;Press&rdquo; &ldquo;attended

-      to&rdquo; the recreant Dr. Mullins so fiercely that, notwithstanding his

-      pull, he resigned his position in the Health Department because of &ldquo;breakdown

-      due to overwork in the course of his duties,&rdquo; and ceased to trouble,

-      in official circles. Enterprising reporters of the &ldquo;Observer&rdquo;

-      caused the arrest of thirty-five trolley-car conductors for moistening

-      transfers with a licked thumb, and then got the street-car company to

-      issue a new form of transfer inscribed across the back, &ldquo;Keep me

-      away from your Mouth.&rdquo; It fell to the &ldquo;Evening News&rdquo; to

-      drive the common drinking-cup out of existence, after which it instituted

-      reforms in soda fountains, restaurants, and barber shops, while the

-      &ldquo;Telegram&rdquo; garnered great glory by interspersing the

-      inning-by-inning returns of the baseball championship with bits of counsel

-      as to how to avoid contagion in the theater, in the street, in travel, in

-      banks, at home, and in various other walks of life. But the &ldquo;Star&rdquo;

-      held foremost place, and clinched it with a Sunday &ldquo;cut-out&rdquo;

-      to be worn as a badge, inscribed &ldquo;Hands Off, Please, Until It&rsquo;s

-      Over.&rdquo; All of which, while it sometimes verged upon the absurd,

-      served the fundamentally valuable purpose of keeping the public in mind of

-      the peril of contact with infected persons or articles.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Slowly but decisively the public absorbed the lesson. &ldquo;Arm&rsquo;s

-      length&rdquo; became a catch-phrase; a motto; a slogan. People came slowly

-      to comprehend the methods by which disease is spread and the principles of

-      self-protection.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      And as knowledge widened, the epidemic ebbed, though gradually. Serious

-      epidemics are not conquered or even perceptibly checked in a day. They are

-      like floods; dam them in one place and they break through your defenses in

-      another. Inexplicable outbreaks occur just when the tide seems to have

-      turned. And when victory does come, it may not be ascribable to any

-      specific achievement of the hygienic forces. The most that can be said is

-      that the persevering combination of effort has at last made itself felt.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The red placards began to disappear; many of them, alas! only after the

-      sable symbol of death had appeared beneath them. Dr. Strong and his

-      worn-out aides found time to draw breath and reckon up their accounts in

-      human life. The early mortality had been terrific. Of the cases which had

-      developed in the period of suppression, before antitoxin was readily

-      obtainable, more than a third had died.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nobody will ever be indicted for those murders,&rdquo; said Dr.

-      Strong to Mr. Clyde grimly. &ldquo;But we have the satisfaction of knowing

-      what can really be done by prompt work. Look at the figures after the free

-      anti-toxin was established.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      There was a drop in the death rate, first to twenty per cent, then to ten,

-      and, in the ebb stage of the scourge, to well below five.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How many infections we&rsquo;ve prevented by giving anti-toxin to

-      immunize exposed persons, there&rsquo;s no telling,&rdquo; continued Dr.

-      Strong. &ldquo;That principle of starting a back-fire in diphtheria,&mdash;it&rsquo;s

-      exactly like starting a back-fire in a prairie conflagration,&mdash;by

-      getting anti-toxin into the system in time to head off the poison of the

-      disease itself, is one of the two or three great achievements of medical

-      science. There isn&rsquo;t an infected household in the city today, I

-      believe, where this hasn&rsquo;t been done. The end is in sight.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then you can go away and get a few days&rsquo; rest,&rdquo; said

-      Grandma Sharpless, who constituted herself the Health Master&rsquo;s own

-      health guardian and undiplomaed medical adviser, and to whom he habitually

-      rendered meek obedience; for she had been watching with anxiety the

-      haggard lines in his face.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not yet,&rdquo; he returned. &ldquo;Measles we still have with us.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Decreasing, though,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Our nurses

-      report a heavy drop in new cases and a big crop of convalescents.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It is those convalescents that we must watch. I don&rsquo;t want a

-      generation of deaf citizens growing up from this onset.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But can you prevent it if the disease attacks the ears?&rdquo;

-      asked Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Almost certainly. We&rsquo;ve got to inspect every child who has or

-      had measles in this epidemic, and, where the ear-drum is shiny and

-      concave, we will puncture it, by a very simple operation, which saves

-      serious trouble in ninety per cent of the cases, at least. But it means

-      constant watchfulness, for often the infection progresses without pain.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;At the same time your inspectors will watch for other

-      after-effects, then,&rdquo; suggested Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Exactly. It&rsquo;s my own opinion that nearly all the serious

-      diseases of the eye, ear, liver, kidney, heart, and so on in early middle

-      age are the late remote effects of what we carelessly call the lesser

-      diseases of childhood. It is only a theory as yet; though some day I think

-      it will be proved. At any rate, we know that a serious and pretty definite

-      percentage of all deafness follows measles; and we are going to carry this

-      thing through far enough to prevent that sequel and to turn over a

-      reasonably cleaned-up situation to Dr. Merritt.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s out of danger, by the way,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde,

-      &ldquo;and will be back at his desk in a fortnight.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well; he&rsquo;ll have an easier job henceforth,&rdquo; prophesied

-      Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s got an enlightened city to watch over. And he

-      can thank you for that, Strong.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He can thank the Clyde family,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong with feeling.

-      &ldquo;I could have done little without you back of me.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s been interesting to extend the principles of our

-      Household Protective Association to the larger world,&rdquo; smiled Clyde.

-      &ldquo;Beyond our own city, too, in one case. Manny has had a letter from

-      the Professor of Hygiene at Hamilton College, where he enters next year,

-      thanking him on behalf of the faculty for his warning about young Hyland

-      who was exposed to diphtheria at the Ellery party. He went back to

-      Hamilton a few days after and was starting in to play basketball, which

-      would have been decidedly dangerous for his team mates; but the

-      authorities, after getting Manny&rsquo;s letter, kept him out of the

-      gymnasium, and kept a watch on him. He developed the disease a week later;

-      but there has been no infection from him.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s direct result,&rdquo; approved Dr. Strong. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s

-      what I call spreading the gospel.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Grandma&rsquo;s our real revivalist, at that,&rdquo; said Julia.

-      &ldquo;The children at Number Three pay more attention to her column than

-      they do to what the teachers tell them. The principal told us that it was

-      the greatest educational force for health that Worthington had ever known.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Only reflected wisdom from you, young man,&rdquo; said Grandma

-      Sharpless to the Health Master. &ldquo;Thank goodness, I&rsquo;m through

-      with it. I&rsquo;m so sick of it that I can&rsquo;t look at writing

-      materials without wanting to cut the ink bottle&rsquo;s throat with my

-      penholder. Bart Snyder has let me off. What&rsquo;s more, he sent me a

-      check for $250. Pretty handsome of him. But I&rsquo;m going to send it

-      back.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why waste good money, grandma?&rdquo; drawled Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t have me keep it, would you, for doing that work?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Who said anything about keeping it? But don&rsquo;t feed it back to

-      Bart Snyder. Why not contribute it to the Public Health League? It&rsquo;s

-      always got a handsome deficit.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In graceful recognition of my having a son-inlaw as president of

-      it, I suppose.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not president any more. My term was up last night. They

-      didn&rsquo;t honor me with a reelection,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, with a

-      rather too obvious glumness, which, for once, escaped the sharp old lady.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The slinkums!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;After all the time and work

-      you&rsquo;ve given to it!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the ex-incumbent philosophically, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s

-      one comfort. They&rsquo;ve put a better man in my place.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No such a thing,&rdquo; declared his mother-in-law, with vehement

-      partisanship. &ldquo;They couldn&rsquo;t find one. Who was it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Give you one guess.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Was it you, young man?&rdquo; queried she, fixing the Health Master

-      with a baleful eye.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, no; a better man than I,&rdquo; he hastened to assure her.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, in the name of sakes, who, then?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, grabbing the old lady by both shoulders

-      and giving her a vigorous kiss. &ldquo;Unanimously elected amidst an

-      uproar of enthusiasm, as the &lsquo;Star&rsquo; puts it. Here it is, on

-      the first column of the front page.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      For the first time in the history of the Clyde household, the senior

-      member thereof gave way to an unbridled license of speech, in the presence

-      of the family.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, I vum!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      <br /><br />

-    </p>

-    <hr />

-    <p>

-      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>

-    </p>

-    <div style="height: 4em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-    <h2>

-      XII. PLAIN TALK

-    </h2>

-    <p class="pfirst">

-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;W</span>hat do you

-      find so interesting in that paper, Strong?&rdquo; asked Mr. Thomas Clyde,

-      from his place in the corner of the big living-room.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dinner was just finished in the Clyde household, and the elders were

-      sitting about, enjoying the easy and intermittent talk which had become a

-      feature of the day since the Health Master had joined the family. From

-      outside, the play of lively voices, above the harmonized undertones of a

-      strummed guitar, told how the children were employing the after-dinner

-      hour. Dr. Strong let the evening paper drop on his knees.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Something that has set me thinking,&rdquo; he said.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you ever give that restless mind of yours a vacation,

-      young man?&rdquo; inquired Grandma Sharpless, looking up from her game of

-      solitaire.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;All that is good for it. Perhaps you&rsquo;d like to share this

-      problem, and thus relieve me of part of the responsibility.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do go on, if you&rsquo;ve found anything exciting,&rdquo; besought

-      Mrs. Clyde, glancing up with her swift, interrogating smile. &ldquo;The

-      paper seemed unusually dull to me.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Because you didn&rsquo;t read quite deep enough into it, possibly.&rdquo;

-      He raised the journal, folded it neatly to a half-page, and holding it

-      before his eyes, began smoothly:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Far, far away, as far as your conscience will let you believe, in

-      the Land of Parables&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Wait a minute,&rdquo; interrupted Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;That &lsquo;Land

-      of Parables&rsquo; sounds as if we were going to have some Improving

-      Information.&rdquo; He regarded his friend and adviser with a twinkling

-      eye. &ldquo;Ought the children to miss this?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is for you to decide later,&rdquo; said the Health Master

-      gravely. And he resumed:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Far, far away, as far as conscience will let you believe, in the

-      Land of Parables, there once stood a prosperous and self-contented city.

-      Men lived therein by rule and rote. Only what their fathers before them

-      had believed and received did they believe and receive. &lsquo;As it hath

-      been, so it is now and ever must and shall be,&rsquo; was the principle

-      whereby their lives were governed. Therefore they endured, without hope as

-      without complaint, the depredations of a hideous Monster who preyed upon

-      them unceasingly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So loathsome was this Monster that the very thought of him was held

-      to taint the soul. His name was sealed away from the common speech. Only

-      the boldest men spoke of him, and then in paraphrases and by

-      circumlocutions. Fouled, indeed, was the fame of the woman who dared so

-      much as confess to a knowledge of his existence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;From time to time the wise and strong men of the city banded

-      together and sallied forth to drive back other creatures of prey as they

-      pressed too hard upon the people. Not so with the Monster. Because of the

-      ban of silence no plan could be mooted, no campaign formulated to check

-      his inroads. So he grew great and ever greater, and his blood hunger

-      fierce and ever more fierce, and his scarlet trail wound in and out among

-      the homes of the people, manifest even to those eyes which most sedulously

-      sought to blind themselves against it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Seldom did the Monster slay outright. But where his claws clutched

-      or his fangs pierced, a slow venom crept through the veins, and life was

-      corroded at its very wellsprings. Nor was this the worst. Once the blight

-      fell upon one member of a household, it might corrupt, by hidden and

-      subtle ways, the others and innocent, who knew not of the curse

-      overhanging them.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Upon the foolish, the reckless, and the erring the Monster most

-      readily fastened himself. But man nor woman nor child was exempt.

-      Necessity drove young girls, struggling and shuddering, into the Monster&rsquo;s

-      very jaws. The purity of a child or of a Galahad could not always save

-      from the serpent-stroke which sped from out the darkness.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One moment, Strong,&rdquo; broke in Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve

-      read this before?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I know what is in it, if that is what you mean. Why?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; hesitated the other, glancing toward his wife and

-      her mother. &ldquo;Only, I suspect it isn&rsquo;t going to be pleasant.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t pleasant. It&rsquo;s true.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Grandma Sharpless laid down her cards. &ldquo;Let him go on, Tom,&rdquo;

-      she said decisively. &ldquo;We have no ban of silence in this house.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      At a nod from Clyde, the Health Master continued:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Always the taboo of silence hedged the Monster about and protected

-      him; and men secretly revolted against it, yet were restrained from speech

-      by the fear of public dishonor. So, in time, he came to have a Scarlet

-      Court of Shame, with his retinue of slaves, whose duty it was to procure

-      victims for his insatiate appetite. But this service availed his servitors

-      nothing in forbearance, for, sooner or later, his breath of fiery venom

-      blasted and withered them, one and all.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One refuge only did the people seek against the Monster. At every

-      doorpost of the city stood a veiled statue of the supposed Goddess and

-      Protectress of the Household, worshiped under the name of <i>Modesty</i>,

-      and to her the people appealed for succor and protection. Also they

-      invoked her vengeance against such as spoke the name of the Monster, and

-      bitter were the penalties wrought upon these in her name. Nevertheless

-      there arose martyrs whose tongues could not be silenced by any fear.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One was a brave priest who stood in his pulpit unashamed and spoke

-      the terrible truth of the Monster, bidding his hearers arise and band

-      themselves together and strike a blow for their homes and their dear ones.

-      But the people hurried forth in dread, and sought refuge before the Veiled

-      Idol; and the priest&rsquo;s words rang hollow in the empty tabernacle;

-      and his church was deserted and crumbled away in neglect, so that the

-      fearful said:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Behold the righteous wrath which follows the breaking of the

-      prescribed silence.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Again, a learned and pious physician and healer gathered the young

-      men about him in the marketplace to give them solemn warning against the

-      Monster and his scarlet slaves. But his words returned upon himself, and

-      he was branded with shame as one who worshiped not the Veiled Goddess, and

-      was presently driven forth from his own place into the wilderness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then there came into the hall of the City Fathers a woman with

-      disheveled hair and tear-worn cheeks, who beat upon her breast and cried:&mdash;&ldquo;&lsquo;Vengeance,

-      O Wise and Great Ones! My son, my little son went to the public baths, and

-      the venom of the Monster was upon the waters, and my son is blind forever.

-      What will ye do, that others may not suffer my grief?&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And the Wise and Great Ones spoke together and said:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Surely this woman is mad, that she thus fouls her lips.&rsquo;

-      And they drove her out of their presence.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;From among their own number there came a terror and a portent. For

-      their Leader, who had been stricken in youth, but thought himself to have

-      thrown off the toils of the Monster, rose in his place and spoke in a

-      voice that piped and shook:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Because no man taught me in my unripe days, I strayed into

-      the paths of the Scarlet One. For the space of a generation I hoped; but

-      now the clutch is upon me again, and I die. See to it, O my Fellows, that

-      our youth no longer perish in their ignorance.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So he passed out from the place of honor; and the strength of his

-      mind and his body was loosened until he died. But, rather than violate the

-      taboo, the Wise and Great Ones gave a false name to his death, and he was

-      buried under a graven lie.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Finally there came to the Council Hall one with the fire of

-      martyrdom in his eyes.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Though I perish,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I and mine, yet will

-      I speak the truth for once. My daughter I have given in marriage, and the

-      Monster has entered into the house of her marriage, and from henceforth

-      she must go, a maimed creature, sexless and childless, to the end of her

-      days. Shame upon this city, that it endures such shame; for my daughter is

-      but one of many.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;The shame be yours,&rsquo; replied the Fathers, &lsquo;that

-      you bring scandal upon your own. Go forth into exile, in the name of the

-      Veiled Goddess, <i>Modesty</i>, beneath whose statue we meet.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But the man strode forward, and with a violent hand plucked the

-      veil from the statue.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;&lsquo;Not the Protectress of Homes,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;but

-      the ally of the Monster. Not the Goddess, <i>Modesty</i>, but her sham

-      sister, <i>Prudery</i>. Down with false gods!&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So saying, he threw the idol to the ground, where it was shattered

-      into a thousand pieces. With those pieces the Fathers stoned him to death.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But in many households that night there was a baring of the Veiled

-      Idol. And ever, behind the folds, was revealed not the pure gaze of the

-      True Goddess, but the simper and leer of <i>Prudery</i>, mute accomplice

-      of <i>Shame</i>.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Thus did the city awake. Fearfully it gathered its forces;

-      tremblingly it prepared its war upon the Monster. But the Monster is

-      intrenched. Its venom runs through the blood of the people, poisoning it

-      from generation to generation, so that neither the grandsons nor the

-      great-grandsons of those who stoned the martyr to the False Goddess shall

-      escape the curse. The Prophet has said it: &lsquo;Even unto the third and

-      the fourth generations.&rsquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;<i>De te fabula narratur</i>; of you is the fable narrated.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The Land of Parables is your country.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The stricken city is your city.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The Monster coils at your doorway, lying in wait for your loved

-      ones; and no prudence, no precaution, no virtue can guard them safely

-      against his venom so long as the Silence of Prudery holds sway.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Dr. Strong let the newspaper fall on his lap, and looked slowly from face

-      to face of the silent little group.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Need I tell you the name of the destroyer?&rdquo; he asked.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not me,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde in a low tone. &ldquo;It is a

-      two-headed monster, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      The Health Master nodded. &ldquo;And because we all fear to utter the

-      words &lsquo;venereal disease,&rsquo; our children grow up in the peril of the

-      Monster whose two allies are Vice and Ignorance.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;One editor in this town, at least, has some gumption,&rdquo;

-      commented Grandma Sharpless, peering over her spectacles at the sheet

-      which Dr. Strong had let fall. &ldquo;Which paper is it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;None, if you must know. The fact is, I read that allegory into the

-      newspaper, not out of it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then it was your own?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Such as it

-      is, mine own. But the inspiration came from this headline.&rdquo; He

-      pointed to a legend in heavy type:&mdash;

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      DIVORCE IN THE INSIDE SET

-    </h3>

-    <h3>

-      AFTER SEX MONTHS OF MARRIAGE, MRS. BARTLEY STARR

-    </h3>

-    <h3>

-      SEEKS FREEDOM&mdash;NATURE OF CHARGES NOT MADE PUBLIC

-    </h3>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you know what is back of it, Strong?&rdquo; asked Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The ruin of a life. Bartley Starr has been a &lsquo;rounder.&rsquo;

-      With the curse of his vices upon him he married a young and untaught girl.&rdquo;

-      He repeated with slow significance a passage from the allegory. &ldquo;The

-      Monster entered into the house of her marriage, and from henceforth she

-      must go, a maimed creature, sexless and childless, to the end of her days.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, no, no!&rdquo; burst out Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Not poor little,

-      lovely, innocent Margaret Starr!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Too innocent,&rdquo; retorted the Health Master. &ldquo;And more

-      than innocent; ignorant.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But Bartley Starr!&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Who would have

-      supposed him such a scoundrel? And with his bringing-up, too!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The explanation lies in his bringing-up.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nonsense! Henry Starr is as upright a man and as good a father as

-      you can find in Worthington.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;The former, perhaps. Not the latter, certainly. He is a worshiper

-      of the False Veiled Goddess, I suspect. Hence Bartley&rsquo;s tragedy.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do you blame Bartley&rsquo;s viciousness upon his father?&rdquo;

-      demanded Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In part, at least. I happen to know a good deal about this case.

-      Bartley got his sex-education or miseducation from chance talk at school.

-      He took that to college with him, and there, unguided, fell into vicious

-      ways. I don&rsquo;t suppose his father ever had a frank talk with him in

-      his life. And I judge that little Mrs. Starr&rsquo;s mother never had one

-      with her, either. Look at the result!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But boys find out about such things some way,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde

-      uneasily.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Some way? What way? And from whom? How much has Manny found out?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Manny&rsquo;s father.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you know?&rdquo; persisted the Health Master

-      relentlessly. &ldquo;You are his father, and, what is more, his friend.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why must Manny know?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Surely my son

-      isn&rsquo;t going to wallow in that sort of foulness.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Pray God he is not!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, turning her old,

-      shrewd, kind face, the eyes bright and soft with feeling, toward her

-      daughter. &ldquo;But, oh, my dear, my dear, the bitterest lesson we

-      mothers have to learn is that our children are of the common flesh and

-      blood of humanity.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Manny is clean-minded and high-spirited,&rdquo; said Strong.

-      &ldquo;But not all of his companions are. Not a month ago I heard one of

-      the older boys in his class assuring some of his fellows, in the terms of

-      the most damnable lie that ever helped to corrupt youth, &lsquo;Why, it

-      ain&rsquo;t any worse than an ordinary cold.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That was a stock phrase of the young toughs when I was a boy,&rdquo;

-      said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;So it still persists, does it?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Any worse than an ordinary cold?&rdquo; repeated Mrs. Clyde,

-      looking puzzled. &ldquo;What did he mean?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Gonorrhoea,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mrs. Clyde winced back and half-rose from her chair.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are you going?&rdquo; asked the Health Master rather &lsquo;grimly.

-      &ldquo;Must I be mealy-mouthed on this subject? Here I am, trying to tell

-      you something of the most deadly import, and am I to choose perfumed words

-      and pick rose-tinted phrases?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Speak out, Strong,&rdquo; said the head of the house. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve

-      been rather expecting this.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;First, then: you need not worry about Manny. I talked to him, long

-      ago.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But he&rsquo;s only a boy, still,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless

-      involuntarily.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He enters college this fall. And I&rsquo;ve made sure that he won&rsquo;t

-      take with him the &lsquo;no worse than a cold&rsquo; superstition about a

-      disease which has wrecked the lives of thousands of Bartley Starrs.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But I thought that Starr&rsquo;s was the&mdash;the other and worse

-      form,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Plain talk,&rdquo; adjured the Health Master. &ldquo;You thought it

-      was syphilis?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And you thought syphilis worse than gonorrhoea?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Surely!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, it isn&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;ll explain that in detail presently.

-      Just now&mdash;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Do I have to hear all of this,&rdquo; appealed Mrs. Clyde, with a

-      face of piteous disgust.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Well, <i>I</i> told Manny,&rdquo; said the Health Master in

-      measured tones. &ldquo;Must I be the one to tell Julia, too?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Julia!&rdquo; cried the mother. &ldquo;Tell Julia?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Some one must tell her.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That child?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Fourteen years old, and in high school. Last year there were ten

-      known cases of venereal disease among the high-school girls.&rdquo; *

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     *  These and the following instances are based on actual and

-     established medical findings.

-</pre>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How horrible!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Bad enough. I have known worse elsewhere. In a certain small city

-      school, several years ago, it was discovered that there was an epidemic of

-      vice which involved practically the whole school. And it was discovered

-      only when venereal disease broke out. Our school authorities are just

-      beginning to learn that immorality must be combated by watchfulness and

-      quarantine, just as contagious disease must.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;How was the outbreak in our high school found out?&rdquo; asked

-      Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;In a curious and tragic way. One of the boys developed a sudden and

-      serious inflammation of the eyes. At first the ophthalmologist to whom he

-      went was puzzled. Then he began to suspect. A bateriological analysis

-      showed that it was a case of gonorrhoeal infection. It was by a hair&rsquo;s

-      breadth that the less infected eye was saved. The sight of the other is

-      lost. Examination showed that the disease was confined to the eyes. By a

-      careful bit of medical detective work, the physician and the principal of

-      the high school determined that the infection came from the use of a

-      bath-towel in the house of a fellow-pupil where the patient had spent two

-      or three nights. This pupil was examined and found to have a fully

-      developed case, which he had concealed, in fear of disgrace. Consequently,

-      the poison is now so deep-seated in him that it may be years before he is

-      cured. He made a confession implicating a girl in the class above him. A

-      rigid investigation followed which brought the other cases to light.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I shall take Julia out of that school at once,&rdquo; said Mrs.

-      Clyde, half-crying.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; controverted the Health Master gently. &ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t

-      do that. In the complex life of a city like this, it is impossible to

-      shelter a girl completely and permanently. Better armor her with

-      knowledge. Besides, the danger in the school, being discovered, is

-      practically over now. In time, and using this experience as a lever with

-      the school authorities, we hope to get a course of lectures on hygiene

-      established, including simple sex-instruction. Meantime this must be

-      carried on by the mothers and fathers.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But what am I to say to Julia?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That is what I am going to tell you,&rdquo; replied the Health

-      Master, &ldquo;and look to you to pass on the truth in terms too plain to

-      admit of any misunderstanding. First, does she know what womanhood and

-      motherhood mean?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not yet, I think. She seems so young. And it&rsquo;s so hard to

-      speak of those things. But I thought I would try to explain to her some

-      day.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Some day? At once! How can you think her too young? She has already

-      undergone the vital change from childhood to womanhood, and without so

-      much as a word of warning or reassurance or explanation as to what it

-      means.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not quite without,&rdquo; put in Grandma Sharpless quietly.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; approved the Health Master. &ldquo;But be sure that

-      the explanation is thorough. Tell her the significance of sex and its

-      relation to reproduction and life. If you don&rsquo;t, be sure that others

-      will. And their version may well be in terms which would make a mother

-      shudder to hear.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Who would tell her?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Her playmates. Do you think that girls don&rsquo;t talk of the

-      mysteries as much as boys? If so, you&rsquo;re sadly in error. The first

-      essential is that she should understand truly and wisely what it means to

-      be a woman. That is fundamental. And now for the matter of venereal

-      disease. I am going to lay certain facts before you all, and you can hand

-      on to the children such modifications as you deem best.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;First, gonorrhoea, because it is the worse of the two. That is not

-      the accepted notion, I know: but the leading specialists one by one have

-      come around to the view, that, by and large, it does more damage to

-      humanity than the more greatly dreaded syphilis. For one thing, it is much

-      more widespread. While there are no accurate statistics covering the field

-      in general, it is fairly certain that forty per cent of all men over

-      thirty-five in our larger cities have had the disease at some time.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;That doesn&rsquo;t seem possible,&rdquo; broke in Mr. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not to you, because you married early, and your associations have

-      been largely with family, home-loving men. But ask any one of the

-      traveling salesmen in your factory his view. Your traveling man is the

-      Ulysses of modern life, &lsquo;knowing cities and the hearts of men.&rsquo;

-      I think that you&rsquo;ll find that compared with the &lsquo;commercial&rsquo;

-      view, my forty per cent is optimistic.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;But it is easily curable, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde,

-      insensibly yielding to the Health Master&rsquo;s matter-of-fact tone, and

-      finding, almost insensibly, that her interest in the hygienic problem had

-      overcome her shamed reluctance to speak of it.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Often in the early stages. But it is very uncertain. And once

-      firmly fixed on the victim, it is one of the most obstinate and

-      treacherous of diseases. It may lie dormant for months or even years,

-      deceiving its victim into thinking himself wholly cured, only to break out

-      again in full conflagration, without warning.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;This is the history of many ruined marriages. Only by the most

-      searching tests can a physician make certain that the infection is stamped

-      out. Probably no disease receives, on the average, such harmful treatment

-      by those who are appealed to to cure it. The reason for this is that the

-      young man with his first &lsquo;dose&rsquo;&mdash;that loathsome, light

-      term of description!&mdash;is ashamed to go to his family physician, and

-      so takes worthless patent medicines or falls into the hands of some

-      &lsquo;Men&rsquo;s Specialist&rsquo; who advertises a &lsquo;sure cure&rsquo;

-      in the papers. These charlatans make their money, not by skillful and

-      scientific treatment, of which they know nothing, nor by seeking to effect

-      a cure, but by actually nourishing the flame of the disease, so as to keep

-      the patient under their care as long as possible, all the time building up

-      fat fees for themselves. If they were able, as they claim, to stop the

-      infection in a few days at a small fee, they couldn&rsquo;t make money

-      enough to pay for the scoundrelly lies which constitute their

-      advertisements. While they are collecting their long-extended payments

-      from the victim, the infection is spreading and extending its roots more

-      and more deeply, until the unfortunate may be ruined for life, or even

-      actually killed by the ravages of the malignant germs.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t suppose that it was ever fatal,&rdquo; said Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Oh, yes. I&rsquo;ve seen deaths in hospitals, of the most agonizing&rsquo;

-      kind. But it is by virtue of its byproducts, so to speak, that gonorrhoea

-      is most injurious and is really more baneful to the race than syphilis.

-      The organism which causes it is in a high degree destructive to the eyes.

-      Newborn infants are very frequently infected in this way by gonorrhoeal

-      mothers. Probably a quarter of all permanent blindness in this country is

-      caused by gonorrhoea. The effect of the disease upon women is disastrous.

-      Half of all abdominal operations on married women, excluding appendicitis,

-      are the results of gonorrhoeal infection from their husbands. A large

-      proportion of sterility arises from this cause. A large proportion of the

-      wives of men in whom the infection has not been wholly eradicated pay the

-      penalty in permanently undermined health. And yet the superstition endures

-      that &lsquo;it&rsquo;s no worse than a bad cold.&rsquo;&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;There is no such superstition about syphilis, at least,&rdquo;

-      remarked Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No. The very name is a portent of terror, and it is well that it

-      should be so. The consequence is that the man who finds himself afflicted

-      takes no chances, as a rule. He goes straight to the best physician he can

-      find, and obeys orders under terror of his life. Thus and thus only, he

-      often is cured. Terrible as syphilis is, there is this redeeming feature:

-      we can tell pretty accurately when the organism which causes it is

-      eliminated. Years after the disease itself is cured, however, the victim

-      may be stricken down by the most terrible form of paralysis, resulting

-      from it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t the Ehrlich treatment regarded as a sure cure?&rdquo;

-      asked Mrs. Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No cure is sure. Salvarsan, skillfully administered, is as near a

-      specific as any known form of treatment. But we don&rsquo;t know whether

-      it has any effect at all upon locomotor ataxia or general paralysis, the

-      after effects, which may destroy the patient fifteen or twenty years after

-      the actual disease has been cured. All locomotor ataxia and all general

-      paralysis come from syphilis. And these diseases are not only incurable,

-      but are as nearly a hell on earth as poor humanity is ever called upon to

-      endure. Of course, you know that a man who is base enough to marry with

-      syphilis dooms his children. Fortunately seventy-five or eighty per cent

-      of the offspring of such marriages die in infancy or early childhood. The

-      rest grow up deficient in mind or body or both. Upwards of ten per cent of

-      all insanity is syphilitic in its origin.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Both venereal diseases are terribly contagious. Innocence is no

-      protection. Syphilis may be contracted from a drinking-cup or

-      eating-utensil, or from the lips of an infected person having an open sore

-      on the mouth. Gonorrhoea is spread by towels, by bathtubs, or from

-      contaminated toilets. No person, however careful, is immune from either of

-      the &lsquo;red plagues.&rsquo; And yet the public is just beginning to be

-      educated to the peril.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why wouldn&rsquo;t that be a good topic for the Woman&rsquo;s Club

-      to discuss?&rdquo; asked Grandma Sharpless.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Splendid!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;That is, if they would

-      allow you to talk about it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;<i>Allow</i> me!&rdquo; The old lady&rsquo;s firm chin tilted up

-      sharply. &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s going to put the ban of silence on me?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Nobody, I dare say, if you make up your mind to speak,&rdquo;

-      replied Dr. Strong, smiling. &ldquo;But some will probably try. Would you

-      believe that, only a short time since, a professor of hygiene in one of

-      our leading universities had to abandon a course of lectures to the

-      students because the wives of the faculty and trustees objected to his

-      including venereal diseases in his course? And a well-known lecturer, who

-      had been invited to speak on health protection before a list of colleges,

-      suffered the indignity of having the invitation withdrawn because he

-      insisted that he could not cover the ground without warning his hearers

-      against the twin pestilences of vice.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Are the colleges so greatly in need of that sort of warning?&rdquo;

-      asked Mrs. Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Subsequent records obtained from some of the protesting

-      institutions showed that one third of the students had at some time been

-      infected.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad you&rsquo;ve told my boy,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde,

-      rising. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll talk to my girls.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And I to the women,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;Then I&rsquo;d

-      better make a list, for both of you, of the literature on the subject

-      which you will find useful,&rdquo; said the Health Master. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll

-      give it to you later.&rdquo; *

-    </p>

-<pre xml:space="preserve">

-     * The list of publications on the sex problem and venereal

-     disease recommended by the Health Master to the Clyde family

-     was as follows:&mdash;

-

-     Published by the California Social Hygiene Society, Room

-     256, U.S. Custom House, San Francisco, Calif.: The Four Sex

-     Lies, When and How to Tell the Children, A Plain Talk with

-     Girls about their Health and Physical Development. Published

-     by the Detroit Society for Sex Hygiene, Wayne Co. Medical

-     Society Building, Detroit, Mich.: To the Girl who does not

-     Know, A Plain Talk with Boys. Published by the Chicago

-     Society of Social Hygiene, 305 Reliance Building, Chicago,

-     Ill: Self Protection, Family Protection, Community

-     Protection. Published by the Maryland Society for Social

-     Hygiene, 15 East Pleasant Street, Baltimore, Md.: The So-

-     Called Sexual Necessity in Man, The Venereal Diseases.

-     Published by the American Federation for Sex Hygiene, 105

-     West 40th St., N.Y. City: List of Publications of the

-     Constituent Societies, The Teaching of Sex Hygiene, Sex

-     Instruction as a Phase of Social Education. Published by the

-     Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis: The Sex Problem,

-     Health and the Hygiene of Sex.

-</pre>

-    <p>

-      For a time after the women had left, the two men sat silent.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Strong,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde presently, &ldquo;who is Bartley

-      Starr&rsquo;s physician?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Dr. Emery.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t he warn him not to marry?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He did. He positively forbade it.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And Starr married that young girl in the face of that prohibition?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;He thought he was cured. Dr. Emery couldn&rsquo;t say positively

-      that he wasn&rsquo;t. He could only beg him to wait another year. Starr

-      hadn&rsquo;t the courage&mdash;or the principle; he feared scandal if he

-      postponed the wedding. So he disregarded the warning and now the scandal

-      is upon him with tenfold weight.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t there any law for such cases?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Not in this state. Indiana requires that parties to a marriage

-      swear to their freedom from venereal disease and certain other ailments.

-      Other states have followed suit. Every state ought to.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t Dr. Emery go to the girl&rsquo;s father, then?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Because of our damnable law,&rdquo; returned the Health Master with

-      a sudden and rare access of bitterness.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You mean that the law forbids?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;It holds the physician liable for any professional confidence

-      violated.&rdquo; Dr. Strong rose and paced up and down the room, talking

-      with repressed energy. &ldquo;Therein it follows medical ethics in its

-      most conservative and baneful phase. The code of medical conduct provides

-      that a physician is bound to keep secret all the private affairs of a

-      patient, learned in the course of practice. One body, the American

-      Institute of Homoeopathy, has wisely amended its code to except those

-      cases where &lsquo;harm to others may result.&rsquo; That amendment was

-      passed with particular reference to venereal disease.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;What about contagious disease?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t

-      the law require the physician to report diphtheria, for instance, and thus

-      violate the patient&rsquo;s confidence?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Certainly it does. All schools recognize that principle of

-      protection to the public. Yet, in the case of syphilis or gonorrhoea, when

-      the harm to the public health is far greater than from any &lsquo;reportable&rsquo;

-      disease except tuberculosis, the physician must hold his peace, though he

-      sees his patient pass out of his hands bearing fire and sword and poison

-      to future generations. There&rsquo;s the Ban of Silence in its most

-      diabolical form!&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Mr. Clyde regarded his household physician keenly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never

-      before seen you so stirred,&rdquo; he observed.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve reason to be stirred.&rdquo; The Health Master whirled

-      suddenly upon his friend and employer. &ldquo;Clyde, you&rsquo;ve never

-      questioned me as to my past.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Have you never wanted it cleared up?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve always been willing to take me on trust?&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And I appreciate it. But now I&rsquo;m going to tell you how I

-      happened to come to you, a broken and ruined man.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Think it over, Strong,&rdquo; advised Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t

-      speak now. Not that it would make any difference to me. I know you. If you

-      were to tell me that you had committed homicide, I&rsquo;d believe that it

-      was a necessary and justifiable homicide.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Suicide, rather,&rdquo; returned the other with a mirthless laugh;

-      &ldquo;professional suicide. I&rsquo;ll speak now, if you don&rsquo;t

-      object.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Go ahead, then, if it will ease your mind.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a lawbreaker, Clyde. I did, years ago, what you thought

-      Emery should have done. I deliberately violated the profession&rsquo;s Ban

-      of Silence. The man was my patient, in the city where I had built up a

-      good high-class practice. He had contracted gonorrhoea and I had treated

-      him for a year. The infection seemed to be rooted out. But I knew the

-      danger, and when he told me that he was engaged to be married, to a girl

-      of my own set and a valued friend, I was horror-stricken. I pleaded,

-      argued, and finally threatened. It was no use. He was the spoiled child of

-      a wealthy family, impatient of any thwarting. One day the suspicions of

-      the girl&rsquo;s mother were aroused. She came to me in deep distress. I

-      told her the truth. The engagement was broken. The man did not bring suit

-      against me, but his family used their financial and social power to

-      persecute and finally drive me out of the city, a nervous wreck. That&rsquo;s

-      my history.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;You could have protected yourself by telling the true facts,&rdquo;

-      suggested Clyde. .

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Yes: but that would have been an unforgivable breach of confidence.

-      The public had no right to the facts. The girl&rsquo;s family had.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Then they should have come to your rescue with the truth.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;I bound them to secrecy.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      Slowly Mr. Clyde rose, walked over, picked up the paper with the staring

-      headlines, folded it, laid it on the table, and, in passing the physician,

-      set a hand, as if by chance, upon his shoulder. From so undemonstrative a

-      man the action meant much.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;So,&rdquo; he said with affectionate lightness, &ldquo;my Chinese

-      physician had been fighting dragons before he ever came to us; worse

-      monsters than he&rsquo;s been called upon to face, since. That was a

-      splendid defeat, Strong.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;A bitter one,&rdquo; said the Health Master; &ldquo;and by the same

-      old Monster, in another manifestation that we&rsquo;ve been fighting here.

-      We&rsquo;ve downed him now and again, you and I, Clyde. But he&rsquo;s

-      never killed: only scotched. He&rsquo;s the universal ally of every ill

-      that man hands on to man, and we&rsquo;ve only to recognize him under the

-      thousand and one different forms he assumes to call him out to battle

-      under his real name.&rdquo;

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;And that is?&rdquo; inquired Clyde.

-    </p>

-    <p>

-      &ldquo;Ignorance,&rdquo; said the Health Master.

-    </p>

-    <h3>

-      THE END

-    </h3>

-    <div style="height: 6em;">

-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

-    </div>

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<pre>

-

-

-

-

-

-End of Project Gutenberg's The Health Master, by Samuel Hopkins Adams

-

-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HEALTH MASTER ***

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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Health Master, by Samuel Hopkins Adams</title>
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold;'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Health Master, by Samuel Hopkins Adams</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The Health Master</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Samuel Hopkins Adams</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Release Date: August 2, 2018 [eBook #57543]<br />
+[Most recently updated: April 14, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Widger</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em;margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HEALTH MASTER ***</div>
+
+<h1>THE HEALTH MASTER</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">By Samuel Hopkins Adams</h2>
+
+<h3>Associate Fellow of the American Medical Association</h3>
+
+<h4>Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company</h4>
+
+<h3>1913</h3>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p>
+<i>To George W. Goler, M.D., a type of the courageous, unselfish, and
+far-sighted health official, whom the enlightened and progressive city of
+Rochester, N. Y., hires to keep it well, on the &ldquo;Chinese plan,&rdquo;
+this book is inscribed, with the hope that it may, by exercising some influence
+in the hygienic education of the public, aid the work which he and his fellow
+guardians of the public health are so laboriously and devotedly performing
+throughout the nation.</i>
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#pref01">INTRODUCTORY NOTE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">I. THE CHINESE PLAN PHYSICIAN</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">II. IN TIME OF PEACE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">III. REPAIRING BETTINA</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">IV. THE CORNER DRUG-STORE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">V. THE MAGIC LENS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">VI. THE RE-MADE LADY</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">VII. THE RED PLACARD</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">VIII. HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">IX. THE GOOD GRAY DOCTOR</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">X. THE HOUSE THAT CAUGHT COLD</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">XI. THE BESIEGED CITY</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">XII. PLAIN TALK</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<h2><a name="pref01"></a>INTRODUCTORY NOTE</h2>
+
+<p>
+To dogmatise on questions of medical practice is to invite controversy and
+tempt disaster. The highest wisdom of to-day may be completely refuted by
+to-morrow&rsquo;s discovery. Therefore, for the simple principles of disease
+prevention and health protection which I have put into the mouth of my Health
+Master, I make no claim of finality. In support of them I maintain only that
+they represent the progressive specialized thought of modern medical science.
+So far as is practicable I have avoided questions upon which there is serious
+difference of belief among the authorities. Where it has been necessary to
+touch upon these, as, for example, in the chapter on methods of isolation in
+contagious diseases, a question which arises sooner or later in every
+household, I have advocated those measures which have the support of the best
+rational probability and statistical support.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not only has the book been prepared in consultation with the recognized
+authorities on public health and preventive medicine, but every chapter has
+been submitted to the expert criticism of specialists upon the particular
+subject treated. My own ideas and theories I have advanced only in such
+passages as deal with the relation of the physician and of the citizen to the
+social and ethical phases of public health. To the large number of medical
+scientists, both public and private, whose generous aid and counsel have made
+my work possible, I gratefully acknowledge my debt. My thanks are due also for
+permission to reprint, to the <i>Delineator</i>, in which most of the chapters
+have appeared serially; to <i>Collier&rsquo;s Weekly</i>, and to the
+<i>Ladies&rsquo; Home Journal</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Author.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>I.<br />
+THE CHINESE PLAN PHYSICIAN</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE eleven-o&rsquo;clock
+car was just leaving Monument Square when Mr. Thomas Clyde swung aboard with an
+ease and agility worthy of a younger and less portly man. Fortune favored him
+with an unoccupied seat, into which he dropped gratefully. Just in front of him
+sprawled a heavy-shouldered young man, apparently asleep. Mr. Clyde was
+unfavorably impressed both by his appearance and by the manner of his
+breathing, which was as excessive as it was unusual. As the car swung sharply
+around a curve the young man&rsquo;s body sagged at the waist, and lopped over
+toward the aisle. Before Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s restraining hand could close upon
+his shoulder, he had tumbled outward to the floor, and lay quiet, with upturned
+face. There was a stir through the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The horrid drunken creature!&rdquo; exclaimed a black-clad woman
+opposite Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Why do they allow such people on the cars?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The conductor hurried forward, only to find his way blocked by a very tall,
+slender man who had quietly stepped, from a seat next the window, over an
+intervening messenger boy and the box he was carrying. The new arrival on the
+scene of action stooped over the prostrate figure. One glance apparently
+satisfied him. With a swift, sharp motion he slapped the inert man forcefully
+across the cheek. The sound of the impact was startlingly loud. The senseless
+head rolled over upon the left shoulder, only to be straightened out by another
+quick blow. A murmur of indignation and disgust hummed and passed, and the
+woman in black called upon the conductor to stop the assault. But Mr. Thomas
+Clyde, being a person of decision and action, was before the official. He
+caught the assailant&rsquo;s arm as it swung back again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let him alone! What do you mean by beating a helpless man that
+way!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know more about this affair than I do?&rdquo; The crisp query was
+accompanied by a backward thrust of the tall man&rsquo;s elbow which broke Mr.
+Clyde&rsquo;s hold, and&mdash;smack! smack!&mdash;the swift double blow rocked
+the victim&rsquo;s head again. This time the man groaned. The car was in an
+uproar. Mr. Clyde instantly and effectively pinned the tall man&rsquo;s elbows
+from behind. Some one pulled the bell, and the brakes ground, throwing those
+forward who had pressed into the aisle. Against this pressure, Mr. Clyde, aided
+by the conductor, began dragging his man backward. The stranger was helpless to
+resist this grip; but as he was forced away he perpetrated a final atrocity.
+Shooting out one long leg, he caught the toe of his boot under the outstretched
+man&rsquo;s jawbone and jerked the chin back. This time, the object of the
+violence not only groaned, but opened his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have you in jail for that!&rdquo; panted Mr. Clyde, his
+usually placid temper surging up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other passengers began to lift the victim.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Drop him!&rdquo; snapped the tall man, with such imperative
+decisiveness, that the helping hands involuntarily retracted. &ldquo;Let him
+lie, you fools! Do you want to kill him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Misgivings beset and cooled Mr. Thomas Clyde. He had now reached the rear
+platform, still holding in his powerful and disabling grasp the unknown man,
+when he heard a voice from an automobile which had been halted by the abrupt
+stop of the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can I be of any help?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Magruder!&rdquo; exclaimed Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;come in here, will you,
+and look at a sick man?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the doctor stepped aboard, the captive with a violent wrench freed himself
+from Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s relaxing hold and dropped from the platform into the
+darkness. Dr. Magruder forced his way through the crowd, took one look at the
+patient, and, right and left, struck him powerfully across the cheeks time and
+again, until the leaden-lidded eyes opened again. There was a quick recourse to
+the physician&rsquo;s little satchel; then&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said the doctor cheerfully. &ldquo;He&rsquo;ll do now.
+But, my friend, with that heart of yours, you want to sign the pledge or make
+your will. It was touch and go with you that time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Waiting to hear no more, Mr. Thomas Clyde jumped from the rear step and set off
+at a rapid pace, looking about him as he ran. He had not gone a block when he
+saw, by the radiance of an electric light, a tall figure leaning against a tree
+in an attitude of nerveless dejection. The figure straightened up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t try to man-handle me again,&rdquo; advised the man,
+&ldquo;or you may meet with a disappointment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve come to apologize.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; returned the other coolly; &ldquo;I appreciate it.
+Many a fool wouldn&rsquo;t go even so far.&rdquo; Mr. Clyde smiled. &ldquo;I
+own to the soft impeachment. From what Dr. Magruder said I judge you saved that
+fellow from the hospital.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I judge I did&mdash;no thanks to you! You&rsquo;ve a grip like a
+vise.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; I keep in good training,&rdquo; said the other pleasantly. &ldquo;A
+man of my age has to, if he is to hold up his work.&rdquo; He looked
+concernedly at the stranger who had involuntarily lapsed against the tree
+again. &ldquo;See here,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe
+you&rsquo;re well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; I don&rsquo;t believe I am,&rdquo; answered the tall man in
+uncompromising tones; &ldquo;but I do believe that it is peculiarly my own
+affair whether I am or not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense! Man, your nerves are on the jump. You used yourself up on that
+chap in the street car. Come across to my club and take something to brace you
+up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+People usually found it hard to resist Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s quiet persuasiveness.
+The stranger, after a moment of consideration, smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Begin with a fight and end with a drink?&rdquo; he asked.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a reversal of the usual process. If your cuisine runs to a
+cup of hot milk as late as this, I&rsquo;d be glad to have it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they entered the club, Mr. Clyde turned to his guest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What name shall I register?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The stranger hesitated. &ldquo;Strong,&rdquo; he said finally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Strong?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well&mdash;yes&mdash;Dr. Strong if you will.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of what place?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any place&mdash;Calcutta, Paris, Mexico City, Philadelphia, Rio.
+I&rsquo;ve tried &lsquo;em all. I&rsquo;m a man without a country, as I am
+without a profession.&rdquo; He spoke with the unguarded bitterness of shaken
+nerves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Without a profession! But you said &lsquo;Doctor.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A title isn&rsquo;t a profession,&rdquo; returned the guest shortly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turning that over in his mind, Mr. Clyde led the way to a quiet table in the
+corner of the diningroom, where he gave his order. Observing that his new
+acquaintance was <i>distrait</i>, he swung into the easy conversational flow of
+a cultured man of the world, at the same time setting his keen judgment of men
+to work upon the other. There was much there to interest a close observer. The
+face indicated not much over thirty years; but there were harsh lines in the
+broad and thoughtful forehead, and the hair that waved away from it was
+irregularly blotched with gray. The eyes, very clear and liquid, were marred by
+an expression of restlessness and stress. The mouth was clear-cut, with an
+expression of rather sardonic humor. Altogether it was a face to remark and
+remember; keen, intellectual, humorous, and worn. Mr. Thomas Clyde decided that
+he liked the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve been a traveler, Doctor?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. I&rsquo;ve seen life in many countries&mdash;and death.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And traced the relations between them, I suppose?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ve flashed my little pin-point lantern at the Great Darkness
+in the fond hope of discovering something,&rdquo; returned the other cynically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In a way, I&rsquo;m interested in those matters,&rdquo; continued Mr.
+Clyde. &ldquo;They&rsquo;ve organized a Public Health League here, and made me
+president of it. More from finance than fitness,&rdquo; he added, humorously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Finance has its part, too,&rdquo; said the other. &ldquo;Give me
+millions enough and I&rsquo;ll rid any city of its worst scourge,
+tuberculosis.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I wish to Heaven you had the millions to spend here in Worthington!
+We&rsquo;re in a bad way. Two years ago we elected a reform administration. The
+Mayor put in a new Health Officer and we looked for results. We&rsquo;ve had
+them&mdash;the wrong kind. The death rate from tuberculosis has gone up
+twenty-five per cent, and the number of cases nearly fifty per cent since he
+took office.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t say so!&rdquo; said the stranger, showing his first
+evidence of animation. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s good.&rdquo; Mr. Clyde stared.
+&ldquo;You think so? Then you&rsquo;ll undoubtedly be pleased to learn that
+other diseases are increasing almost at the same rate: measles, scarlet fever,
+and so on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fine!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And finally, our general mortality rate has gone up a full point. We
+propose to take some action regarding it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite right. You certainly ought to.&rdquo; Something in his
+guest&rsquo;s tone made Mr. Clyde suspicious. &ldquo;What action would you
+suggest, then? he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A vote of confidence in your Health Officer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You propose that we indorse the man who is responsible for a marked rise
+in our mortality figures?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the name of all that&rsquo;s absurd, why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me answer that by another question. If disease appears in your
+household, do you want your doctor to conceal it or check it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde took that under advisement. &ldquo;You mean that this city has been
+concealing its diseases, and that Dr. Merritt, our new Health Officer, is only
+making known a condition which has always existed?&rdquo; he asked presently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t you just told me so?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When did I tell you anything of the sort?&rdquo; The younger man smiled.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s five questions in a row,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Time for an
+answer. You said that deaths from tuberculosis had increased twenty-five per
+cent since the new man came in.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re wrong. Tuberculosis doesn&rsquo;t increase in sudden leaps.
+It isn&rsquo;t an epidemic disease, rising and receding in waves. It&rsquo;s
+endemic, a steady current.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But look at the figures. Figures don&rsquo;t lie, do they?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Usually, in vital statistics,&rdquo; was the imperturbable reply.
+&ldquo;In this case, probably not. That is, they don&rsquo;t lie to me.
+I&rsquo;m afraid they do to you.&rdquo; Mr. Clyde looked dubiously at the
+propounder of this curious suggestion and shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t get it?&rdquo; queried Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Perhaps you recall
+the saying of Thoreau&mdash;I think it the profoundest philosophical thought of
+the New World&mdash;that it takes two to tell the truth, one to speak and one
+to hear it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean that we&rsquo;ve misinterpreted the figures? Why, they&rsquo;re
+as plain as two and two.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Truth lies behind figures, not in them,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;Now, you&rsquo;re worried because of a startling apparent swelling of
+the tuberculosis rate. When you find that sort of a sudden increase, it
+doesn&rsquo;t signify that there&rsquo;s more tuberculosis. It signifies only
+that there&rsquo;s more knowledge of tuberculosis. You&rsquo;re getting the
+disease more honestly reported; that&rsquo;s all. Dr. Merritt&mdash;did you say
+his name is?&mdash;has stirred up your physicians to obey the law which
+requires that all deaths be promptly and properly reported, and all new cases
+of certain communicable diseases, as well. Speaking as a doctor, I should say
+that, with the exception of lawyers, there is no profession which considers
+itself above the law so widely as the medical profession. Therefore, your
+Health Officer has done something rather unusual in bringing the doctors to a
+sense of their duty. As for reporting, you can&rsquo;t combat a disease until
+you know where it is established and whither it is spreading. So, I say, any
+health officer who succeeds in spurring up the medical profession, and in
+dragging the Great White Plague out of its lurking-places into the light of day
+ought to have a medal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What about the other diseases? Is the same true of them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not to the same extent. No man can tell when or why the epidemic
+diseases&mdash;scarlet fever, measles, whooping-cough, and
+diphtheria&mdash;come and go. By the way, what about your diphtheria death rate
+here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is the exception to the rule. The rate is decreasing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong brought his hand down flat on the table with a force which made his
+cup jump in its saucer. &ldquo;And your misnamed Public Health League proposes
+to take some action against the man who is shown, by every evidence
+you&rsquo;ve suggested thus far, to be the right man in the right place!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How does the diphtheria rate show in his favor any more than the other
+death rates against him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because diphtheria is the one important disease which your medical
+officer can definitely control, and he seems to be doing it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The only important one? Surely smallpox is controllable?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Smallpox is the poisoned arrow of the fool-killer. It is controllable;
+but it isn&rsquo;t important, except to fools and anti-vaccination
+bigots.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Thomas Clyde softly rubbed his cleanshaven chin, a sign and token with him
+that his mind was hard at work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re giving me a new view of a city in which I&rsquo;ve lived
+for the first and last forty-five years of my life,&rdquo; he said presently.
+&ldquo;Are you familiar with conditions here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never have been here before, and have no reason to suppose that I shall
+ever return. Traveling at night is too much for me, so I stopped over to have a
+look at a town which has been rather notorious among public health officials
+for years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Notorious!&rdquo; repeated Mr. Clyde, his local pride up in arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For falsifying its vital statistics. Your low mortality figures are a
+joke. Worthington has been more jeered at, criticized, and roasted by various
+medical conventions than any other city in the United States.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, I&rsquo;ve never seen anything of that sort in the papers.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong laughed. &ldquo;Your newspapers print what you want to read; not
+what you don&rsquo;t want to read. They follow the old adage, &lsquo;What you
+don&rsquo;t know won&rsquo;t hurt you.&rsquo; It&rsquo;s a poor principle in
+matters of hygiene.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So one might suppose,&rdquo; returned the host dryly. &ldquo;Still you
+can scarcely expect a newspaper to run down its own city. I&rsquo;ve known
+business to suffer for a year from sensational reports of an epidemic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other grunted. &ldquo;If a pest of poisonous spiders suddenly bred and
+spread in Worthington, the newspapers would be full of it, and everybody would
+commend the printing of the facts as a necessary warning and safeguard. But
+when a pest of poisonous germs breeds and spreads, Business sets its finger to
+its lips and says, &lsquo;Hush!&rsquo; and the newspapers obey. You&rsquo;re a
+business man, I assume, Mr. Clyde? Frankly, I haven&rsquo;t very much sympathy
+with the business point of view.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose and pushed his chair back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wait a moment,&rdquo; said the other. &ldquo;Sit down. I have something
+that may be of importance to suggest to you. It occurs to me that Worthington
+would be the better for having a man with your ideas as a citizen. Now,
+supposing the Public Health League should offer you&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am not at present in medical practice,&rdquo; broke in the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Even at that, I was thinking that you would be of use as an advisory
+physician and scientific lookout.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a moment, the other&rsquo;s face brightened, an indication which Mr. Clyde
+was quick to note. But instantly the expression of eagerness died out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ten hours a day?&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;It couldn&rsquo;t be
+done properly in less time. And I&rsquo;m a mere nervous wreck, bound for the
+scrap-heap.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would you mind,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde very gently, &ldquo;telling me
+what&rsquo;s wrong? I&rsquo;m not asking without a purpose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong held out his long arms before him. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a surgeon
+without a right hand, and a bacteriologist without a left.&rdquo; The sinewy
+and pale hands shook a little. &ldquo;Neuritis,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;One
+of the diseases of which we doctors have the most fear and the least
+knowledge.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And with the loss of your occupation, general nervous collapse?&rdquo;
+asked Mr. Clyde. Being himself a worker who put his heart into his work, he
+could guess the sterile hopelessness of spirit of the man banned from a chosen
+activity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;I may still be fit for the lecture platform as a
+dispenser of other men&rsquo;s knowledge. Or perhaps I&rsquo;ll end up as
+medical watchdog to some rich man who can afford that kind of pet. Pleasing
+prospect, isn&rsquo;t it, for a man who once thought himself of use in the
+world?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good idea,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde quietly. &ldquo;Will you try the
+position with my family?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other stared in silence at his questioner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just consider my situation for a moment. As you know, I&rsquo;m a
+layman, interested in, but rather ignorant of, medical subjects. As wealth goes
+in a city of one hundred and fifty thousand population, I&rsquo;m a rich man.
+At any rate, I can afford a considerable outlay to guard against sickness. In
+the last five years I suppose disease has cost my household ten thousand
+dollars in money, and has cost me, in worry and consequent incapacity for work,
+ten times that amount. Even at a large salary you would doubtless prove an
+economy. Come, what do you say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know absolutely nothing of me,&rdquo; suggested the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know that you are a man of quick and correct judgment, for I saw you
+in action.&rdquo; The other smiled. &ldquo;You are, for reasons which are your
+own, not very expansive, as to your past professional career. I&rsquo;m content
+with that attitude of yours, and I&rsquo;m quite satisfied to base my offer on
+what I have been able to judge from your manner and talk. Without boasting, I
+may say that I have built up a great manufacturing plant largely on my judgment
+of men. I think I need you in my business of raising a family.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How much of a family?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Five children, their mother and their grandmother. I may warn you at
+once that you&rsquo;ll have a jealous rival in Grandma. She&rsquo;s the
+household guardian, and pretty &lsquo;sot&rsquo; in her ideas. But the
+principal thing is for you to judge me as I&rsquo;ve judged you, and determine
+whether we could work out the plan together.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong set his chin in one thin, cupped hand and gazed consideringly upon
+the profferer of this strange suggestion. He saw a strong-built, clear-skinned
+man, whose physical aspect did not suggest the forty-five years to which he had
+owned. Mr. Clyde recommended himself at first sight by a smooth-voiced ease of
+manner, and that unostentatious but careful fitness of apparel which is,
+despite wise apothegms to the contrary, so often an index of character. Under
+the easy charm of address, there was unobtrusively evident a quick
+intelligence, a stalwart self-respect, and a powerful will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, the doctor noted, this man had been both ready and fair in yielding his
+judgment, under the suggestion of a new point of view. Evidently he could take
+orders as well as give them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;have you appraised me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The weary eyes of the other twinkled a little. &ldquo;Physically you disclose
+some matters plainly enough, if one wishes to show off in the Sherlock Holmes
+manner. For instance, you&rsquo;ve recently been in the tropics; your eyesight
+is better than your hearing, you drink lightly if at all, and don&rsquo;t use
+tobacco in any form; you&rsquo;ve taken up athletics&mdash;handball
+principally&mdash;in recent years, as the result of a bad scare you got from a
+threatened paralytic attack; and your only serious illness since then has been
+typhoid fever.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde laughed outright. &ldquo;If you had started our acquaintance that
+way,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;d have thought you a fortune-teller. Part
+of it I can follow. You noticed that I kept my left ear turned, of course; and
+the fact that my nose shows no eyeglass marks would vouch for my eyesight. Did
+you judge me a non-smoker because I forgot to offer you a cigar&mdash;which
+deficiency I&rsquo;ll gladly make up now, if it isn&rsquo;t too late.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Partly that&mdash;no, thank you. I&rsquo;m not allowed to
+smoke&mdash;but principally because I noticed you disliked the odor of my hot
+milk. It is offensive, but so faint that no man without a very keen sense of
+smell would perceive it across a table; no tobacco-user preserves his sense of
+smell to any such degree of delicacy. As for the drink, I judged that from your
+eyes and general fitness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the handball, of course, from my &lsquo;cushioned&rsquo;
+palms.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Obviously. A man at the heart of a great business doesn&rsquo;t take up
+violent indoor exercise without some special reason. Such a reason I saw on the
+middle finger of your left hand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Holding up the telltale member, Mr. Clyde disclosed a small dark area at the
+side of the first joint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Leaky fountain-pen,&rdquo; he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As you are right-handed naturally, but write with your left hand,
+it&rsquo;s clear that you&rsquo;ve had an attack of writer&rsquo;s
+paralysis&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Five years ago,&rdquo; put in Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And that your doctor made good use of the salutary scare it gave you, to
+get you to take up regular exercise.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And, incidentally, to cut out my moderate, occasional cocktail. Now, as
+to the tropics and the typhoid?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The latter is a guess; the former a certainty. Under your somewhat
+sparse long hair in front there is an outcropping of very fine hairs. Some
+special cause exists for that new growth. The most likely cause, at your age,
+is typhoid. As you&rsquo;ve kept in good training, it isn&rsquo;t likely that
+you&rsquo;d have had any other serious ailment recently. On that I took a
+chance. The small scars at the back of your ears could be nothing but the marks
+of that little pest of the tropics, the <i>bête rouge</i>. I&rsquo;ve had him
+dug out of my skin and I know something of him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Right on every count,&rdquo; declared Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve
+given me cumulative proof of your value to me. I&rsquo;ll tell you. Forget
+formalities. Let me &lsquo;phone for a cab; we&rsquo;ll go to your hotel, get
+your things, and you come back with me for the night. In the morning you can
+look the ground over, and decide, with the human documents before you, whether
+you&rsquo;ll undertake the campaign.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The younger man smiled a very pleasant and winning smile. &ldquo;You go
+fast,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;And as in all fast motion, you create a current in
+your direction. Certainly, if I&rsquo;m to consider your remarkable plan
+I&rsquo;d best see the whole family. But there&rsquo;s one probable and perhaps
+insurmountable obstacle. Who is your physician?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t such a thing in the house, at present,&rdquo; said Mr.
+Clyde lightly. Then, in a graver tone, &ldquo;Our old family physician died six
+months ago. He knew us all inside and out as a man knows a familiar
+book.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A difficult loss to replace. Knowledge of your patient is half the
+battle in medicine. You&rsquo;ve had no one since?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. Six weeks ago, my third boy, Charley, showed signs of fever and we
+called a distant cousin of mine who has a large practice. He felt quite sure
+from the first that it was diphtheria; but he so managed matters that we had no
+trouble with the officials. In fact, he didn&rsquo;t report it at all, though I
+believe it was a very light case of the disease.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong&rsquo;s eyes narrowed. &ldquo;At the outset, I&rsquo;ll give you two
+bits of advice, gratis, Mr. Clyde. First, don&rsquo;t ever call your
+doctor-cousin again. He&rsquo;s an anarchist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just what do you mean by that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s plain enough, isn&rsquo;t it? Anarchist, I said: a man who
+doesn&rsquo;t believe in law when it contravenes his convenience.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin again. &ldquo;Hum,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;Well!
+the second gift of advice?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That you either respect the law yourself or resign the presidency of the
+Public Health League.&rdquo; A distinct spot of red appeared on each of the
+elder man&rsquo;s smooth cheeks. &ldquo;Are you trying to provoke me to a
+quarrel?&rdquo; he asked brusquely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then his expression mollified. &ldquo;Or are you testing me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Neither. I&rsquo;m giving you my best and most honest advice. If you
+expect me to do as your substitute physician did, to guard your household in
+violation of the law which tries to protect the whole public equally,
+you&rsquo;ve got the wrong man, and your boasted judgment has gone
+askew,&rdquo; was the steady reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde turned and left the room. When he returned his hand was outstretched.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve taken three swallows of cold air, and sent for a cab,&rdquo;
+he said. &ldquo;Shake hands. I think you and I will be friends.
+Only&mdash;train me a little gently at the outset. You&rsquo;ll come with
+me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, and the two men shook hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the drive Mr. Clyde expounded the virtues and characteristics of his
+native city to his new acquaintance, who was an excellent listener. Long
+afterward he found Dr. Strong acting on remembered and shrewdly analyzed
+information given in that first long talk. When they reached the big, rambling,
+many-windowed house which afforded the growing Clyde family opportunity to
+grow, the head of the household took his guest to an apartment in one of the
+wings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;These two rooms are yours,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I hope you&rsquo;ll be
+like Coleridge who came to visit with one satchel and stayed five years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That remains to be seen to-morrow,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;By the
+way, as I usually read myself to sleep, you might leave me some of your local
+health reports. Thus I can be looking the ground over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All I&rsquo;ve got you&rsquo;ll find on the shelf over the desk.
+Good-night!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Being of that type of man who does his thinking before and not after a
+decision, Mr. Thomas Clyde arose in the morning with an untroubled mind as to
+his new venture in household economics. Voices from the library attracted him
+thither, as he came downstairs, and, entering, he beheld his guest hedged in a
+corner by the grandmother of the Clyde household.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me, young man,&rdquo; the old lady was saying, in her
+clear, determined voice. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve not slept well for ages! I know
+that kind of an eye.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Sharpless has been diagnosing my case, Mr. Clyde,&rdquo; called the
+guest, with a rather wry smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You stay here for a while,&rdquo; said she vigorously, &ldquo;and
+I&rsquo;ll cocker you up. I don&rsquo;t believe you even eat properly. Do
+you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Maybe not,&rdquo; admitted the young man. &ldquo;We doctors are
+sometimes less wise for ourselves than for others.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! So you&rsquo;re a doctor?&rdquo; asked the grandmother with a
+shrewd, estimating glance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Strong is, I hope, going to stay with us awhile,&rdquo; explained
+her son-in-law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll take care of
+him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a strong inducement,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong gracefully.
+&ldquo;But I want a little more material on which to base a decision.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Between us Grandma and I ought to be able to answer any
+questions,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About sickness, then, in the family. I&rsquo;ve already introduced
+myself to Mrs. Clyde and questioned her; but her information isn&rsquo;t
+definite.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Myra seldom is,&rdquo; observed Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s part of her
+charm. But Grandma Sharpless has been keeping a daybook for years. Everything
+that&rsquo;s ever happened, from the cat&rsquo;s fits to the dressmaker&rsquo;s
+misfits, is in that series. I&rsquo;ve always thought it might come in handy
+sometime.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just the thing!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong heartily. &ldquo;Will you bring
+it, Mrs. Sharpless? I hope you&rsquo;ve included your comment on events as well
+as the events themselves.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My opinions are generally pronounced enough so that I can remember
+&lsquo;em, young man,&rdquo; returned Mrs. Sharpless, as she departed for the
+desired volumes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That last remark of yours sounded a little like making fun of
+Grandma,&rdquo; suggested Mr. Clyde, as the door closed after her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Far from it,&rdquo; retorted Dr. Strong quickly. &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you
+see that she&rsquo;s a born diagnostician? She&rsquo;s got the sixth sense
+sticking out all over her. Women more often have it than men. When a doctor has
+it, and sometimes when he&rsquo;s only able to counterfeit it, he becomes great
+and famous.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now that you speak of it, I remember my wife&rsquo;s saying that when
+she was a girl and lived in the country, her mother was always being sent for
+in cases of illness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;Heretical though it is to say so, I would rather have
+the diagnosis of such a woman, in an obscure case, than of many a doctor. She
+learns in the school of experience.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here, Mrs. Sharpless returned, carrying several diaries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;These go five years back,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find
+&lsquo;em pretty complete. We&rsquo;ve had our fair share of trouble; measles,
+whooping-cough,&mdash;I thought Betsy was going to bark her poor little head
+off,&mdash;mumps, and chicken-pox. I nursed &lsquo;em through, myself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All of them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All of &lsquo;em didn&rsquo;t have all the things because Tom Clyde sent
+the rest away when one of &lsquo;em came down. All nonsense, I say. Better let
+&lsquo;em get it while they&rsquo;re young, and have done with it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One of the worst of the old superstitions,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong
+quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me, young man! Doctor or no doctor, you can&rsquo;t
+teach me about children&rsquo;s diseases. There isn&rsquo;t any of those measly
+and mumpy ones that I&rsquo;m afraid of. Bobs <i>did</i> scare me, though, with
+that queer attack of his.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bobs,&rdquo; explained Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;is Robin, one of the
+eight-year-old twins.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me about the attack.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When <i>was</i> it?&rdquo; said the grandmother, running over the leaves
+of a selected diary. &ldquo;Oh, here it is. Last March. It was short and sharp.
+Only lasted three days; but the child had a dreadful fever and pretty bad
+cramps.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anything else?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, yes; though that idiot of a cousin of Tom&rsquo;s snubbed me when I
+told him about it. The boy seemed kind of numb and slow with his hands for some
+time after.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now?&rdquo; So sharp came the question that Mr. Clyde glanced at the
+speaker, not without apprehension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing left of it that I can see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What had you in mind?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde of the doctor, curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Speaking technically, anterior poliomyelitis.&rdquo; Grandma Sharpless
+laughed comfortably. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve noticed that a very long name like that
+usually means a sore toe or a pimple behind your ear. It&rsquo;s the short
+names that bring the undertaker.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shrewdly said, but exception noted,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As for Bobs, I remember two cases I saw at Clinton years ago, like that
+attack of his. One of &lsquo;em never walked afterward, and the other has a
+shriveled hand to this day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;To come down nearer to English, that&rsquo;s
+infantile paralysis, one of the mysteries of medicine. I&rsquo;ll tell you some
+things about it some day. Your Bobs had a narrow escape.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re sure it is an escape?&rdquo; asked the father anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If Mrs. Sharpless is satisfied that there&rsquo;s no trace left, I
+am.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come in to breakfast,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, entering the room with a
+child attached to either hand. She was a tall, fair woman with the charm of
+fresh coloring and regular features, large, intelligent eyes, and a somewhat
+restless vigor and vitality. That her husband and children adored her was
+obvious. One had to look twice to perceive that she was over thirty; and even a
+careful estimate did not suggest her real age of thirty-seven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the introductory meal, Dr. Strong talked mostly to her, but he kept
+watching the children. And when it was over, he went to his study and made an
+inventory, in the order of age.
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+GRANDMA SHARPLESS;<br />
+<i>Probably 70; sound and firm as a good apple; ought to live to be 90. Medical
+demands, none.</i><br />
+<br />
+MR. CLYDE;<br />
+<i>45; sturdy, restrained, active, phlegmatic: Tends to over-concentration; his
+own best physician.</i><br />
+<br />
+MRS. CLYDE;<br />
+<i>35; possibly more. Quick-witted, nervously active; eager, perhaps a little
+greedy of enjoyment. Somewhat intemperate; probably in eating, possibly in the
+use of tea or candy. An invariably loving mother; not invariably a wise one.</i><br />
+<br />
+MAYNARD, <i>otherwise</i> &ldquo;MANNY&rdquo; CLYDE;<br />
+<i>14 years old; rangy, good-tempered, intelligent boy with a good physical
+equipment.</i> (<i>Note: watch his eyes.</i>)<br />
+<br />
+ROBIN, <i>alias</i> BOBS <i>and</i> JULIA (<i>mysteriously</i>) JUNKUM;<br />
+<i>8-year old twins; Bobs, quick and flashing like his mother; Julia, demure,
+thoughtful, a little lethargic, and with much of her father s winning quality
+of friendliness.</i> (<i>Note: test Bobs for reflexes. Watch Julia's habits of
+play.</i>)<br />
+<br />
+CHARLES;<br />
+<i>Aged 7; strong rough-and-tumble urchin, the particular pet of his grandmother.</i>
+(<i>Note: watch his hand motions.</i>)<br />
+<br />
+BETTINA, <i>alias variously</i> BETSY, TOOTS, TWINKLES, <i>and the</i> CHERUB;<br />
+<i>4 years old; a Duck</i> [here the human side of the doctor broke through],
+<i>though a little spoiled by her father.</i> (<i>Note: a mouth-breather; the
+first case to be considered.</i>)<br />
+<br />
+ADDENDUM;<br />
+<i>Various servants, not yet identified or studied; but none the less members of
+our household community.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This catalogue Dr. Strong put away, with Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s day books,
+for further notation and amplification. Then he made three visits: one to the
+Health Bureau, one to the Water Department, and one to the City
+Engineer&rsquo;s office, where he spent much time over sundry maps. It was
+close upon dinner-time when he returned, and immediately looked up Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; said that gentleman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Assuming that I accept your offer it should be understood that I&rsquo;m
+only a guardian, not, a physician.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Meaning&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That I shall expect, in emergency, to call in such physicians or others
+as I consider best equipped for the particular task.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well. But why that phrase &lsquo;or others&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve suggested before that I am a heretic. In certain instances I
+might want an osteopath, or, if I were dealing with a sick soul causing a sick
+body, I might even send for a Christian Scientist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have a refreshingly catholic breadth of view.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m trying to map out for you, a rich man, as good treatment as a
+very poor man would have in a hospital&mdash;that is, the best technical advice
+for every hygienic emergency that may arise&mdash;plus some few extensions of
+my own. Now we come to what is likely to prove the stumbling-block.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Set it up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I&rsquo;m to take this job, I must be the autocrat, in so far as my
+own department is concerned. As you know, a city health official&rsquo;s powers
+are arbitrary. He can burn your house down; he can imprison you; he can
+establish a military régime; he can override or undo the laws which control the
+ordinary procedure of life. Hygienic law, like martial law, supersedes rights
+in crises. You are asking me to act as health officer of your house. If
+I&rsquo;m to do my work, I must have full sway, and I shall expect you to see
+that every member of your household obeys my orders&mdash;except,&rdquo; he
+added, with a twinkle, &ldquo;Grandma Sharpless. I expect she&rsquo;s too old
+to take orders from any one. Diplomacy must be my agent with her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde pondered. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a pretty wide authority you&rsquo;re
+asking.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, but I shall use it only in extreme cases. I shall deal extensively
+in advice and suggestion, which you may take or leave as you choose. But an
+order will mean a life or death matter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Agreed. Now, as to terms&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let the terms go, until we see how much I can save you. Meantime,
+don&rsquo;t overestimate what I undertake to do. Suppose you just run through
+the roster of what you consider the danger points, and I&rsquo;ll tell you how
+far I can promise anything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;First, then, tuberculosis, of course.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Practical immunity from that, as long as you maintain your present
+standards of life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Typhoid fever. As I told you, we&rsquo;ve had one visitation.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no reason why you should ever have another if the children
+will take ordinary precautions.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Diphtheria?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We can&rsquo;t guarantee the youngsters against getting it, though we
+can do something to protect them. And if they do get it, we can be pretty
+certain of pulling them through.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Scarlet fever and measles?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why not add whooping-cough and influenza? The former kills as many
+people as either scarlet fever or measles, and the latter twice as many.
+They&rsquo;re all in the same category; medical science is pretty near helpless
+against their onset. You and your family may be as rigidly careful as they
+will; if the family next door, or a family at the farthermost end of the town,
+is careless, we&rsquo;re as likely as not to suffer for their sins. All that I
+can promise, then, is hope against the occurrence of these diseases, and the
+constant watchfulness, when they come, which they call for but don&rsquo;t
+always get.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cancer?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eternal vigilance, again; so that, if it does come, we may discover it
+in time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me see,&rdquo; mused Mr. Clyde; &ldquo;what else is there?
+Oh&mdash;nervous and functional disorders.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Functional disorders mean, usually, either a bad start, or the heritage
+of some disease like scarlet fever or grippe, or excess or carelessness in
+living. I think your household is free from them; and it should remain free. As
+for nervous ailments, they commonly mean lack of self-discipline. It may be
+overindulgence in work&rdquo;&mdash;he glanced down at his right
+hand&mdash;&ldquo;or it may be overindulgence in play.&rdquo; His glance
+wandered significantly to the doorway, through which the voice of Mrs. Clyde
+could be heard. &ldquo;By the way, you&rsquo;ve left out the greatest destroyer
+of all&mdash;perhaps because you&rsquo;re beyond the danger point.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tuberculosis is the greatest destroyer, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not numerically. It is beaten out by the death record of intestinal
+poisoning in the very young. Your flock has run the gamut and come through with
+undiminished vitality. Two of them, however, are running life&rsquo;s race
+under a handicap&rdquo;&mdash;the father&rsquo;s eyelids went
+up&mdash;&ldquo;which I&rsquo;ll take up shortly, when I&rsquo;ve fully
+determined the causes. They can be repaired, one readily, the other in time.
+Finally, I hope to be able to teach them the gospel of the sound, clean mind in
+the sound, clean body. In a desert I might guarantee immunity from most of the
+ills that flesh is heir to. Amid the complexities of our civilization, disease
+and death are largely social; there is no telling from what friend the poison
+may come. No man can safeguard his house. The most he can hope for is a measure
+of protection. I can offer you nothing more than that, under our
+compact.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is enough,&rdquo; returned Mr. Clyde. He took from his inner pocket
+a folded paper, which he handed over to the young man. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s the
+contract, duly signed. Come in, Grandma.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Sharpless, entering the door, stopped on seeing the two men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Business, Tom?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Business that you&rsquo;re interested in,&rdquo; said her son-in-law,
+and briefly outlined his plan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grandma Sharpless shook a wise gray head. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad you&rsquo;re
+going to stay, young man,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;You need looking after. But
+as for the scheme, I don&rsquo;t hold much with these new-fangled
+notions.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps it isn&rsquo;t as new-fangled as you suppose,&rdquo; returned
+the head of the household. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just given Dr. Strong a contract,
+and where do you suppose I got it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That lawyer man of yours, probably,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, he looked it over and made sure it was sound in American law. But
+essentially it&rsquo;s a copy of a medical contract in force before Hippocrates
+ever rolled a pill. It&rsquo;s the old logical Chinese form, whereby the
+doctor&rsquo;s duty is prescribed as warding off sickness, not curing it. Is
+that old-fashioned enough for you, grandma?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Chinese! My land!&rdquo; said the old lady. &ldquo;What do they know
+about sickness?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They know the one most important fact in all medical practice,
+ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;that the time for locking the
+stable door is before the horse is stolen, and that an ounce of prevention is
+worth a pound of cure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>II.<br />
+IN TIME OF PEACE</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;H</span>ow is the
+Chinese plan working?&rdquo; asked Mr. Thomas Clyde, stretching himself on the
+lounge in Dr. Strong&rsquo;s study.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One week before, the doctor had been officially installed, on the Oriental
+principle of guarding the Clyde household against intruding sickness. In that
+time he had asked few questions. But Mr. Clyde, himself a close observer, noted
+the newcomer&rsquo;s quietly keen observation of the children, and sometimes of
+Mrs. Clyde, as they met at mealtime. He had remarked, too, that the nervous
+tension of the man was relaxing; and guessed that he had found, in his new and
+unique employment, something of that panacea of the troubled soul, congenial
+work. Now, having come to Dr. Strong&rsquo;s wing of the house by request, he
+smilingly put his question, and was as smilingly answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your Chinese physician has been making what the Chinese call a
+&lsquo;go-look-see.&rsquo; In other but less English terms, a
+reconnaissance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In what department?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Earth, air, and water.&rdquo; The other waved an inclusive hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any results?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, all kinds. Preliminary report now ready. I&rsquo;d like to make it a
+sort of family conference.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good idea! I&rsquo;ll send for Mrs. Clyde and Grandma Sharpless.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Children out of town?&rdquo; inquired Dr. Strong suggestively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course not. Oh, I see. You want us all. Servants, too?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The cook certainly. She should be very important to our council of war.
+Perhaps we might leave the rest till later.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They gathered in the spacious study; and Grandma Sharpless glanced round
+approvingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s like family prayers,&rdquo; she commented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Concerted effort <i>is</i> a sort of prayer, if it&rsquo;s
+honest,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong gravely. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never had much of an
+opinion of the man who gets up in meeting to beg the Lord for sound health for
+himself and family and then goes home and sleeps with all his windows
+closed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are no closed windows in this house,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless
+emphatically. &ldquo;I see to that, having been brought up on fresh air
+myself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You show it,&rdquo; returned the doctor pleasantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;ve noticed that this house breathes deep at night, through
+plenty of open windows. So I can save my own breath on that topic. Just now I
+want to talk milk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All our milk comes from my farm,&rdquo; said the head of the family.
+&ldquo;Cows are my hobby. You ought to see the place, Strong; it&rsquo;s only
+ten miles out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have seen the place.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you think of it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think you&rsquo;d better get your milk somewhere else for a
+while.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, Dr. Strong!&rdquo; protested Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;There isn&rsquo;t a
+woman among my friends who doesn&rsquo;t envy me our cream. And the milk keeps
+sweet&mdash;oh, for days, doesn&rsquo;t it, Katie?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes&rsquo;m,&rdquo; replied the cook. &ldquo;Three days, or even four,
+in the ice-box.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t that show it&rsquo;s pure?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde
+triumphantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong shook his head. &ldquo;Hardly proof,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Really
+clean milk will keep much longer. I have drunk milk from the Rochester
+municipal supply that was thirteen days old, and as sweet as possible. And that
+was in a hot August.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thirteen days old! I&rsquo;d be ashamed to tell it!&rdquo; declared
+Grandma Sharpless, with so much asperity that there was a general laugh, in
+which the doctor joined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t care to try it with your milk. It is rich, but it
+isn&rsquo;t by any means pure. Eternal vigilance is the price of good milk. I
+don&rsquo;t suppose you inspect your farm once a month, do you, Mr.
+Clyde?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; I leave that to the farmer. He&rsquo;s an intelligent fellow.
+What&rsquo;s wrong?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Scientifically speaking, from 300,000 to 500,000 bacteria per cubic
+centimeter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do we drink all those things when we have a glass of milk, Dr.
+Strong?&rdquo; inquired &ldquo;Manny&rdquo; Clyde, the oldest boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Four or five times that many for every teaspoonful,&rdquo; said the
+doctor. &ldquo;But it isn&rsquo;t as bad as it sounds, Manny. One hundred
+thousand is considered a fairly safe allowance, though <i>very</i> good
+milk&mdash;the kind I drank when it was thirteen days old&mdash;may contain
+only two or three thousand. When the count runs up to half a million or so, it
+shows that some kind of impurity is getting in. The bacteria in your milk may
+not be disease germs at all; they may all be quite harmless varieties. But
+sooner or later, if dirt gets into milk, dangerous germs will get in with it.
+The high count is a good danger signal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If Bliss, the farmer, has been allowing dirt to get into the milk,
+he&rsquo;ll find himself out of a place,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde decisively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be too hard on him,&rdquo; advised the doctor. &ldquo;His
+principal fault is that he&rsquo;s getting the milk dirty trying to keep it
+clean. He is washing his cans with water from an open well near the barnyard.
+The water in the well is badly contaminated from surface drainage. That would
+account for the high number of bacteria; that and careless milking.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And on that account you advise me to give up the milk?&rdquo; asked Mr.
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only temporarily. There are other more immediate considerations. For one
+thing, there are both diphtheria and typhoid near by, and the people on the
+farm are in contact with them. That&rsquo;s dangerous. You see, milk under
+favorable conditions is one of the best cultures for germs that is known. They
+flourish and multiply in it past belief. The merest touch of contamination may
+spread through a whole supply, like fire through flax. One more thing: one of
+your cows, I fear, is tuberculous.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We might pasteurize, I suppose,&rdquo; suggested Mrs. Clyde anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong returned a decisive negative. &ldquo;Pasteurized milk is better than
+poisoned milk,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but it&rsquo;s a lot worse than good raw
+milk. Pasteurizing simply means the semi-cooking of all the varieties of germs,
+good and bad. In the process of cooking, some of the nutritive quality is lost.
+To be sure, it kills the bad germs, but it also kills the good ones.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you mean that some of the germs are actually useful?&rdquo; asked
+Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very useful, in certain rôles. For example, the lactic acid bacteria
+would be unpopular with you, Mrs. Clyde, because they are responsible for the
+souring of milk. But they also perform a protective work. They do their best to
+destroy any bacilli of disease which may invade their liquid home. Now, when
+you pasteurize, you kill all these millions of defenders; and any hostile germs
+that come along afterward and get into the milk, through dust or other mediums,
+can take possession and multiply without hindrance. Therefore pasteurized milk
+ought to be guarded with extra care after the process, which it seldom is. I
+once visited a large pasteurizing plant which made great boasts of its purity
+of product, and saw flies coming in from garbage pail and manure heap to
+contaminate the milk in the vats; milk helpless to protect itself, because all
+its army of defense had been boiled to death.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If we are allowed neither to use our farm milk raw nor to pasteurize it,
+what shall we do with it?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Full directions are in there,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong, pointing to an
+envelope on his desk. &ldquo;If you&rsquo;ll look over what I&rsquo;ve written,
+and instruct your farmer to follow it out, you&rsquo;ll have milk that is
+reasonably good. I&rsquo;ll go further than that; it will be even good enough
+to give to the babies of the tenements, if you should have any left
+over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Thomas Clyde proceeded to rub his chin, with some degree of concentration,
+whereby Dr. Strong knew that his hint had struck in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Meantime,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, with a trace of sarcasm, &ldquo;do you
+expect us to live on condensed milk?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all; on certified milk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that mean?&rdquo; asked Miss Julia, who had a thirst for
+information.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s a certificate, Junkum?&rdquo; retorted the doctor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I get when I pass my examinations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Right! Well, milk coming from a farm that passes all its examinations
+gets a certificate from the Medical Society, which keeps a pretty constant
+watch over it. The society sees that all the cattle are tested for tuberculosis
+once in so often; that the cows are brushed off before milking; that the
+milking is done through a cloth, through which no dirt or dust can pass, into a
+can that has been cleaned by steam&mdash;not by contaminated water&mdash;so
+that no germs will remain alive in it; then cooled and sealed up and delivered.
+From the time the milk leaves the cow until it comes on your table, it
+hasn&rsquo;t touched anything that isn&rsquo;t germ-proof. That is the system I
+have outlined in the paper for your farmer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It sounds expensive,&rdquo; commented Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; that is the drawback. Certified milk costs from fifteen to twenty
+cents a quart. But when you consider that nearly half the dead babies were
+poisoned by bad milk it doesn&rsquo;t seem so expensive, does it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All very well for us,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde thoughtfully. &ldquo;We can
+afford it. But how about the thousands who can&rsquo;t?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s the pity of it. Theoretically every city should maintain a
+milk standard up to the requirements of the medical certification, and allow no
+milk to be sold which falls short of that. It&rsquo;s feasible, and it could be
+done at a moderate price if we could educate the farmer to it.
+Copenhagen&rsquo;s milk supply is as good as the best certified milk in this
+country, because the great Danish Milk Company cooperates with the farmer, and
+doesn&rsquo;t try to make huge profits; and its product sells under five cents
+a quart. But, to answer your question, Mr. Clyde: even a family of very
+moderate means could afford to take enough certified milk for the baby, and it
+would pay in doctor&rsquo;s bills saved. Older children and grown-ups
+aren&rsquo;t so much affected by milk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go out to the farm to-morrow,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s next?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Water, Mr. Clyde. I&rsquo;ve found out where you got your typhoid, last
+summer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pooh! I could have told you that,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless.
+&ldquo;There was sewer-gas in the house. It smelled to heaven the day before he
+was taken down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it curious how our belief in ghosts sticks to us!&rdquo;
+commented the doctor, chuckling,&mdash;&ldquo;malaria rising from swamps;
+typhoid and diphtheria rising in sewer-gas; sheeted specters rising from
+country graveyards&mdash;all in the same category.&rdquo; Grandma Sharpless
+pushed her spectacles up on her forehead, a signal of battle with her.
+&ldquo;Do you mean to tell me, young man, that there&rsquo;s no harm in
+sewer-gas?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Far from it! There&rsquo;s harm enough in sewer-gas, but no germs. The
+harm is that the gas reduces vitality, and makes one more liable to disease
+attack. It&rsquo;s just as true of coal-gas as of sewer-gas, and more true of
+ordinary illuminating gas than either. I&rsquo;d much rather have bad plumbing
+in the house than even a small leak in a gas-pipe. No, Mrs. Sharpless, if you
+waited all day at the mouth of a sewer, you&rsquo;d never catch a germ from the
+gas. Moreover, typhoid doesn&rsquo;t develop under ten days, so your odorous
+outbreak of the day before could have had nothing to do with Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s
+illness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps you&rsquo;ll give us <i>your</i> theory,&rdquo; said the old
+lady, with an elaboration of politeness which plainly meant, &ldquo;And
+whatever it is, I don&rsquo;t propose to believe it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not mine, but the City Water Commissioner&rsquo;s. Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s
+case was one of about eighty, all within a few weeks of each other. They were
+all due to the criminal negligence of a city official who permitted the river
+supply, which isn&rsquo;t fit to drink and is used only for fire pressure, to
+flood into the mains carrying the drinking supply.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then why didn&rsquo;t the whole city get typhoid?&rdquo; asked Mr.
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because only a part of the system was flooded by the river water. The
+problem of the city&rsquo;s experts was to find out what part was being
+contaminated with this dilute sewage. When the typhoid began to appear, the
+Health Department, knowing the Cypress supply to be pure, suspected milk. Not
+until a score of cases, showing a distribution distinct from any milk supply,
+had appeared, was suspicion directed to the water supply. Then the officials of
+the Water Department and Health Department tried a very simple but highly
+ingenious test. They dumped a lot of salt into the intake of the river supply,
+and tested hydrant after hydrant of the reservoir supply, until they had a
+complete outline of the mixed waters. From that it was easy to ascertain the
+point of mixture, and stop it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our river water is always bad, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+&ldquo;Last summer I had to keep Charley away from swimming-school because the
+tank is filled from the river, and two children got typhoid from swallowing
+some of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All foolishness, I say,&rdquo; announced the grandmother. &ldquo;Better
+let &lsquo;em learn to swim.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you swim at all?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong, turning to the
+seven-year-old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I went five strokes once,&rdquo; said Charley. &ldquo;Hum-m-m! Any other
+swimming-school near by?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And are the children about water at all?&rdquo; Dr. Strong asked the
+mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well; there are the canal and the river both near us, you know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it comes down to this,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;The liability
+of typhoid from what water Charley would swallow in the tank isn&rsquo;t very
+great. And if he should get it, the chances are we could pull him through. With
+the best care, there should be only one chance in fifty of a fatal result. But
+if Charley falls in the canal and, not knowing how to swim, is drowned, why,
+that&rsquo;s the end of it. Medical science is no good there. Of two dangers
+choose the lesser. Better let him go on with the swimming, Mrs. Clyde.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless,
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;I&mdash;swanny!&rdquo; This was extreme profanity for
+her. &ldquo;Young man, I&rsquo;m glad to see for once that you&rsquo;ve got
+sense as well as science!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you consider the Cypress supply always safe to drink? Several times
+it has occurred to me to outfit the house with filters,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No need, so long as the present Water Department is in office,&rdquo;
+returned Dr. Strong. &ldquo;I might almost add, no use anyway.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t filtered water good?&rdquo; asked Manny. &ldquo;They have it
+at the gymnasium.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No house filter is absolutely sure. There&rsquo;s just one way to get a
+guaranteeable water: distill it. But I think you can safely use the city
+supply.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What next, the water problem being cleared up?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By no means cleared up. Assuming that you are reasonably safeguarded at
+home, you&rsquo;re just as likely&mdash;yes, even more likely&mdash;to pick up
+typhoid somewhere else.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why more likely?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For some mysterious reason a man accustomed to a good water supply is
+the easiest victim to a bad. Pittsburg, for many years the most notorious of
+American cities for filthy drinking, is a case in point. Some one pointed out
+that when Pittsburg was prosperous, and wages high, the typhoid rate went up;
+and when times were hard, it went down. Dr. Matson, of the Health Bureau,
+cleared up that point, by showing that the increase in Pittsburg&rsquo;s
+favorite disease was mainly among the newcomers who flocked to the city when
+the mills were running full time, to fill the demand for labor. An old resident
+might escape, a new one might hardly hope to. Dr. Matson made the interesting
+suggestion that perhaps those who drank the diluted sewage&mdash;for that is
+what the river water was&mdash;right along, came, in time, to develop a sort of
+immunity; whereas the newcomer was defenseless before the bacilli.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then a man, in traveling, ought to know the water supply of every city
+he goes to. How is he to find out?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In your case, Mr. Clyde, he&rsquo;s to find out from his Chinese
+doctor,&rdquo; said the other smiling. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m collecting data from
+state and city health boards, on that and other points. Air will now come in
+for its share of attention.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young Manny Clyde grinned. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; he
+said. &ldquo;Nothing to breathe but air, you know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True enough, youngster; but you can pick your air to some extent, so
+it&rsquo;s worth while to know where it&rsquo;s good and where it&rsquo;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&mdash;that&rsquo;s the little fellow that brings pneumonia and is
+always hanging about, looking for an opening in unprotected breathing
+apparatus&mdash;gets in his deadly work. Somewhere I&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me that New York is unfit to breathe in!&rdquo; said
+Mrs. Clyde, with a woman&rsquo;s love for the metropolis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thus far it&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s even
+worse to breathe steel than to breathe coal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any railroad track must be bad, then,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That sounds like one of those maxims of the many that only the few
+believe,&rdquo; remarked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t practice it, but you can safely believe it,&rdquo;
+retorted the doctor. &ldquo;The atmosphere in a day coach is always better than
+in a parlor car, because there&rsquo;s an occasional direct draft through. As
+for a sleeping-car,&mdash;well, I never get into one without thinking of the
+definition in &lsquo;Life&rsquo;s&rsquo; dictionary:
+&lsquo;Sleeping-Car&mdash;An invention for the purpose of transporting bad air
+from one city to another.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The poor railroads!&rdquo; chuckled Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;They get blamed
+for everything, nowadays.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It may not be the Pullman Company&rsquo;s fault that I don&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And sleep in that cold draft!&rdquo; cried Mrs Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My dear Mrs. Clyde,&rdquo; replied the doctor suavely, &ldquo;will you
+tell me the difference between a draft and a wind?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it a conundrum?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; but I&rsquo;ll answer it for you. A draft is inside a house; a wind
+outside. You&rsquo;re not afraid of wind, are you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then to you an air-current is like a burglar. It&rsquo;s harmless enough
+outside the room, but as soon as it comes through a window and gets into the
+room, it&rsquo;s dangerous.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sound common sense!&rdquo; put in Granny Sharpless. &ldquo;Young man, I
+believe you&rsquo;re older than you look.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m old enough to know that pure air is better than foul warm air,
+anyway. Here; I want you youngsters to understand this,&rdquo; he added,
+turning to the children. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t given
+his blood the right supply. His whole system is weakened, and he &lsquo;catches
+cold,&rsquo; not from too much air, but too little.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s often struck me,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;that I feel
+better traveling in Europe than in America. Yet our Pullmans are supposed to be
+the best in the world.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The worst!&rdquo; declared Dr. Strong forcefully. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a pause, in which rose the clear whisper of Bobs, appealing to his
+mentor, Julia, for information.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Junkum, how did we get so far away from home?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;High time we came back, isn&rsquo;t it, Bobs?&rdquo; approved the
+doctor. &ldquo;Well, suppose we return by way of the school-house. All of you
+go to Number Three but Betsey, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;m go-un next year,&rdquo; announced that young lady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps not,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think,
+Doctor, that children are liable to catch all sorts of things in the public
+schools?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Unquestionably.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;More so than in private schools, aren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hum! Well, yes; since they&rsquo;re brought into contact with a more
+miscellaneous lot of comrades.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which is exactly why I have insisted on our sticking to the regular
+schools,&rdquo; put in Mr. Clyde, with the air of quiet decisiveness. &ldquo;I
+want our children to be brought up like other children!&rdquo; The mother shook
+her head dubiously. &ldquo;I wish I were sure it is the right place for
+them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ought to be sure. I might even say&mdash;if you will forgive the
+implied criticism&mdash;that you ought to be surer than you are.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alarmed at his tone, the mother leaned forward. &ldquo;Is there anything the
+matter at Number Three?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Several things. Nothing that you need worry about immediately, however.
+I&rsquo;ve been talking with some of the teachers, and found out a few points.
+Charley&rsquo;s teacher, for instance, tells me that she has a much harder time
+keeping the children up to their work in the winter term than at other
+times.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I remember Charley&rsquo;s tantrums over his arithmetic, last
+winter,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My head felt funny. Kinder thick,&rdquo; defended Charley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is bad,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;very bad. I&rsquo;ve
+reported the teacher in that grade to Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Reported teacher?&rdquo; said Charley, his eyes assuming a prominence
+quite startling. &ldquo;What for?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Starving her grade.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Clyde fairly bounced in her chair. &ldquo;Our children are not supposed to
+eat at school, Dr. Strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Starving her grade,&rdquo; continued the doctor, &ldquo;in the most
+important need of the human organism, air.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you reach that conclusion?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Evidence and experience. I remember in my college days that the winter
+term was considered to be the most difficult in every year. The curriculum
+didn&rsquo;t seem to show it, but every professor and every undergraduate knew
+it. Bad air, that&rsquo;s all. The recitation rooms were kept tightly closed.
+The human brain can&rsquo;t burn carbon and get a bright flame of intelligence
+without a good draft, and the breathing is the draft. Now, on the evidence of
+Charley&rsquo;s teacher, when winter comes percentages go down, although the
+lessons are the same. So I asked her about the ventilation and found that she
+had a superstitious dread of cold.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I remember Miss Benn&rsquo;s room,&rdquo; said Julia thoughtfully.
+&ldquo;It used to get awful hot there. I never liked that grade anyway, and
+Bobs got such bad deportment marks.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Both of the twins had colds all the winter they were in that
+room,&rdquo; contributed Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up went Dr. Strong&rsquo;s hands, the long fingers doubled in, in a curious
+gesture which only stress of feeling ever drove him to use.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;When will the substitute mothers and fathers who run our schools
+learn about air!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Air! It&rsquo;s the first cry of the
+newly born baby. Air! It&rsquo;s the last plea of the man with the death-rattle
+in his throat. It&rsquo;s the one free boon, and we shut it out. If I&rsquo;m
+here next winter, I think I&rsquo;ll load up with stones and break some
+windows!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lemme go with you!&rdquo; cried Charley, with the eagerness of
+destruction proper to seven years. &ldquo;On the whole, Charley,&rdquo; replied
+the other, chuckling a little, &ldquo;perhaps it&rsquo;s better to smash
+traditions. Not easier, but better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you wouldn&rsquo;t have them study with all the windows open on a
+zero day!&rdquo; protested Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t I! Far rather than choke them in a close room! Why, in
+Chicago, the sickly children have special classes on the roof, or in the yards,
+all through the cold weather. They study in overcoats and mittens. And they
+<i>learn</i>. Not only that, but they thrive on it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde was rubbing his chin hard. &ldquo;Perhaps our school system
+isn&rsquo;t all I bragged,&rdquo; he observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not in all respects. You still stick to that relic of barbarism, the
+common drinking-cup, after filtering your water. That&rsquo;s a joke!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see the point,&rdquo; confessed Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Whom is
+the joke on?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All of you who pay for the useless filters and then settle
+doctors&rsquo; bills for the disease spread by the drinking-cups. Don&rsquo;t
+you understand that in the common contagious diseases, the mouth is the danger
+point? Now, you may filter water till it&rsquo;s dry, but if in drinking it you
+put your lips to a cup soiled by the touch of diseased lips, you&rsquo;re in
+danger. We think too much of the water and too little of what contains it.
+I&rsquo;ve seen a school in Auburn, New York, and I&rsquo;ve seen a golf course
+at the Country Club in Seattle, where there isn&rsquo;t a glass or cup to be
+found; and they have two of the best water supplies I know. A tiny fountain
+spouts up to meet your lips, and your mouth touches nothing but the running
+water. The water itself being pure, you can&rsquo;t possibly get any infection
+from it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can you get me a report on that for the Board of Education?&rdquo; asked
+Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s already here,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong quietly. &ldquo;That is
+part of my Chinese job of watch-dog. One other matter. A teacher in another
+grade, at Number Three, with whom I talked, stood with a pencil, which she had
+taken from one of her scholars, pressed to her lips. While we talked she gave
+it back to the child.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, land sakes!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, &ldquo;where&rsquo;s
+the harm? I suppose the poor girl was clean, wasn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do I know? How does anybody know? There is a case on record where a
+teacher carried the virulent bacilli of diphtheria in her throat for three
+months. Suppose she had been careless about putting her lips to the various
+belongings of the children. How many of them do you suppose she would have
+killed with the deadly poison?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t she know she had diphtheria?&rdquo; asked Junkum,
+wide-eyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She hadn&rsquo;t, dear. She was what we call a &lsquo;carrier&rsquo; of
+disease. For some reason which we can&rsquo;t find out, a &lsquo;carrier&rsquo;
+doesn&rsquo;t fall ill, but will give the disease to any one else as surely as
+a very sick person, if the germs from the throat reach the throat or lips of
+others.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some lectures on hygiene might not be amiss in Number Three,&rdquo; said
+Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what medical school inspectors are for&mdash;to teach the
+teachers. The Board of Education should be getting it started.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you doing over there, Twinkles?&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde to
+Bettina, who had slipped from his knee and was sliding her chubby fist along
+the window-pane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child looked around. &ldquo;Thwat that fly,&rdquo; she explained with
+perfect seriousness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She has heard the other children talking about the fly-leaflets that
+have been scattered around. Where&rsquo;s the fly, Toodles?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Up they-arr,&rdquo; replied Bettina, pointing to a far corner of the
+pane where a big &ldquo;green-bottle&rdquo; bumped its head against the glass.
+&ldquo;Come down, buzzy fly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, where,&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde, in despair, &ldquo;do you suppose
+that wretched creature came from? I&rsquo;m so particular always to keep the
+rooms screened and darkened.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please&rsquo;m, it might have come from the kitchen,&rdquo; suggested
+Katie. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a plenty of &lsquo;em there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And before that it came from your next-door neighbor&rsquo;s
+manure-heap,&rdquo; added Dr. Strong. &ldquo;That particular kind of fly breeds
+only in manure. The fact is that the fly is about the nastiest thing alive.
+Compared to it, a hog is a gentleman, and a vulture an epicure. It loves filth,
+and unhappily, it also loves clean, household foods. Therefore the path of its
+feet is direct between the two&mdash;from your neighbor&rsquo;s stable-yard to
+your dinner-table.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Disgusting!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Worse than disgusting: dangerous,&rdquo; returned Dr. Strong, unmoved by
+her distaste. &ldquo;A fly&rsquo;s feet are more than likely to be covered with
+disease-bearing matter, which he leaves behind him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something ought to be done about Freeman&rsquo;s manure-heap, next door.
+I&rsquo;ll see to it,&rdquo; announced Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Doubtless you could report him for maintaining a nuisance,&rdquo;
+admitted Dr. Strong; &ldquo;in which case he might&mdash;er&mdash;conceivably
+retort upon you with your unscreened garbage-pails, which are hatcheries for
+another variety of fly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a beam in the eye for you, Tom,&rdquo; said Grandma
+Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Meantime I&rsquo;ll have the kitchen windows and doors screened at
+once,&rdquo; declared Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That will help,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;though it won&rsquo;t
+cure. You can gain some idea, from this matter of the flies, how intricate a
+social problem health really is. No man sins to himself alone, in hygiene, and
+no man can thoroughly protect himself against the misdeeds of his neighbor.
+It&rsquo;s true that there is such a thing as individual self-defense by a sort
+of personal fortifying of the body&mdash;I&rsquo;ll take that up some other
+time&mdash;but it&rsquo;s very limited. You can carry the fight into the
+enemy&rsquo;s country and eradicate the evil conditions that threaten all, only
+by identifying yourself with your environment, and waging war on that basis.
+Mr. Clyde, do you know anything about the row of wooden tenements in the
+adjoining alley?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Saddler&rsquo;s Shacks? Not much, except that a lot of Italians live
+there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some live; some die. The whole settlement is a scandal of overcrowding,
+dirt, and disease. I&rsquo;ve made out a little local health report of the
+place, for the year. Of course, it&rsquo;s incomplete; but it&rsquo;s
+significant. Look it over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde read aloud as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<table summary="" style="margin-left: 3em">
+
+<tr>
+<td>Diphtheria</td><td>11 cases</td><td>2 deaths</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Measles</td><td>20</td><td>1</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Typhoid fever</td><td>4</td><td>2</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Scarlet fever</td><td>13</td><td>1</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Whooping-cough</td><td>20</td><td>3</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Acute intestinal trouble</td><td>45</td><td>10</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Influenza</td><td>16</td><td>1</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Tuberculosis</td><td>6</td><td>1</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Pneumonia</td><td>9</td><td>4</td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you think of it?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a bad showing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a bad showing and a bad property. Why don&rsquo;t you buy
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who? I? Are you advising me to buy a job-lot of diseases?&rdquo; queried
+Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well&mdash;as a protective investment. We&rsquo;d be safe here if those
+tenements were run differently.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But we aren&rsquo;t in touch with them at all. They are around the
+corner on another block.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nevertheless, visitors pass daily between your house and Saddler&rsquo;s
+Shacks. One of the young men from there delivers bread, often with his bare and
+probably filthy hands. Two of the women peddle fruit about the neighborhood.
+What Saddler&rsquo;s Shacks get in the way of disease, you may easily get by
+transmission from them. Further, the sanitary arrangements of the shacks are
+primitive, not to say prehistoric, and, incidentally, illegal. They are within
+the area of fly-travel from here, so both the human and the winged
+disease-bearers have the best possible opportunity to pick up infection in its
+worst form.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ugh!&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll never eat with a fly
+again as long as I live!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t it be a simple matter to have the Bureau of Health
+condemn the property?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would not.&rdquo; Dr. Strong spoke with curt emphasis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certain features, you said, are illegal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But pull is still stronger than law in this city.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who owns Saddler&rsquo;s Shacks?&rdquo; asked Grandma Sharpless, going
+with characteristic directness to the point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Carson Searle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, then, it&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; asserted Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;I
+know Mrs. Searle very well. She&rsquo;s a leader in church and charitable work.
+Of course, she doesn&rsquo;t know about the condition of the property.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She knows enough about it,&rdquo; retorted Dr. Strong grimly, &ldquo;to
+go to the Mayor over the Health Officer&rsquo;s head, and put a stop to Dr.
+Merritt&rsquo;s order for the premises to be cleaned up at the owner&rsquo;s
+expense. She wants her profits undisturbed. And now, before the conference
+breaks up, I propose that we organize the Household Protective
+Association.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, can we children belong?&rdquo; cried Julia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course. There are offices and honors enough for all. Mr. Clyde shall
+be president; Mrs. Sharpless, vice-president and secretary; Mrs. Clyde,
+treasurer, and each one of the rest of you shall have a committee. Katie, I
+appoint you chairman of the Committee on Food, and if any more flies get into
+your kitchen, you can report &lsquo;em to the Committee on Flies, Miss Bettina
+Clyde, chairman; motto, &lsquo;Thwat that fly!&rsquo; Manny, you like to go to
+the farm; you get the Committee on Milk Supply. Junkum, your committee shall be
+that of school conditions. Bobs, water is your element. As Water Commissioner
+you must keep watch on the city reports. I&rsquo;ll see that they are sent you
+regularly; and the typhoid records.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t left anything for me,&rdquo; protested Charley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t I! You&rsquo;ve got one of the biggest of all jobs, air.
+If the windows aren&rsquo;t properly wide when the house is asleep, I want to
+know it from you, and you&rsquo;ll have to get up early to find out. If the
+Street Cleaning Department sweeps the air full of dust because it&rsquo;s too
+lazy to wash down the roadway first, we&rsquo;ll make a committee report to the
+Mayor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bettina, <i>alias</i> Toots, <i>alias</i> Twinkles, <i>alias</i> the Cherub,
+trotted over and laid two plump hands on the doctor&rsquo;s knee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you goin&rsquo; to be anyfing in the play?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I?&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Of course, Toots. Every real
+association has to have officers and membership, you know. I&rsquo;m the
+Member.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>III.<br />
+REPAIRING BETTINA</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;M</span>edicine would be
+the ideal profession if it did not involve giving pain,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong,
+setting a paper-weight upon some school reports which had just come in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve been here three months and you haven&rsquo;t hurt any one
+yet,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde easily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. I&rsquo;ve been cautious, and perhaps a little cowardly. My place as
+Chinese doctor has been such a sinecure that I&rsquo;ve let things go.
+Moreover, I&rsquo;ve wanted to gain Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s confidence as much as
+possible, before coming to the point.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The expression of Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s keen, good-humored face altered and focused
+sharply. He scrutinized the doctor in silence. &ldquo;Well, let&rsquo;s have
+it,&rdquo; he said at length. &ldquo;Is it my wife?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. It&rsquo;s Bettina.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The father winced. &ldquo;That baby!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Serious?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the contrary, quite simple. <i>If</i> it is handled wisely. But it
+means&mdash;pain. Not a great deal; but still, pain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An operation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;Merely a minor one. I&rsquo;ve sounded Mrs. Clyde,
+without her knowing it, and she will oppose it. Mrs. Sharpless, too, I fear.
+You know how women dread suffering for the children they love.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again Mr. Clyde winced. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s&mdash;it&rsquo;s necessary, of
+course,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not to do it would be both stupid and cruel. Shall we call in the women
+and have it out with them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For reply, Mr. Clyde pressed a button and sent the servant who responded, for
+Mrs. Clyde and her mother. Grandma Sharpless arrived first, took stock of the
+men&rsquo;s grave faces, and sat down silently, folding her strong, competent
+hands in her lap. But no sooner had Mrs. Clyde caught sight of her
+husband&rsquo;s face than her hand went to her throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The children&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing to be alarmed about, Mrs. Clyde,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong quickly.
+He pushed a chair toward her. &ldquo;Sit down. It&rsquo;s a question
+of&mdash;of what I might call carpenter-work&rdquo;&mdash;the mother laughed a
+nervous relief&mdash;&ldquo;on Betty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Betty?&rdquo; Her fears fluttered in her voice. &ldquo;What about
+Betty?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She needs repairing; that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what you mean! Is she hurt?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all. She is breathing wrong. She breathes through her
+mouth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; There was reassurance and a measure even of contempt in Mrs.
+Clyde&rsquo;s voice. &ldquo;Lots of children do that. Perhaps she&rsquo;s got a
+little cold.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t that. This is no new thing with her. She is a
+mouth-breather.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll see that it&rsquo;s corrected,&rdquo; promised the mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only one thing can correct it,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong gravely.
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a difficulty that must be removed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean an operation? On that baby? Do you know that she isn&rsquo;t
+five yet? And you want to cut her with a knife&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Steady, Myra,&rdquo; came Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s full, even speech.
+&ldquo;Dr. Strong doesn&rsquo;t <i>want</i> to do anything except what he
+considers necessary.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Necessary! Supposing she does breathe through her mouth! What excuse is
+that for torturing her&mdash;my baby!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll answer that, Mrs. Clyde,&rdquo; said the doctor, with patient
+politeness. Walking over to the window he threw it up and called, &ldquo;Oh,
+Tootles! Twinkles! Honorable Miss Cherub, come up here. I&rsquo;ve got
+something to show you.&rdquo; And presently in came the child, dragging a huge
+and dilapidated doll.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was a picture of rosy health, but, for the first time, the mother noted the
+drooping of the lower jaw, and the slight lift of the upper lip, revealing the
+edges of two pearly teeth. Dr. Strong took from a drawer a little wooden box,
+adjusted a lever and, placing the ear pieces in Betty&rsquo;s ears, bade her
+listen. But the child shook her head. Again he adjusted the indicator. This
+time, too, she said that she heard nothing. Not until the fourth change did she
+announce delightedly that she heard a pretty bell, but that it sounded very far
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now we&rsquo;ll try it on mother,&rdquo; said the experimenter, and
+added in a low tone as he handed it to Mrs. Clyde, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve set it two
+points less loud than Betty&rsquo;s mark. Can you hear it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Clyde nodded. A look of dread came into her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, Tootles, open your mouth,&rdquo; directed the doctor, producing a
+little oblong metal contrivance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t got any sore froat,&rdquo; objected the young lady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, but I want to look at the thoughts inside your head,&rdquo; he
+explained mysteriously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With entire confidence the child opened her mouth as wide as possible, and Dr.
+Strong, setting the instrument far back against her tongue, applied his eye to
+the other end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, Toots,&rdquo; he said, after a moment. &ldquo;Get your
+breath, and then let mother look.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He showed Mrs. Clyde how to press the tiny button setting aglow an electric
+lamp and lighting up the nasal passages above the throat, which were reflected
+on a mirror within the contrivance and thus made clear to the eye. Following
+his instructions, she set her eye to the miniature telescope as the physician
+pressed it against the little tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Betty,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, as the implement was again
+withdrawn, &ldquo;you&rsquo;ve got very nice thoughts inside that wise little
+head of yours. Now you can continue bringing up your doll in the way she should
+go.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the door closed behind her the mother turned to Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is she going to be deaf?&rdquo; she asked breathlessly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; he reassured her. &ldquo;That will be taken care
+of. What did you see above the back of the throat?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Little things like tiny stalactites hanging down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Adenoids.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where could she have gotten adenoids?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From her remotest imaginable ancestor, probably.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, aren&rsquo;t they a disease?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. An inheritance. The race has always had them. Probably they&rsquo;re
+vestigial salivary glands, the use of which we&rsquo;ve outgrown. Unfortunately
+they may overdevelop and block up the air-passages. Then they have to come
+out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the first time in the conference Grandma Sharpless gathered force and
+speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Young man,&rdquo; she said solemnly&mdash;rather accusingly, in
+fact&mdash;&ldquo;if the Lord put adenoids in the human nose he put &lsquo;em
+there for some purpose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Doubtless. But that purpose, whatever it may have been, no longer
+exists.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Everything in the human body has some use,&rdquo; she persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Had,&rdquo; corrected Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Not has. How about your
+appendix?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Sharpless&rsquo;s appendix, like the wicked, had long since ceased from
+troubling, and was now at rest in alcohol in a doctor&rsquo;s office, having,
+previous to the change of location, given its original proprietress the one bad
+scare of her life. Therefore, she blinked, not being provided with a ready
+answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The ancestors of man,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;were endowed with
+sundry organs, like the appendix and the adenoids, which civilized man is
+better off without. And, as civilized man possesses a God-given intelligence to
+tell him how to get rid of them, he wisely does so when it&rsquo;s
+necessary.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What have the adenoids to do with Betty&rsquo;s deafness?&rdquo; asked
+Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Everything. They divert the air-currents, thicken the tubes connecting
+throat and ear, and interfere with the hearing. Don&rsquo;t let that little
+deficiency in keenness of ear bother you, though. Most likely it will pass with
+the removal of the adenoids. Even if it shouldn&rsquo;t, it is too slight to be
+a handicap. But I want the child to be repaired before any of the familiar and
+more serious adenoid difficulties are fixed on her for life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are there others?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde apprehensively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, every imaginable kind. How could it be otherwise? Here&rsquo;s the
+very first principle of life, the breath, being diverted from its proper
+course, in the mouth-breather; isn&rsquo;t a general derangement of functions
+the inevitable result? The hearing is affected, as I&rsquo;ve shown you
+already. The body doesn&rsquo;t get its proper amount of oxygen, and the
+digestion suffers. The lungs draw their air-supply in the wrong way, and the
+lung capacity is diminished. The open mouth admits all kinds of dust particles
+which inflame the throat and make it hospitable to infection. By incorrect
+breathing the facial aspect of the mouth-breather is variously modified and
+always for the worse; since the soft facial bones of youth are altered by the
+continual striking of an air-current on the roof of the mouth, which is pushed
+upward, distorting the whole face.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;None of <i>our</i> children are distorted. You won&rsquo;t find a
+better-looking lot anywhere,&rdquo; challenged Mrs. Sharpless, the
+grandmother&rsquo;s pride up in arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True. None of them has had overdeveloped adenoids, except Betty. The
+others all breathe through their noses. See how different their mouths are from
+Betty&rsquo;s lifting upper lip&mdash;very fascinating now, but
+later&mdash;Well, I&rsquo;ve gone so far as to prepare an object-lesson for
+you. Three extreme types of the mouth-breathers are here from school by my
+invitation to have some lemonade and cakes. They are outside now. When they
+come in, I want each of you to make an analysis of one of them, without their
+seeing it, of course. Talk with them about their work in school. You may get
+ideas from that. Mrs. Sharpless, you take the taller of the girls; Mrs. Clyde,
+you study the shorter. The boy goes to you, Mr. Clyde.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trio of visitors entered, somewhat mystified, but delighted to be the
+guests of their friend, Dr. Strong, who had a faculty of interesting children.
+So shrewdly did he divert and hold their attention that they concluded their
+visit and left without having suspected the scrutiny which they had undergone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, Mrs. Clyde,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, after the good-byes were said,
+&ldquo;what about your girl?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing in particular except that she&rsquo;s mortally homely and
+doesn&rsquo;t seem very bright.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Homely in what respect?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, hatchet-faced, to use a slang term.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not a slang term any more; it&rsquo;s a medical term to
+describe a typical result of mouth-breathing. The diversion of the breath
+destroys the even arch of the teeth, pushes the central teeth up, giving that
+squirrel-like expression that is so unpleasantly familiar, lengthens the mouth
+from the lower jaw&rsquo;s hanging down, and sharpens the whole profile to an
+edge, and an ugly one. Adenoids!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My tall girl I thought at first was dull, but I found the poor thing was
+a little deaf,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s got a horrid
+skin; so sallow and rough and pimply. I don&rsquo;t think her digestion is
+good. In fact, she said she had trouble with her stomach.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Naturally. Her teeth are all out of place from facial malformation
+caused by mouth-breathing. That means that she can&rsquo;t properly chew her
+food. That means in turn that her digestion must suffer. That, again, means a
+bad complexion and a debilitated constitution. Adenoids! What&rsquo;s your
+analysis, Mr. Clyde?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That boy? He&rsquo;s two grades behind where he should be in school. It
+takes him some time to get the drift of anything that&rsquo;s said to him. I
+should judge his brain is weak. Anyway, I don&rsquo;t see where he keeps it,
+for the upper part of his face is all wrong, the roof of the mouth is so pushed
+up. The poor little chap&rsquo;s brain-pan must be contracted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perfectly correct, and all the result of adenoids again. The boy is the
+worst example I&rsquo;ve been able to find. But all three of the children are
+terribly handicapped; one by a painful homeliness, one by a ruined digestion,
+and the boy by a mental deficiency&mdash;and all simply and solely because they
+were neglected by ignorant parents and still more ignorant school
+authorities.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would you have the public schools deal with such details?&rdquo; asked
+Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly. Have you ever heard what Goler, the Health Officer of
+Rochester, asked that city? &lsquo;Oughtn&rsquo;t we to close the schools and
+repair the children?&rsquo; he asked, and he kept on asking, until now
+Rochester has a regular system of looking after the noses, mouths, and eyes of
+its young. They want their children, in that city, to start the battle of life
+in fighting trim.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you don&rsquo;t see many misshapen children about,&rdquo; objected
+Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it&rsquo;s because you don&rsquo;t look. Call to your mind
+Hogarth&rsquo;s caricatures. Do you remember that in his crowds there are
+always clubfooted, or humpbacked, or deformed people? In those days such
+deformities were very common because medical science didn&rsquo;t know how to
+correct them in the young. To-day facial deformities, to the scientific eye,
+are quite as common, though not as obvious. We&rsquo;re just learning how to
+correct them, and to know that the hatchet-face is a far more serious clog on a
+human being&rsquo;s career than is the clubfoot.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If Betty had a clubfoot, of course&mdash;&rdquo; began Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course, you&rsquo;d have it repaired at whatever cost of suffering.
+You&rsquo;d submit her to a long and serious operation; and probably to the
+constant pain of a rigid iron frame upon her leg for months, perhaps years. To
+obviate the deformity you&rsquo;d consider that not too high a price to pay,
+and rightly. Well, here is the case of a more far-reaching malformation,
+curable by a minor operation, without danger, mercifully quick, with only the
+briefest after-effects of pain, and you draw back from it. Why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The thought of the knife on that little face. Is&mdash;is that all there
+is to be done?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, there are the teeth. They should be looked to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense! They&rsquo;re only first teeth,&rdquo; said
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grandma Sharpless vigorously. &ldquo;What does a doctor know about
+teeth?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lots, if he knows his business. There would be fewer dyspeptics if
+physicians in general sent their patients to the dentist more promptly, and
+kept them in condition to chew their food.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all very well, when people have their real, lasting
+teeth,&rdquo; returned the grandmother. &ldquo;But Betty&rsquo;s first set will
+be gone in a few years. Then it will be time enough to bother the poor
+child.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Apparently, Mrs. Sharpless,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong mildly, &ldquo;you
+consider that teeth come in crops, like berries; one crop now, a second and
+distinct crop later. That isn&rsquo;t the way growth takes place in the human
+mouth. The first teeth are to the second almost what the blossom is to the
+fruit. I shall want immediately to take Betty to the dentist, and have him keep
+watch over her mouth with the understanding that he may charge a bonus on every
+tooth he keeps in after its time. The longer the first lot lasts, the better
+the second lot are. But there is no use making the minor repairs unless the
+main structure is put right first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must see Betty,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde abruptly, and left the room.
+Mrs. Sharpless followed. &ldquo;Now comes the first real split.&rdquo; Dr.
+Strong turned to Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re going to vote me down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If it comes to a pinch,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde quietly, &ldquo;my wife
+will accept my decision.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is what I want to avoid. Where would my influence with her be, if I
+were obliged to appeal to you on the very first test of professional authority?
+No, I shall try to carry this through myself, even at the risk of having to
+seem a little brutal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde lifted his eyebrows, but he only nodded, as the door opened and the
+two women reentered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Doctor,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, &ldquo;if, in a year from now, Betty
+hasn&rsquo;t outgrown the mouth-breathing, I&mdash;I&mdash;you may take what
+measures you think best.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In a year from now, the danger will be more advanced. There is not the
+faintest chance of correction of the fault without an operation.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t help it! I can&rsquo;t stand the thought of it,
+now,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde brokenly. &ldquo;You should see her, poor baby, as
+she looks now, asleep on the lounge in the library, and even you, Doctor&rdquo;
+(the doctor smiled a little awry at that), &ldquo;couldn&rsquo;t bear to think
+of the blood and the pain.&rdquo; She was silent, shuddering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My dear Mrs. Clyde, the blood will be no more than a nosebleed, and the
+pain won&rsquo;t amount to much, thanks to anaesthesia. Let me see.&rdquo; He
+stepped to the door and, opening it softly, looked in, then beckoned to the
+others to join him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child lay asleep on her side, one cupped pink hand hanging, the other back
+of her head. Her jaw had dropped and the corner of the mouth had slackened down
+in an unnatural droop. The breath hissed a little between the soft lips. Dr.
+Strong closed the door again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he said, and there was a suggestion of the sternness of
+judgment in the monosyllable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am her mother.&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde faced him, a spot of color in each
+cheek. &ldquo;A mother is a better judge of her children than any doctor can
+be!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think so?&rdquo; said Dr. Strong deliberately. &ldquo;Then I must
+set you right. Do you recall sending Charley away from the table for
+clumsiness, two days ago?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, yes.&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s expressive eyes widened. &ldquo;He
+overturned his glass, after my warning him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And once last week for the same thing?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, but what&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pardon me, do you think your mother-judgment was wise then?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, really, Dr. Strong,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, flushing, &ldquo;you
+will hardly assume the right of control of the children&rsquo;s
+manners&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is not a question of manners. There is where your error
+lies,&rdquo; interrupted the doctor. &ldquo;Against your mother-judgment I set
+my doctor-judgment, and I tell you now&rdquo;&mdash;his voice rose a little
+from its accustomed polished smoothness, and took on authority&mdash;&ldquo;I
+tell you that the boy is no more responsible for his clumsiness than Betty is
+for bad breathing. It&rsquo;s a disease, very faint but unmistakable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not Charley!&rdquo; said his father incredulously, &ldquo;Why,
+he&rsquo;s as husky as a colt.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He will be, please God, in a few years, but just now he
+has&mdash;don&rsquo;t be alarmed; it&rsquo;s nothing like so important as it
+sounds&mdash;he has a slight heart trouble, probably the sequel to that light
+and perhaps mismanaged diphtheria attack. It&rsquo;s quite a common result and
+is nearly always outgrown, and it shows in almost unnoticeable lack of control
+of hands and feet. I observed Charley&rsquo;s clumsiness long ago; listened at
+his heart, and heard the murmur there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you never told us!&rdquo; reproached the grandmother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What was the use? There&rsquo;s nothing to be done; nothing that needs
+to be done, except watch, and that I&rsquo;ve been doing. And I didn&rsquo;t
+want to worry you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ve been punishing him for what wasn&rsquo;t his
+fault,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde in a choked voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have. Don&rsquo;t punish Betty for what isn&rsquo;t hers,&rdquo;
+countered the physician, swiftly taking advantage of the opening. &ldquo;Give
+her her chance. Mrs. Clyde, if Betty were my own, she could hardly have wound
+herself more closely around my heartstrings. I want to see her grow from a
+strong and beautiful child to a strong and beautiful girl, and finally to a
+strong and beautiful woman. It rests with you. Watch her breathing to-night, as
+she sleeps&mdash;and tell me to-morrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose and left the room. Mr. Clyde walked over and put a hand softly on his
+wife&rsquo;s soft hair; then brushed her cheek with his lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s up to you, dearest,&rdquo; he said gently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three days later, Betty, overhanging the side fence, was heard, by her
+shamelessly eavesdropping father, imparting information to her next-door
+neighbor and friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d ought to get a new nothe, Thally. It don&rsquo;t hurt much,
+an&rsquo; breathin&rsquo; ith heapth more fun!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pondering a chain of suggestions induced by this advice, Mr. Clyde walked
+slowly to the house. As was his habit in thought, he proceeded to rub the idea
+into his chin, which was quite pink from friction by the time he reached the
+library. There he found Dr. Strong and Mrs. Sharpless in consultation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you two conspiring about?&rdquo; he asked, ceasing to rub the
+troubled spot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Matter of school reports,&rdquo; answered the doctor. He glanced at the
+other&rsquo;s chin and smiled. &ldquo;And what is worrying you?&rdquo; he
+asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m wondering whether I haven&rsquo;t made a mistake.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite possibly. It&rsquo;s done by some of our best people,&rdquo;
+remarked the physician dryly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not a pleasant possibility in this case. You remember quoting Rochester
+as to closing the schools and repairing the children. To-day, as I heard Betty
+commenting on her new nose, it suddenly came to me that I was obstructing that
+very system of repairs by which she is benefiting, for less fortunate
+youngsters in our schools.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong in surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As president of the Public Health League. The Superintendent of Schools
+came to me with a complaint against Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer, who, he
+claimed, was usurping authority in his scheme for a special inspection system
+to examine all schoolchildren at regular intervals.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ought to have been established long ago,&rdquo; declared Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Superintendent thinks otherwise. He claims that it would interfere
+with school routine. It&rsquo;s the duty of the health officials, he says, to
+control epidemics from without, to keep sickness out of the schools, not to
+hunt around among the children, scaring them to death about diseases that
+probably aren&rsquo;t there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong muttered something which Grandma Sharpless pretended not to hear.
+&ldquo;And you&rsquo;ve agreed to support him in that attitude?&rdquo; he
+queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;ve half committed myself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Heaven forgive you! Why, see here, Clyde, your dodo of a superintendent
+talks of keeping sickness out of the schools. Doesn&rsquo;t that mean keeping
+sickness out of the pupils? There&rsquo;s just one way to do that: get every
+child into the best possible condition of repair&mdash;eyes, ears, nose,
+throat, teeth, stomach, everything, and maintain them in that state. Then
+disease will have a hard time breaking down the natural resistance of the
+system. Damaged organs in a child are like flaws in a ship&rsquo;s armor-plate;
+a vital weakening of the defenses. And remember, the child is always battling
+against one besieging germ or another.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why can&rsquo;t medical science wipe out the germs?&rdquo; demanded Mrs.
+Sharpless. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s always claiming to do such wonders.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In a few instances it can. In typhoid we fight and win the battle from
+the outside by doing that very thing. In smallpox, and to a lesser extent in
+diphtheria, we can build up an effective artificial barrier by inoculation.
+But, as medical men are now coming to realize, in the other important
+contagions of childhood, measles, whooping-cough, and scarlet fever, we must
+fight the disease from inside the individual; that is, make as nearly
+impregnable as possible the natural fortifications of the body to resist and
+repel the invasion. That is what school medical inspection aims at.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t rank whooping-cough and measles with scarlet fever,
+would you?&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless incredulously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why not? Although scarlet fever has the worst
+after-effects,&mdash;though not much more serious than those of
+measles,&mdash;the three are almost equal so far as the death-rate is
+concerned.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Surely not!&rdquo; protested the old lady. &ldquo;Why, I&rsquo;d rather
+have measles in the house ten times, or whooping-cough either, than scarlet
+fever once.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re about ten times as likely to have.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked puzzled. &ldquo;But what did you mean by saying that one of
+&lsquo;em is as bad as the other?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That it&rsquo;s as dangerous to the community, though not to the
+individual.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just a little deep for me, too,&rdquo; confessed Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet it&rsquo;s perfectly simple. Here, take an example. Would you rather
+be bitten by a rattlesnake or a mosquito?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A mosquito, of course.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Naturally. Yet a rattlesnake country is a good deal safer than a
+mosquito country. You wouldn&rsquo;t hesitate, on account of your health, to
+move to Arizona, where rattlesnakes live?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you <i>would</i> be afraid to establish your family in the malarious
+swamps of the South?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, people who die of malaria die of mosquito bite, since the mosquito
+is the only agency of infection. Thus, it reduces to this: that while the
+individual rattler is more dangerous than the individual mosquito, the
+mosquito, in general, kills her thousands where the snake kills one.
+Now&mdash;with considerable modification of the ratio&mdash;scarlet fever is
+the rattlesnake; whooping-cough and measles are the mosquitoes. It is just as
+important to keep measles out of a community as it is to shut out scarlet
+fever. In fact, if you will study the records of this city, you will find that
+in two out of the last three years, measles has killed more people than scarlet
+fever, and whooping-cough more than either of them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are we going to do about it?&rdquo; asked the practical-minded Mr.
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, if some one would only tell us that! In measles the worst of the
+harm is done before the disease announces itself definitely. The most
+contagious stage is previous to the appearance of the telltale rash.
+There&rsquo;s nothing but a snuffling nose, and perhaps a very little fever to
+give advance notice that the sufferer is a firebrand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you can&rsquo;t shut a child out of school for every little sore
+throat,&rdquo; observed Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As to that I&rsquo;m not so sure,&rdquo; replied the physician slowly
+and thoughtfully. &ldquo;A recent writer on school epidemics has suggested
+educating the public to believe that every sore throat is contagious.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That isn&rsquo;t true, is it?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. Personally I believe that, while a physician is often justified in
+deceiving his patient, he is never justified in fooling the public. In the long
+run they find him out and his influence for good is lessened. Yet that
+sore-throat theory is near enough true to be a strong temptation. Every sore
+throat is suspicious; that isn&rsquo;t too much to say. And, with a thorough
+school-inspection system, it is quite possible that epidemics could be headed
+off by isolating the early-discovered cases of sore throat. But, an epidemic of
+the common contagions, once well under way, seems to be quite beyond any
+certainty of control.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you mean to say that quarantine and disinfection and isolation are
+all useless?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. I won&rsquo;t go as far as that. They may exercise a check in some
+cases. But I will say this: that all our cumbersome and expensive and often
+harassing hygienic measures in the contagious diseases haven&rsquo;t made good.
+Obviously, if they had, we should see a diminution of the ills which they are
+supposed to limit. There is no diminution. No, we&rsquo;re on the wrong tack.
+Until we know what the right tack is, we perhaps ought to keep on doing what we
+can in the present line. It&rsquo;s a big, complicated subject, and one that
+won&rsquo;t be settled until we find out what scarlet fever, measles, and
+whooping-cough really are, and what causes them. While we&rsquo;re waiting for
+the bacteriologist to tell us that, the soundest principle of defense that we
+have is to keep the body up to its highest pitch of resistance. That is why I
+support medical inspection for schools as an essential measure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To repair the children without closing the schools, if I may modify Dr.
+Goler&rsquo;s epigram,&rdquo; suggested Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Exactly. Eventually we shall have to build as well as repair. A very
+curious thing is happening to Young America in the Eastern States. The growing
+generation is shrinking in weight and height.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which is almost contradictory enough for a paradox,&rdquo; remarked Mr.
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a melancholy and literal fact. You know, there&rsquo;s a
+height and weight basis for age upon which our school grading system rests. The
+authorities have been obliged to reconstruct it because the children are
+continuously growing smaller for their years. <i>There&rsquo;s</i> work for the
+inspection force!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d put the children on pulleys and stretch &lsquo;em out, I
+suppose!&rdquo; gibed Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That might work, too,&rdquo; replied the doctor, unruffled. &ldquo;The
+Procrustean system isn&rsquo;t so bad, if old Procrustes had only sent his
+victims to the gymnasium instead of putting them to bed. Yes, a quarter of an
+hour with the weight-pulleys every day would help undersized kiddies a good
+deal. But principally I should want the school-inspectors to keep the
+youngsters playing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t have to teach a child to play,&rdquo; sniffed Grandma
+Sharpless, with womanly scorn of mere man&rsquo;s views concerning children.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pardon me, Mrs. Sharpless, you taught your children to play.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I! Whatever makes you think that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The simple fact that they didn&rsquo;t die in babyhood.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Sharpless looked at him with a severity not unmingled with suspicion.
+&ldquo;Sometimes, young man,&rdquo; she observed, &ldquo;you talk like
+a&mdash;a&mdash;a gump!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take that, Strong!&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, joining in the doctor&rsquo;s
+laugh against himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Facts may sometimes sound foolish,&rdquo; admitted Dr. Strong. &ldquo;If
+they do, that&rsquo;s the fault of the speaker. And it <i>is</i> a fact that
+every mother teaches her baby to play. Watch the cat if you don&rsquo;t believe
+me. The wisest woman in America points out in her recent book that it is the
+mother&rsquo;s playing with her baby which rouses in it the will to live.
+Without that will to live none of us would survive.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know who your wisest woman in America may be, but I
+don&rsquo;t believe she knows what she is talking about,&rdquo; declared
+Grandma Sharpless flatly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never known her when she didn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; retorted the
+doctor. &ldquo;If Jane Addams of Hull House isn&rsquo;t an expert in life,
+mental, moral, and physical, then there&rsquo;s no such person! Why, see here,
+Mrs. Sharpless; do you know why a baby&rsquo;s chance of survival is less in
+the very best possible institution without its mother, than in the very worst
+imaginable tenement with its mother, even though the mother is unable to nurse
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t as well tended, I expect.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All its physical surroundings are a thousand times more advantageous:
+better air, better food, better temperature, better safeguarding against
+disease; yet babies in these surroundings just pine away and die. It&rsquo;s
+almost impossible to bring up an infant on an institutional system. The infant
+death-rate of these well-meaning places is so appalling that nobody dares tell
+it publicly. And it is so, simply because there is no one to play with the
+babies. The nurses haven&rsquo;t the time, though they have the instinct. I
+tell you, the most wonderful, mystic, profound thing in all the world, to me,
+is the sight of a young girl&rsquo;s intuitive yearning to dandle every baby
+she may see. That&rsquo;s the universal world-old, world-wide, deep-rooted
+genius of motherhood, which antedates the humankind, stirring within her and
+impelling her to help keep the race alive&mdash;by playing with the
+baby.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;H&rsquo;m! I hadn&rsquo;t thought of it in that way,&rdquo; confessed
+Grandma Sharpless. &ldquo;There may be something in what you say, young man.
+But by the time children reach school age I guess they&rsquo;ve learned that
+lesson.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not always. At least, not properly, always. Let&rsquo;s consult the
+Committee on School of our household organization.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sent for eight-year-old Julia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Question to lay before you, Miss Chairwoman,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;How many of the girls in your grade hang around the hall or doorways
+during recess?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, lots!&rdquo; said Julia promptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are they the bigger girls? or the smaller ones?&rdquo; The Committee on
+School considered the matter gravely. &ldquo;Mary Hinks, she&rsquo;s tall, but
+she&rsquo;s awful thin and sickly,&rdquo; she pronounced. &ldquo;Dot Griswold
+and Cora Smith and Tiny Warley&mdash;why, I guess they&rsquo;re most all the
+littlest girls in the class.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong nodded. &ldquo;Sure to be the undernourished, anaemic, lethargic
+ones,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re forgetting the lessons of their
+babyhood. Insensibly they are losing the will to live. But there&rsquo;s nobody
+to tell them so. A thorough medical inspection service would correct that. It
+would include school-nurses who would go to the homes of the children and tell
+the parents what was the matter. Such a system might not be warranted to keep
+epidemics out of our schools, but it would stretch out and fill out those
+meager youngsters&rsquo; brains as well as bodies, and fit them to combat
+illness if it did come. The whole theory of the school&rsquo;s attitude toward
+the child seems to me misconceived by those who have charge of the system. It
+assumes too much in authority and avoids too much in responsibility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take the case of John Smith, who has two children to bring up under our
+enlightened system of government. Government says to John Smith, &lsquo;Send
+your children to school!&rsquo; &lsquo;Suppose I don&rsquo;t wish to?&rsquo;
+says John Smith. &lsquo;You&rsquo;ve got to,&rsquo; says Government. &lsquo;It
+isn&rsquo;t safe for me to have them left uneducated.&rsquo; &lsquo;Will you
+take care of them while they&rsquo;re at school?&rsquo; says John Smith.
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;ll train their minds,&rsquo; says Government. &lsquo;What about
+their bodies?&rsquo; says John Smith. &lsquo;Hm!&rsquo; says Government;
+&lsquo;that&rsquo;s a horse of another color.&rsquo; &lsquo;Then I&rsquo;ll
+come with them and see that they&rsquo;re looked after physically,&rsquo; says
+John Smith. &lsquo;You <i>will</i> not!&rsquo; says Government.
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;m <i>in loco &lsquo;parentis</i>, while they&rsquo;re in
+school.&rsquo; &lsquo;Then you take the entire <i>loco</i> of the
+<i>parentis</i>,&rsquo; says John Smith. &lsquo;If you take my children away on
+the ground that you&rsquo;re better fitted to care for their minds than I am,
+you ought to be at least as ready to look after their health. Otherwise,&rsquo;
+says John Smith, &lsquo;go and teach yourself to stand on your head. You
+can&rsquo;t teach <i>my</i> children.&rsquo; Now,&rdquo; concluded Dr. Strong,
+&ldquo;do you see any flaws in the Smith point of view?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just plain common sense,&rdquo; approved Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Clyde,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, with a twinkle, &ldquo;if you don&rsquo;t
+stop rubbing a hole in your chin, I&rsquo;ll have to repair <i>you</i>.
+What&rsquo;s preying on your mind?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am trying,&rdquo; replied Mr. Clyde deliberately, &ldquo;to figure
+out, with reference to the School Superintendent and myself, just how a man who
+has made a fool of himself can write a letter to another man who has helped the
+first man make a fool of himself, admitting that he&rsquo;s made a fool of
+himself, and yet avoid embarrassment, either to the man who has made a fool of
+himself or to the other man who aided the man in making a fool of himself. Do
+you get that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong rose. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a Chinese doctor,&rdquo; he observed,
+&ldquo;not a Chinese puzzle-solver. That&rsquo;s a matter between you and your
+ink-well. Meantime, having attained the point for which I&rsquo;ve been
+climbing, I now declare this session adjourned.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>IV.<br />
+THE CORNER DRUG-STORE</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;N</span>o, it
+won&rsquo;t add to the attractiveness of the neighborhood, perhaps,&rdquo; said
+Mrs. Clyde thoughtfully. &ldquo;But how convenient it will be!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde had come home with the news that a drug-store was to be opened
+shortly on the adjacent corner. Shifting his position to dodge a
+foliage-piercing shaft of sunlight&mdash;they were all sitting out on the shady
+lawn, in the cool of a September afternoon&mdash;Dr. Strong shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too convenient, altogether,&rdquo; he observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; queried Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;A drugstore is like a
+gun in Texas: you may not need it often, but when you do need it, you need it
+like blazes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True enough. But most people over-patronize the drug-store.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not this family; at least, since our house-doctor came to keep us well
+on the Chinese plan,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde gracefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Dr. Strong only looked rueful. &ldquo;Your Chinese doctor has to plead
+guilty to negligence of what has been going on under his very nose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, not more trouble!&rdquo; pleaded Mrs. Clyde. She had come through
+the dreaded ordeal of little Betty&rsquo;s operation for adenoids&mdash;which
+had proved to be, after all, so slight and comparatively painless&mdash;with a
+greatly augmented respect for and trust in Dr. Strong; but her nerves still
+quivered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing to trouble you,&rdquo; the doctor assured her, &ldquo;but enough
+to make me feel guilty&mdash;and stupid. Have you noticed any change in Manny,
+lately?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Manny&rdquo; was fourteen-year-old Maynard Clyde, the oldest of the
+children; a high school lad, tall, lathy, athletic, and good-tempered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The boy is as nervous as a witch,&rdquo; put in Grandma Sharpless.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve noticed it since early summer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I wish you had taught me my trade,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;Manny is so husky and active that I&rsquo;ve hardly given him a
+thought.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what&rsquo;s wrong with him?&rdquo; asked the father anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too much drug-store,&rdquo; was the prompt reply. &ldquo;Not
+drugs!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde, horrified. &ldquo;That child!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, no; not in the sense you mean it. Wait; there he is now.
+Manny!&rdquo; he called, raising his voice. &ldquo;Come over here a minute,
+will you?&rdquo; The boy ambled over, and dropped down on the grass. He was
+brown, thin, and hard-trained; but there was a nervous pucker between his eyes,
+which his father noted for the first time. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s this? A meeting
+of the Board? Anything for the Committee on Milk Supply to do?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at present,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong, &ldquo;except to answer a
+question or two. You don&rsquo;t drink coffee, do you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course not. I&rsquo;m trying for shortstop on the junior nine, you
+know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How are you making out?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rotten!&rdquo; said the boy despondently. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t seem to
+have any grip on myself this year. Sort o&rsquo; get the rattles.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hm-m-m. Feel pretty thirsty after the practice, and usually stop in at
+the soda-fountain for some of those patent soft drinks advertised to be
+harmless but stimulating, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the boy, surprised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said the doctor carelessly; &ldquo;three or four glasses a
+day, I suppose?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Manny thought a moment. &ldquo;All of that,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you quit it,&rdquo; advised the doctor, &ldquo;if you want to make
+the ball team. It will put you off your game worse than tea or coffee. Tell the
+athletic instructor I said so, will you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure!&rdquo; said the boy. &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know there was any harm
+in it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Manny walked away, Dr. Strong turned to
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;I found out about Manny by accident. No wonder the boy is
+nervous. He&rsquo;s been drinking that stuff like water, with no thought of
+what&rsquo;s in it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What <i>is</i> in it?&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Caffeine, generally. The most widely used of the lot is a mixture of
+fruit syrups doctored up with that drug. There&rsquo;s as much nerve-excitation
+in a glass of it&mdash;yes, and more&mdash;than in a cup of strong coffee. What
+would you think of a fourteen-year-old boy who drank five cups of strong coffee
+every day?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d think his parents were fools,&rdquo; declared Grandma
+Sharpless bluntly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or his physician,&rdquo; suggested Dr. Strong. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen
+cases of people drinking twenty to twenty-five glasses of that
+&lsquo;harmless&rsquo; stuff every day. Of course, they were on the road to
+nervous smash-up. But the craving for it was established and they hadn&rsquo;t
+the nerve to stop.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The soda-fountain as a public peril,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, with a
+smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s more in that than can be smiled away,&rdquo; retorted the
+doctor vigorously. &ldquo;What between nerve-foods that are simply disguised
+&lsquo;bracers,&rsquo; and dangerous, heart-depressing dopes, like
+bromo-seltzer, the soda-fountain does its share of damage in the
+community.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What about soda-water; that is innocent, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; asked
+Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. If the syrups are pure, soda-water is a good thing in moderation.
+So are the mineral waters. But there is this to be said about soda-water and
+candy, particularly the latter&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always said,&rdquo; broke in Grandma Sharpless, &ldquo;that
+candy-eating would ruin any digestion.&rdquo;, &ldquo;Then you&rsquo;ve always
+been wrong, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Candy, well and
+honestly made, is excellent food at the proper time. The trouble is, both with
+candy and with the heavy, rich soda-waters, that people are continually filling
+up with them between meals. Now the stomach is a machine with a great amount of
+work to do, and is entitled to some consideration. Clyde, what would happen to
+the machines in your factory, if you didn&rsquo;t give them proper intervals of
+rest?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;d be very short-lived,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a curious thing about machinery which everybody knows but
+nobody understands: running a machine twenty-four hours a day for one week
+gives it harder wear than running it twelve hours a day for a month. It needs a
+regular rest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So with the machinery of digestion,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;The
+stomach and intestines have their hard work after meals. How are they to rest
+up, if an odd lot of candy or a slab of rich ice-cream soda come sliding down
+between whiles to be attended to? Eat your candy at the end of a meal, if you
+want it. It&rsquo;s a good desert. But whatever you eat, give your digestion a
+fair chance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can digest anything if you use Thingumbob Pills,&rdquo; observed Mr.
+Clyde sardonically. &ldquo;The newspapers say so.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the kind of doctrine that makes dyspeptics,&rdquo; returned
+Dr. Strong. &ldquo;The American stomach is the worst-abused organ in creation.
+Saliva is the true digestive. If people would take time to chew properly, half
+the dyspepsia-pill fakers would go out of business. If they&rsquo;d take time
+to exercise properly, the other half would disappear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Liver pills were my regular dependence a few years ago,&rdquo; remarked
+Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Since I took up hand-ball I haven&rsquo;t needed them. But I
+suppose that half the business men in town think they couldn&rsquo;t live
+without drugging themselves two or three times a week.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Undoubtedly. Tell the average American any sort of a lie in print, about
+his digestion, and he&rsquo;ll swallow it whole, together with the drug which
+the lie is intended to sell. Look at the Cascaret advertising. Its tendency is
+to induce, not an occasional recourse to Cascarets, but a steady use of them.
+Any man foolish enough to follow the advice of the advertisements would form a
+Cascaret habit and bring his digestion into a state of slavery. That sort of
+appeal has probably ruined more digestions and spoiled more tempers than any
+devil-dogma ever put into type.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Castor-oil is good enough for me,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless
+emphatically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s good enough for anybody&mdash;that is to say, bad enough and
+nasty enough so that there isn&rsquo;t much danger of its being abused. But
+these infernal sugar-coated candy cathartics get a hold on a man&rsquo;s
+intestinal organization so that it can&rsquo;t do its work without &lsquo;em,
+and, Lord knows, it can&rsquo;t stand their stimulus indefinitely. Then along
+comes appendicitis.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But some of the laxative medicines advertise to prevent
+appendicitis,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong&rsquo;s face was very grim. &ldquo;Yes, they advertise. Commercial
+travelers, because of their irregular habits, are great pill-guzzlers as a
+class. Appendicitis is a very common complaint among them. A Pittsburgh surgeon
+with a large practice among traveling men has kept records, and he believes
+that more than fifty per cent of the appendicitis cases he treats are caused by
+the &lsquo;liver-pill&rsquo; and &lsquo;steady-cathartic&rsquo; habit. He
+explains his theory in this way. The man begins taking the laxative to correct
+his bad habits of life. Little by little he increases his dose, as the
+digestive mechanism grows less responsive to the stimulus, until presently an
+overdose sets his intestines churning around with a violence never intended by
+nature. Then, under this abnormal peristalsis, as it is called, the appendix
+becomes infected, and there&rsquo;s nothing for it but the surgeon&rsquo;s
+knife.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would you have people run to the doctor and pay two dollars every time
+their stomach got a little out of kilter?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Sharpless shrewdly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Run to the doctor; run to the minister; run to the plumber; run anywhere
+so long as you run far enough and fast enough,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong with
+a smile. &ldquo;A mile a day at a good clip, or three miles of brisk walking
+would be the beginning of a readjustment. Less food more slowly eaten and no
+strong liquors would complete the cure in nine cases out of ten. The tenth case
+needs the doctor; not the newspaper-and-drug-store pill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But all patent medicines aren&rsquo;t bad, are they?&rdquo; asked Mrs.
+Clyde. &ldquo;Some have very good testimonials.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bought or wheedled. Any medicine which claims to <i>cure</i> is a fraud
+and a swindle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me, young man!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless.
+&ldquo;You doctors are prejudiced against patent medicines, but we old folks
+have used &lsquo;em long enough to know which are good and which are bad. Now I
+don&rsquo;t claim but what the Indian herb remedies and the &lsquo;ready
+reliefs&rsquo; and that lot are frauds. But my family was brought up on
+teething powders and soothing syrups.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you&rsquo;re fortunate,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong sternly, &ldquo;that
+none of them has turned out to be an opium fiend.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The instant he said it, he saw, with sharp regret, that his shaft had sped true
+to the mark. The clear, dark red of a hale old age faded from Grandma
+Sharpless&rsquo;s cheeks. Mr. Clyde shot a quick glance of warning at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And speaking of Indian remedies,&rdquo; went on the doctor glibly,
+&ldquo;I remember as a boy&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stop a minute,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless steadily. &ldquo;The truth
+isn&rsquo;t going to hurt me. Or, if it does hurt, maybe it&rsquo;s right it
+should. I had a younger brother who died in a sanitarium for drug-habit when he
+was twenty-four. As a child he pretty nearly lived on soothing syrups; had to
+have them all the time, because he was such a nervous little fellow; always
+having earache and stomach-ache, until he was eight or nine years old. Then he
+got better and became a strong, active boy, and a robust man. After his college
+course he went to Philadelphia, and was doing well when he contracted the
+morphine habit&mdash;how or why, we never knew. It killed him in three years.
+Do you think&mdash;is it possible that the soothing syrups&mdash;I&rsquo;ve
+heard they have morphine in them&mdash;had anything to do with his ruin?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, Mrs. Sharpless,&rdquo; said the other, very gently, &ldquo;I can
+only put it before you in this way. Here is one of the most subtle and
+enslaving of all drugs, morphine. It is fed to a child, in the plastic and
+formative years of life, regularly. What surer way could there be of planting
+the seeds of drug-habit? Suppose, for illustration, we substitute alcohol,
+which is far less dangerous. If you gave a child, from the time of his second
+year to his eighth, let us say, two or three drinks of whiskey every day, and
+that child, when grown up, developed into a drunkard, would you think it
+strange?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d think it strange if he didn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Apply the same logic to opium, or its derivative, morphine. There are a
+dozen preparations regularly used for children, containing opium, or morphine,
+such as Mrs. Winslow&rsquo;s &lsquo;Soothing Syrup,&rsquo; and Kopp&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Baby Friend.&rsquo; This is well known, and it is also a recognized fact
+that the morphine and opium habit is steadily increasing in this country.
+Isn&rsquo;t it reasonable to infer a connection between the two? Further, some
+of the highest authorities believe that the use of these drugs in childhood
+predisposes to the drink habit also, later in life. The nerves are unsettled;
+they are habituated to a morbid craving, and, at a later period, that craving
+is liable to return in a changed manifestation.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But a drug-store can&rsquo;t sell opium or morphine except on
+prescription, can it?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It can <i>in a patent medicine</i>,&rdquo; replied the doctor.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s one of the ugly phases of the drug business. Yet it&rsquo;s
+possible to find honest people who believe in these dopes and even give
+testimonials to them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some testimonials are hard to believe,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde,
+thankfully accepting the chance to shift the conversation to a less painful
+phase of the topic. &ldquo;Old Mrs. Dibble in our church is convinced that she
+owes her health to Hall&rsquo;s Catarrh Cure.&rdquo; Dr. Strong smiled
+sardonically. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the nostrum which offers one hundred dollars
+reward for any case it can&rsquo;t cure; and when a disgusted dupe tried to get
+the one hundred dollars, they said he hadn&rsquo;t given their remedy a
+sufficient trial: he&rsquo;d taken only twenty-odd bottles. So your friend
+thinks that a useless mixture of alcohol and iodide of potassium fixed her,
+does she?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why shouldn&rsquo;t she? She had a case of catarrh. She took three
+bottles of the medicine, and her catarrh is all gone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right. Let&rsquo;s extend her line of reasoning to some other cases.
+While old Mr. Barker, around on Halsey Street, was very ill with pneumonia last
+month, he fell out of bed and broke his arm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In two places,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;I saw him walking up
+the street yesterday, all trussed up like a chicken.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite recovered from pneumonia, however. Then there was little Mrs.
+Bowles: she had typhoid, you remember, and at the height of the fever a strange
+cat got into the room and frightened her into hysterics.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But she got well,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re up in the
+woods now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Exactly. Moral (according to Mrs. Dibble&rsquo;s experience with
+Hall&rsquo;s Catarrh Cure): for pneumonia, try a broken arm; in case of
+typhoid, set a cat on the patient.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde laughed. &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;People get well in
+spite of these patent medicines, rather than by virtue of them. <i>Post hoc,
+non propter hoc</i>, as our lawyer friends say.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got it. The human body keeps up a sort of drug-store of its
+own. As soon as disease fastens on it, it goes to work in a subtle and
+mysterious way, manufacturing a cure for that disease. If it&rsquo;s
+diphtheria, the body produces antitoxin, and we give it more to help it on. If
+it&rsquo;s jaundice, it produces a special quality of gastric juices to correct
+the evil conditions. In the vast majority of attacks, the body drives out the
+disease by its own efforts; yet, if the patient chances to have been idiot
+enough to take some quack &lsquo;cure&rsquo; the credit goes to that
+medicine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or to the doctor, if it&rsquo;s a doctor&rsquo;s case,&rdquo; suggested
+Grandma Sharpless, with a twinkle of malice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Show me a doctor who boasts &lsquo;I can cure you,&rsquo; whether by
+word of mouth or in print, and I&rsquo;ll show you a quack,&rdquo; returned the
+other warmly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what is a doctor for in a sick-room, if not to cure?&rdquo; asked
+Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is a captain for on a ship?&rdquo; countered Dr. Strong. &ldquo;He
+can&rsquo;t cure a storm, can he? But he can guide the vessel so that she can
+weather it. Well, our medical captains lose a good many commands; the storm is
+often too severe for human skill. But they save a good many, too, by skillful
+handling.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then there is no such thing as an actual cure, in medicine?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, yes. In a sense there are several. Antitoxin may be called a cure
+for diphtheria. Quinine is, to some extent, a specific in malaria. And
+Ehrlich&rsquo;s famous &lsquo;606&rsquo; has been remarkably, though not
+unfailingly, successful in that terrible blood-plague, born of debauchery,
+which strikes the innocent through the guilty. All these remedies, however,
+come, not through the quack and the drug-store, but through the physician and
+the laboratory.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;May not the patent medicines, also, help to guide the physical ship
+through the storm?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde, adopting the doctor&rsquo;s simile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On to the rocks,&rdquo; he replied quickly. &ldquo;Look at the
+consumption cures. To many consumptives, alcohol is deadly. Yet a wretched
+concoction like Duffy&rsquo;s Malt Whiskey, advertised to cure tuberculosis,
+flaunts its lies everywhere. And the law is powerless to check the suicidal
+course of the poor fools who believe and take it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, I thought the Pure Food Law stopped all that,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Clyde innocently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Pure Food Law! The life has been almost crushed out of it. Roosevelt
+whacked it over the head with his Referee Board, which granted immunity to the
+food poisoners, and afterward the Supreme Court and Wickersham treated it to a
+course of &lsquo;legal interpretations,&rsquo; which generally signify a way to
+get around a good law.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the patent medicines aren&rsquo;t allowed to make false claims any
+more, as I understand it,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That applies only to the label on the bottle. So you&rsquo;ll find that
+the words &lsquo;alcohol,&rsquo; &lsquo;opium,&rsquo; &lsquo;acetanilid,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;chloral,&rsquo; and other terms of poison, have sprouted forth there, in
+very small and inconspicuous type. But there&rsquo;s a free field for the false
+promises on sign-boards, in the street-cars, in the newspapers, everywhere.
+Look in the next drug-store window you pass and you&rsquo;ll see &lsquo;sure
+cures&rsquo; exploited in terms that would make Ananias feel like an
+amateur.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You make out a pretty poor character for the druggists, as a
+class,&rdquo; observed Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all. As a class, they&rsquo;re a decent, self-respecting,
+honorable lot of men.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then why do they stick to a bad trade?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong got to his feet. &ldquo;Let one of them answer,&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;Mr. Gormley, who runs the big store in the Arcade, usually passes here
+about this time, and I think I see him coming now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They can talk all they like,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless emphatically,
+as the doctor walked across to the front fence, &ldquo;but I wouldn&rsquo;t be
+without a bottle of cough syrup in the house.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor I without my headache tablets,&rdquo; added Mrs. Clyde.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d have had to give up the bridge party yesterday but for
+them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde shot a sharp glance, first, at his wife, then at her mother.
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;d like to see the labels on your particular brands of
+medicine,&rdquo; he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing bad in mine,&rdquo; asserted Mrs. Clyde.
+&ldquo;Mrs. Martin recommended them to me; she&rsquo;s been taking them for
+years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this point Dr. Strong returned, bringing with him a slim, elderly man, whose
+shrewd, wide eyes peered through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you want me to give away the secrets of my trade,&rdquo; he remarked
+good-humoredly, after the greetings. &ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t object to
+relieving my mind, once in a while. So shoot, and if I can&rsquo;t dodge,
+I&rsquo;ll yell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why do you deal in patent medicines if they&rsquo;re so bad?&rdquo;
+asked Grandma Sharpless bluntly. &ldquo;Is there such a big profit in
+them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No profit, worth speaking of,&rdquo; replied Mr. Gormley. &ldquo;Though
+you&rsquo;ll note that I haven&rsquo;t admitted they are bad&mdash;as
+yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The bulk of your trade is in that class of goods, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+queried Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Worse luck, it is. They&rsquo;ve got us through their hold on the
+public. And they not only force us to be their agents, but they grind us down
+to the very smallest profit; sometimes less than the cost of doing
+business.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you aren&rsquo;t compelled to deal in their medicines,&rdquo;
+objected Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Practically I am. My really profitable trade is in filling
+prescriptions. There I can legitimately charge, not only for the drugs, but
+also for my special technical skill and knowledge. But in order to maintain my
+prescription trade I must keep people coming to my store. And they won&rsquo;t
+come unless I carry what they demand in the way of patent medicines.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then there is a legitimate demand for patent medicines?&rdquo; said Mr.
+Clyde quickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Legitimate? Hardly. It&rsquo;s purely an inspired demand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What makes it persist, then?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The newspapers. The patent-medicine advertisers fill the daily columns
+with their claims, and create a demand by the force of repeated falsehood. Do
+you know the universal formula for the cost of patent cures? Here it is: Drugs,
+3 per cent; manufacturing plant, 7 per cent; printing ink, 90 per cent.
+It&rsquo;s a sickening business. If I could afford it, I&rsquo;d break loose
+like that fellow McConnell in Chicago and put a placard of warning in my show
+window. Here&rsquo;s a copy of the one he displays in his drug-store.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking a card from his pocket, Mr. Gormley held it up for the circle to read.
+The inscription was:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+&ldquo;Please do not ask us what <i>any old patent, medicine</i> is worth,
+for you embarrass us, as our honest answer must be that <i>it is
+worthless</i>.<br />
+    &ldquo;If you mean to ask us at what price we sell it, that is an entirely
+different proposition. When sick, consult a good physician. It is the only
+proper course. And you will find it cheaper in the end than self-medication
+with <i>worthless &lsquo;patent&rsquo; nostrums.</i>&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Has that killed his trade in quackery?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing can kill that. It has cut it down by half, though. It&rsquo;s a
+peculiar and disheartening fact that the public will believe the paid lie of a
+newspaper advertisement and disregard the plain truth from an expert. And see
+here, Dr. Strong, when you doctors get together and roast the pharmaceutical
+trade, just remember that it&rsquo;s really the newspapers and not the
+drug-stores that sell patent medicines.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are all of them so bad?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All that claim to <i>cure</i>. They&rsquo;re either frauds, appealing to
+the appetite by a stiff allowance of booze, like Swamp Root and Peruna, or
+disguised dopes,&mdash;opium, hasheesh or chloral,&mdash;masquerading as
+soothing syrups, cough medicines, and consumption cures; or artificial devices
+for giving yourself heart disease by the use of coal-tar chemicals in the
+headache powders and anti-pain pills.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you can&rsquo;t make me believe, Mr. Drug-man,&rdquo; said Grandma
+Sharpless with a belligerent shake of her head, &ldquo;that a patent medicine
+which keeps on being in demand for years, on its own merits, hasn&rsquo;t
+something good in it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, ma&rsquo;am, I can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; agreed the visitor. &ldquo;I
+wouldn&rsquo;t want to. There isn&rsquo;t any such patent medicine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s hundreds of &lsquo;em,&rdquo; contradicted the old lady,
+with the exaggeration of the disputant who finds the ground dropping away from
+underfoot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not that sell on their own merits. Advertising and more advertising and
+still more advertising is all that does it. Let any one of them drop out of the
+newspapers and off the bill-boards, and the demand for it would be dead in a
+year.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet, as a student of business conditions,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m inclined to side with Mrs. Sharpless and believe that any line
+of goods which has come down from yesterday to to-day must have some
+merit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The druggist took off his glasses, wiped them and waved them in the air, with a
+flourish.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+And all our yesterdays have lighted fools<br />
+The way to dusty death,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+he quoted sonorously. &ldquo;We think ourselves heirs to the wisdom of the
+ages, without stopping to consider that we&rsquo;re heirs to the foolishness,
+also. We&rsquo;re gulled by the printed lie about Doan&rsquo;s Kidney Pills,
+just as our fathers were by the cart-tail oratory of the itinerant quack who
+sold the &lsquo;Wonderful Indian Secrets of Life&rsquo; at one dollar per
+bottle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I hesitate to admit it,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, with a little
+laugh, &ldquo;but we always have a few of the old remedies about.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Suppose you name some of them over,&rdquo; suggested the druggist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Usually I keep some One-Night Cough Cure in the house. That&rsquo;s
+harmless, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The druggist glanced at Dr. Strong, and they both grinned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It <i>might</i> be harmless,&rdquo; said the druggist mildly, &ldquo;if
+it didn&rsquo;t contain both morphine and hasheesh.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Goodness!&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, horrified. &ldquo;How could one
+suppose&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By reading the label carefully,&rdquo; interjected Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;Anything else?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me think. I&rsquo;ve always considered Jayne&rsquo;s Expectorant
+good for the children when they have a cold.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tastes differ,&rdquo; observed the druggist philosophically. &ldquo;I
+wouldn&rsquo;t consider opium good for <i>my</i> children inside or outside of
+any expectorant. Next!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the names <i>sound</i> so innocent!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m almost afraid to tell any more. But we always have Rexall
+Cholera Cure on hand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Had much cholera in the house lately?&rdquo; inquired the druggist, with
+an affectation of extreme interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course it&rsquo;s only for stomach-ache,&rdquo; explained Mrs. Clyde.
+&ldquo;It certainly does cure the pain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not cure,&mdash;drug it into unconsciousness,&rdquo; amended Mr.
+Gormley. &ldquo;The opium in it does that. Rather a heroic remedy, opium, for a
+little stomach-ache, don&rsquo;t you think?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What have you got to say against Kohler&rsquo;s One-Night Cough Cure
+that I always keep by me?&rdquo; demanded Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Gormley beamed on her in deprecatory good nature. &ldquo;Who? Me? Gracious!
+I&rsquo;ve got nothing to say against it worse than it says against itself, on
+its label. Morphine, chloroform, and hasheesh. What more <i>is</i> there to
+say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How long has this house been full of assorted poisons?&rdquo; asked Mr.
+Clyde suddenly of his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, Tom,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always been careful
+about using them for the children. Personally, I never touch patent
+medicines.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at this her mother, smarting under their caller&rsquo;s criticism of her
+cough syrup, turned on her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you call those headache tablets you take?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Those? They aren&rsquo;t a patent medicine. They&rsquo;re Anti-kamnia, a
+physician&rsquo;s prescription.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; a fine prescription they are!&rdquo; said the druggist. &ldquo;Did
+you ever read the Anti-kamnia booklet? For whole-souled, able-bodied,
+fore-and-aft, up-and-down stairs professional lying, it has got most of the
+patent medicines relegated to the infant class. Harmless, they say! I&rsquo;ve
+seen a woman take two of those things and hardly get out of the door before
+they got in their fine work on her heart and over she went like a shot
+rabbit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not dead!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; but it was touch and go with her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s in that; opium, too?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; a coal-tar chemical which puts a clamp on the heart action. One or
+another of the coal-tar drugs is in all the headache powders. There&rsquo;s a
+long list of deaths from them, not to mention cases of drug-habit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Habit?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Do you mean I&rsquo;m in danger
+of not being able to get along without the tablets?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you take them steadily you certainly are. If you take them
+occasionally, you&rsquo;re only in danger of dropping dead one of these
+days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s chin abruptly assumed a prominence which he seldom permitted
+it. &ldquo;Well, that settles <i>that</i>,&rdquo; he observed; and it was
+entirely unnecessary for any one present to ask any amplification of the
+remark. Mrs. Clyde looked at her mother for sympathy&mdash;and didn&rsquo;t get
+any.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Whenever I see a woman come into the shop,&rdquo; continued the
+druggist, &ldquo;with a whitey-blue complexion and little gray&rsquo; flabby
+wrinkles under her eyes, I know without asking what <i>she</i> wants.
+She&rsquo;s a headache-powder fiend.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That queer look they have is from deterioration of the blood,&rdquo;
+said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;The acetanilid or acetphenetidin or whatever the
+coal-tar derivative may be, seems to kill the red corpuscles. In extreme cases
+of this I&rsquo;ve seen blood the color of muddy water.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It certainly makes a fright of a woman. &lsquo;Orangeine&rsquo; gets a
+lot of &lsquo;em. You&rsquo; ve seen its advertisements in the street-cars. The
+owner of Orangeine, a Chicago man, got the habit himself: used fairly to live
+on the stuff, until pop! went his heart. He&rsquo;s a living, or, rather a dead
+illustration of what his own dope will do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what are you to do for a splitting headache?&rdquo; queried Mrs.
+Clyde, turning to Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, unless I know what causes it,&rdquo; said Dr.
+Strong. &ldquo;Headache isn&rsquo;t a disease. It&rsquo;s a symptom, a danger
+signal. It&rsquo;s the body&rsquo;s way of crying for help. Drugs don&rsquo;t
+cure a headache. They simply interrupt it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What with the headache-powders breeding the drug habit, and the
+consumption cures and cough medicines making dope fiends, and the malt whiskey
+cures and Perunas furnishing quiet joy to the temperance trade, I sometimes
+wonder what we&rsquo;re coming to,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Gormley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin thoughtfully. &ldquo;But poor people who can&rsquo;t
+afford a doctor have no recourse but to patent medicines,&rdquo; said he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t afford a doctor!&rdquo; exclaimed Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Why,
+don&rsquo;t you know that nostrum-taking is the most expensive form of
+treatment? Did you ever happen to see A. B. Frost&rsquo;s powerful cartoon
+called &lsquo;Her Last Dollar&rsquo;? A woman, thin, bent, and ravaged with
+disease, is buying, across the counter of a country store, a bottle of some
+kind of &lsquo;sure cure,&rsquo; from the merchant, who serves her with a
+smile, half-pitying, half-cynical, while her two ragged children, with hunger
+and hope in their pinched faces, gaze wistfully at the food in the glass cases.
+There&rsquo;s the whole tragedy of a wasted life in that picture. &lsquo;Her
+Last Dollar!&rsquo; That&rsquo;s what the patent medicine is after. A doctor at
+least <i>tries</i> to cure. But the patent medicine shark&rsquo;s policy is to
+keep the sufferer buying as long as there is a dollar left to buy with. Why, a
+nostrum that advertises heavily has got to sell six bottles or seven to each
+victim before the cost of catching that victim is defrayed. After that, the
+profits. Since you&rsquo;ve brought up the matter of expense, I&rsquo;ll give
+you an instance from your own household, Clyde.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here! What&rsquo;s this?&rdquo; cried Mr. Clyde, sitting up straight.
+&ldquo;More patent dosing?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One of the servants,&mdash;Maggie, the nurse. I&rsquo;ve got her whole
+medical history and she&rsquo;s a prime example of the Dupe&rsquo;s Progress.
+She&rsquo;s run the gamut of fake cures.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something must have been the matter with her to start her off,
+though,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the joke&mdash;or would be if it weren&rsquo;t pathetic.
+She started out by having headaches. Not knowing any better, she took
+headache-powders.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One for you, Myra,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Clyde to his wife, in an aside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bad heart action and difficulty in breathing&mdash;the natural
+result&mdash;scared her into the belief that she had heart trouble. Impetus was
+given to this notion by an advertisement which she found in a weekly, a
+religious weekly (God save the mark!), advising her not to drop dead of heart
+disease. To avoid this awful fate, which was illustrated by a sprightly sketch
+of a man falling flat on the sidewalk, she was earnestly implored to try
+Kinsman&rsquo;s heart remedy. She did so, and, of course, got worse, since the
+&lsquo;remedy&rsquo; was merely a swindle. About this time Maggie&rsquo;s
+stomach began to &lsquo;act up,&rsquo; partly from the medicines, partly from
+the original trouble which caused her headaches.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t told us what that was, Strong,&rdquo; remarked Mr.
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Later. Maggie now developed catarrh of the stomach, superinduced by
+reading one of old Dr. Hartman&rsquo;s Peruna ads. She took seven bottles of
+Peruna, and it cheered her up quite a bit&mdash;temporarily and
+alcoholically.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it was <i>that</i> that I smelled on her breath. And I accused her
+of drinking,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde remorsefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So she had been; raw alcohol, flavored with a little caramel and
+doctored up with a few drugs. Toward the close of her Peruna career, her
+stomach became pretty sensitive. Also, as she wasn&rsquo;t accustomed to strong
+liquor, her kidneys were affected somewhat. In her daily paper she read a
+clarion call from Dr. Kilmer of the Swamp Root swindle (the real Dr. Kilmer
+quit Swamp Root to become a cancer quack, by the way), which seemed to her to
+diagnose her case exactly. So she &lsquo;tanked up&rsquo; some more on that
+brand of intoxicant. Since she was constantly drugging herself, the natural
+resistance of her body was weakened, and she got a bad cold. The cough scared
+her almost to death; or rather, the consumption cure advertisements which she
+took to reading did; and she spent a few dollars on the fake factory which
+turns out Dr. King&rsquo;s New Discovery. This proving worthless, she switched
+to Piso&rsquo;s Cure and added the hasheesh habit to alcoholism. By this time
+she had acquired a fine, typical case of patent-medicine dyspepsia. That idea
+never occurred to her, though. She next tried Dr. Miles&rsquo;s Anti-Pain Pills
+(more acetanilid), and finally decided&mdash;having read some advertising
+literature on the subject&mdash;that she had cancer. And the reason she was
+leaving you, Mrs. Clyde, was that she had decided to go to a scoundrelly quack
+named Johnson who conducts a cancer institute in Kansas City, where he fleeces
+unfortunates out of their money on the pretense that he can cure cancer without
+the use of the knife.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you stop her?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ve stopped her! You&rsquo;ll find the remains of her patent
+medicines in the ash-barrel. I flatter myself I&rsquo;ve fixed <i>her</i>
+case.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grandma Sharpless gazed at him solemnly. &ldquo;&lsquo;Any doctor who claims to
+cure is a quack.&rsquo; Quotation from Dr. Strong,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nearly had me there,&rdquo; admitted he. &ldquo;Fortunately I
+didn&rsquo;t use the word &lsquo;cure.&rsquo; It wasn&rsquo;t a case of cure.
+It was a case of correcting a stupid, disastrous little blunder in
+mathematics.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mathematics, eh?&rdquo; repeated Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Have you reached the
+point where you treat disease by algebra, and triangulate a patient for an
+operation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not quite that. But poor Maggie suffered all her troubles solely through
+an error in figuring by an incompetent man. A year ago she had trouble with her
+eyes. Instead of going to a good oculist she went to one of these stores which
+offer examinations free, and take it out in the price of the glasses. The
+examination is worth just what free things usually are worth&mdash;or less.
+They sold her a pair of glasses for two dollars. The glasses were figured out
+some fifty degrees wrong, for her error of vision, which was very slight,
+anyway. The nervous strain caused by the effort of the eyes to accommodate
+themselves to the false glasses and, later, the accumulated mass of drugs with
+which she&rsquo;s been insulting her insides, are all that&rsquo;s the matter
+with Maggie.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is, the glasses caused the headaches, and the patent medicines the
+stomach derangement,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the general break up, though the glasses may have started both
+before the nostrums ever got in their evil work. Nowadays, the wise doctor,
+having an obscure stomach trouble to deal with, in the absence of other
+explanation, looks to the eyes. Eyestrain has a most potent and far-reaching
+influence on digestion. I know of one case of chronic dyspepsia, of a
+year&rsquo;s standing, completely cured by a change of eyeglasses.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As a financial proposition,&rdquo; said Mr. Gormley, &ldquo;your nurse
+must have come out at the wrong end of the horn.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Decidedly,&rdquo; confirmed the doctor. &ldquo;She spent on patent
+medicines about forty dollars. The cancer quack would have got at least a
+hundred dollars out of her, not counting her railroad fare. Two hundred dollars
+would be a fair estimate of her little health-excursion among the quacks. Any
+good physician would have sent her to an oculist, who would have fitted proper
+glasses and saved all that expense and drugging. The entire bill for doctor,
+oculist, and glasses might have been twenty-five dollars. Yet they defend
+patent medicines on the ground that they&rsquo;re the &lsquo;poor man&rsquo;s
+doctor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Gormley rose. &ldquo;Poor man&rsquo;s undertaker, rather,&rdquo; he
+amended. &ldquo;Well, having sufficiently blackguarded my own business, I think
+I&rsquo;ll go. Here&rsquo;s the whole thing summed up, as I see it. It pays to
+go to the doctor first and the druggist afterward; not to the druggist first
+and the doctor afterward.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong walked over to the gate with him. On his return Mrs. Clyde remarked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What an interesting, thoughtful man. Are most druggists like
+that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re not all philosophers of the trade, like Gormley,&rdquo;
+said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;but they have to be pretty intelligent before they can
+pass the Pharmaceutical Board in this state, and put out their colored
+lights.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve often meant to ask what the green and red lights in front of
+a drug-store stand for,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;What is their
+derivation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Green is the official color of medical science,&rdquo; explained the
+doctor. &ldquo;The green flag, you know, indicates the hospital corps in
+war-time; and the degree of M.D. is signalized by a green hood in academic
+functions.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the red globe on the other side of the store: what does that
+mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Danger,&rdquo; replied Dr. Strong grimly.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>V.<br />
+THE MAGIC LENS</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;N</span>o good fairy had
+ever bestowed such a gift as this magic lens,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, whisking
+Bettina up from her seat by the window and setting her on his knee. &ldquo;It
+was most marvelously and delicately made, and furnished with a lightning-quick
+intelligence of its own. Everything that went on around it, it reported to its
+fortunate possessor as swiftly as thought flies through that lively little
+brain of yours. It earned its owner&rsquo;s livelihood for him; it gave him
+three fourths of his enjoyments and amusements; it laid before him the
+wonderful things done and being done all over the world; it guided all his
+life. And all that it required was a little reasonable care, and such
+consideration as a man would show to the horse that worked for him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At the beginning you said it wasn&rsquo;t a fairytale,&rdquo; accused
+Bettina, with the gravity which five years considers befitting such an
+occasion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wait. Because the owner of the magic lens found that it obeyed all his
+orders so readily and faithfully, he began to impose on it. He made it work
+very hard when it was tired. He set tasks for it to perform under very
+difficult conditions. At times when it should have been resting, he compelled
+it to minister to his amusements. When it complained, he made light of its
+trouble.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Could it speak?&rdquo; inquired the little auditor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At least it had a way of making known its wants. In everything which
+concerned itself it was keenly intelligent, and knew what was good and bad for
+it, as well as what was good and bad for its owner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t it stop working for him if he was so bad to it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only as an extreme measure. But presently, in this case, it threatened
+to stop. So the owner took it to a cheap and poor repair-shop, where the
+repairer put a little oil in it to make it go on working. For a time it went
+on. Then, one morning, the owner woke up and cried out with a terrible fear.
+For the magic light in the magic lens was gone. So for that foolish man there
+was no work to do nor play to enjoy. The world was blotted out for him. He
+could not know what was going on about him, except by hearsay. No more was the
+sky blue for him, or the trees green, or the flowers bright; and the faces of
+his friends meant nothing. He had thrown away the most beautiful and wonderful
+of all gifts. Because it is a gift bestowed on nearly all of us, most of us
+forgot the wonder and the beauty of it. So, Honorable Miss Twinkles, do you
+beware how you treat the magic lens which is given to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To me?&rdquo; cried the child; and then, with a little squeal of
+comprehension: &ldquo;Oh, I know! My eyes. That&rsquo;s the magic lens.
+Isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that about Bettykin&rsquo;s eyes?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde,
+who had come in quietly, and had heard the finish of the allegory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been examining them,&rdquo; explained Dr. Strong, &ldquo;and
+the story was reward of merit for her going through with it like a little
+soldier.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Examining her eyes? Any particular reason?&rdquo; asked the father
+anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very particular. Mrs. Clyde wishes to send her to kindergarten for a
+year before she enters the public school. No child ought to begin school
+without a thorough test of vision.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did the test show in Bettykin&rsquo;s case?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing except the defects of heredity.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Heredity? My sight is pretty good; and Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s is still
+better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You two are not the Cherub&rsquo;s only ancestors, however,&rdquo;
+smiled the physician. &ldquo;And you can hardly expect one or two generations
+to recast as delicate a bit of mechanism as the eye, which has been built up
+through millions of years of slow development. However, despite the natural
+deficiencies, there&rsquo;s no reason in Betty why she shouldn&rsquo;t start in
+at kindergarten next term, provided there isn&rsquo;t any in the kindergarten
+itself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde studied the non-committal face of his &ldquo;Chinese
+physician,&rdquo; as he was given to calling Dr. Strong since the latter had
+undertaken to safeguard the health of his household on the Oriental basis of
+being paid to keep the family well and sound. &ldquo;Something is wrong with
+the school,&rdquo; he decided.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Read what it says of itself in that first paragraph,&rdquo; replied Dr.
+Strong, handing him a rather pretentious little booklet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the prospectus of their &ldquo;new and scientific kindergarten,&rdquo; the
+Misses Sarsfield warmly congratulated themselves and their prospective pupils,
+primarily, upon the physical advantages of their school building which included
+a large work-and-play room, &ldquo;with generous window space on all sides, and
+finished throughout in pure, glazed white.&rdquo; This description the head of
+the Clyde household read over twice; then he stepped to the door to intercept
+Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s mother who was passing by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, Grandma,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Our Chinese tyrant had diagnosed
+something wrong with that first page. Do you discover any kink in it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not I,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless, after reading it. &ldquo;Nor in the
+place itself. I called there yesterday. It is a beautiful room; everything as
+shiny and clean as a pin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yesterday was cloudy,&rdquo; observed the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was. Yet there wasn&rsquo;t a corner of the place that wasn&rsquo;t
+flooded with light,&rdquo; declared Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And on a clear day, with the sun pouring in from all sides and being
+flashed back from those shiny, white walls, the unfortunate inmates would be
+absolutely dazzled.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you mean to say that God&rsquo;s pure sunlight can hurt any
+one?&rdquo; challenged Mrs. Sharpless, who was rather given to citing the Deity
+as support for her own side of any question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you ever hear of snow-blindness?&rdquo; countered the physician.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen it in the North,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not a pleasant thing to see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Glazed white walls would give a very fair imitation of snow-glare. Too
+much light is as bad as too little. Those walls should be tinted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet it says here,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, referring to his circular,
+&ldquo;that the &lsquo;Misses Sarsfield will conduct their institution on the
+most improved Froebelian principles.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Froebel was a great man and a wise one,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;His kindergarten system has revolutionized all teaching. But he lived
+before the age of hygienic knowledge. I suppose that no other man has wrought
+so much disaster to the human eye as he.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a pretty broad statement, Strong,&rdquo; objected Air.
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it? Look at the evidence. North Germany is the place where Froebel
+first developed his system. Seventy-five per cent of the population are
+defective of vision. Even the American children of North German immigrants show
+a distinct excess of eye defects. You&rsquo;ve seen the comic pictures
+representing Boston children as wearing huge goggles?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you making an argument out of a funny-paper joke?&rdquo; queried
+Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why not? It wouldn&rsquo;t be a joke if it hadn&rsquo;t some foundation
+in fact. The kindergarten system got its start in America in Boston. Boston has
+the worst eyesight of any American city; impaired vision has even become
+hereditary there. To return to Germany: if you want a shock, look up the
+records of suicides among school-children there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But surely that has no connection with the eyes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Surely it has,&rdquo; controverted Dr. Strong. &ldquo;The eye is the
+most nervous of all the organs; and nothing will break down the nervous system
+in general more swiftly and surely than eye-strain. Even in this country we are
+raising up a generation of neurasthenic youngsters, largely from neglect of
+their eyes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Still, we&rsquo;ve got to educate our children,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And we&rsquo;ve got to take the utmost precautions lest the education
+cost more than it is worth, in acquired defects.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For my part,&rdquo; announced Grandma Sharpless, &ldquo;I believe in
+early schooling and in children learning to be useful. At the Sarsfield school
+there were little girls no older that Bettina, who were doing needlework
+beautifully; fine needlework at that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fine needlework!&rdquo; exploded Dr. Strong in a tone which Grandma
+Sharpless afterwards described as &ldquo;damnless swearing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s enough! See here, Clyde. Betty goes to that kindergarten
+only over my dead job.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, well,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, amazed at the quite unwonted excitement
+which the other exhibited, &ldquo;if you&rsquo;re dealing in ultimatums,
+I&rsquo;ll drop out and leave the stricken field to Mrs. Clyde. This
+kindergarten scheme is hers. Wait. I&rsquo;ll bring her. I think she just came
+in.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What am I to fight with you about, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde,
+appearing at the door, a vision of trim prettiness in her furs and veil.
+&ldquo;Tom didn&rsquo;t tell me the <i>casus belli</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nobody in this house,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong appealing to her,
+&ldquo;seems to deem the human eye entitled to the slightest consideration.
+You&rsquo;ve never worn glasses; therefore you must have respected your own
+eyesight enough to&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped abruptly and scowled into Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s smiling face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well! what&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;You look as
+if you were going to bite.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you looking cross-eyed for?&rdquo; the Health Master shot at
+her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not! Oh, it&rsquo;s this veil, I suppose.&rdquo; She lifted
+the heavy polka-dotted screen and tucked it over her hat. &ldquo;There,
+that&rsquo;s more comfortable!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it!&rdquo; said the physician with an emphasis of sardonicism.
+&ldquo;You surprise me by admitting that much. How long have you been wearing
+that instrument of torture?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, two hours. Perhaps three. But, Dr. Strong, it doesn&rsquo;t hurt my
+eyes at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor your head?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I <i>have</i> got a little headache,&rdquo; she confessed. &ldquo;To
+think that a supposedly intelligent woman who has reached the age
+of&mdash;of&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thirty-eight,&rdquo; said she, laughing. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not ashamed of
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;Thirty-eight, without having to wear glasses, should deliberately
+abuse her hard-working vision by distorting it! See here,&rdquo; he interrupted
+himself, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s quite evident that I haven&rsquo;t been living up to
+the terms of my employment. One of these evenings we&rsquo;re going to have in
+this household a short but sharp lecture and symposium on eyes. I&rsquo;ll give
+the lecture; and I suspect that this family will furnish the symposium&mdash;of
+horrible examples. Where&rsquo;s Julia? As she&rsquo;s the family Committee on
+School Conditions, I expect to get some material from her, too. Meantime, Mrs.
+Clyde, no kindergarten for Betty kin, if you please. Or, in any case, not that
+kindergarten.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No further ocular demonstrations were made by Dr. Strong for several days.
+Then, one evening, he came into the library where the whole family was sitting.
+Grandma Sharpless, in the old-fashioned rocker, next a stand from which an
+old-fashioned student-lamp dispensed its benign rays, was holding up, with some
+degree of effort, a rather heavy book to the line of her vision. Opposite her a
+soft easychair contained Robin, other-wise Bobs, involuted like a currant-worm
+after a dose of Paris green, and imaginatively treading, with the feet of
+enchantment, virgin expanses of forest in the wake of Mr. Stewart White.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Julia, alias &ldquo;Junkum,&rdquo; his twin, was struggling against the demon
+of ill chance as embodied in a game of solitaire, far over in a dim corner.
+Geography enchained the mind of eight-year-old Charles, also his eyes, and
+apparently his nose, which was stuck far down into the mapped page. Near him
+his father, with chin doubled down over a stiff collar, was internally begging
+leave to differ with the editorial opinions of his favorite paper; while Mrs.
+Clyde, under the direct glare of a side-wall electric cluster, unshaded, was
+perusing a glazed-paper magazine, which threw upon her face a strong reflected
+light. Before the fire Bettykin was retailing to her most intelligent doll the
+allegory of the Magic Lens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Enter, upon this scene of domestic peace, the spirit of devastation in the
+person of the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The horrible examples being now on exhibit,&rdquo; he remarked from the
+doorway, &ldquo;our symposium on eyes will begin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He says we&rsquo;re a hor&rsquo;ble example, Susan Nipper,&rdquo; said
+Bettina confidentially, to her doll.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I apologize, Bettykin,&rdquo; returned the doctor.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re the only two sensible people in the room.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Julia promptly rose, lifted the stand with her cards on it, carried it to the
+center of the library, and planted it so that the central light fell across it
+from a little behind her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One recruit to the side of common sense,&rdquo; observed the physician.
+&ldquo;Next!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s wrong with me?&rdquo; demanded Mr. Clyde, looking up.
+&ldquo;Newspaper print?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Newspaper print is an unavoidable evil, and by no means the worst
+example of Gutenberg&rsquo;s art. No; the trouble with you is that your neck is
+so scrunched down into a tight collar as to shut off a proper blood supply from
+your head. Don&rsquo;t your eyes feel bungy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A little. What am I going to do? I can&rsquo;t sit around after dinner
+with no collar on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sit up straight, then; stick your neck up out of your collar and give it
+play. Emulate the attentive turtle! And you, Bobs, stop imitating an anchovy.
+Uncurl! <i>Uncurl!!</i>&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a sigh, Robin straightened himself out. &ldquo;I was so
+comfortable,&rdquo; he complained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, you weren&rsquo;t. You were only absorbed. The veins on your temples
+are fairly bulging. You might as well try to read standing on your head. Get a
+straight-backed chair, and you&rsquo;re all right. I&rsquo;m glad to see that
+you follow Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s good example in reading by a
+student-lamp.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s my own lamp,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;Seventy
+years has at least taught me how to read.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How, but not what,&rdquo; answered the Health Master.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a bad book you&rsquo;re reading.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grandma Sharpless achieved the proud athletic feat of bounding from her chair
+without the perceptible movement of a muscle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Young man!&rdquo; she exclaimed in a shaking voice, &ldquo;do you know
+what book that is?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care what book&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is the Bible.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it? Well, Heaven inspired the writer, but not the printer. Text such
+as that ought to be prohibited by law. Isn&rsquo;t there a passage in that
+Bible, &lsquo;Having eyes, ye see not&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, there is,&rdquo; snapped Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;And my eyes have
+been seeing and seeing straight for a good many more years than yours.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The more credit to them and the less to you, if you&rsquo;ve maltreated
+them with such sight-murdering print as that. Haven&rsquo;t you another
+Bible?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grandma Sharpless sat down again. &ldquo;I have another,&rdquo; she said,
+&ldquo;with large print; but it&rsquo;s so heavy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Prescription: one reading-stand. Now, Mrs. Clyde.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mother of the family looked up from her magazine with a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t say that I haven&rsquo;t large print or a good
+light,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The print is good, but the paper bad,&rdquo; said the Health Master.
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;ve kept the worst offender for
+the last.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Charley detached his nose from his geography and looked up. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
+me, I suppose,&rdquo; he remarked pessimistically and ungrammatically.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m always coming in for something special. But I can&rsquo;t make
+anything out of these old maps without digging my face down into
+&lsquo;em.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;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&rsquo;t playing football this year?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Manny&rdquo; was the oldest son of the family, then away at school.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mother wanted him not to, I suppose,&rdquo; said the boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Dr. Strong persuaded me that the
+development he would get out of the game would be worth the risk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was his eyes,&rdquo; said the Health Master. &ldquo;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&mdash;or rather his teachers&mdash;abused
+his eyes with just such outrageous demands as that geography of yours. And
+while the eye responded then, it is demanding payment now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But a kid&rsquo;s got to study, hasn&rsquo;t he? Else he won&rsquo;t
+keep up,&rdquo; put in Bobs, much interested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at the expense of the most important of his senses,&rdquo; returned
+the Health Master. &ldquo;And never at night, at Charley&rsquo;s age, or even
+yours, Bobs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then he gets dropped from his classes,&rdquo; objected Bobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if other children go ahead, ours must,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps the others who go ahead now won&rsquo;t keep ahead later. There
+is a sentence in Wood and Woodruff&rsquo;s textbook on the eye<a href="#fn1" name="fnref1" id="fnref1"><sup>[1]</sup></a>
+which every public-school teacher and every parent should learn by heart. It
+runs like this: &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="fn1" id="fn1"></a> <a href="#fnref1">[1]</a>
+Commoner Diseases of the Eye, by Casey A. Wood and Thomas A. Woodruff, pp. 418,
+419.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Antelope?&rdquo; put in Bettina, who was getting weary of her exclusion
+from the topic. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got a picture of that. It&rsquo;s a little
+deer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So are you, Toddles,&rdquo; cried the doctor, seizing upon her with one
+hand and Susan Nipper with the other, and setting one on each shoulder,
+&ldquo;and we&rsquo;re going to keep those very bright twinklers of yours just
+as fit&rsquo;as possible, both to see and be seen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what of Charley and the twins?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Everything right, so far. They&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In my childhood,&rdquo; observed Mrs. Sharpless, with the finality
+proper to that classic introductory phrase, &ldquo;we thought more of our
+brains than our eyes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;t under half the strain that
+it is in our modern, print-crowded world. The fact is, we&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand what you are getting at,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Clyde, letting her magazine drop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you tried walking on all fours lately?&rdquo; inquired the
+physician.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not for a number of years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Presumably you would find it awkward. Yet if, through some pressure of
+necessity, the human race should have to return to the quadrupedal method, the
+alteration in life would be less radical than we have imposed upon our vision
+in the last few generations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sounds like flat nonsense to me,&rdquo; said the downright Clyde.
+&ldquo;We see just as all our ancestors saw.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Think again. Our ancestors, back a very few generations, were an outdoor
+race living in a world of wide horizons. Their eyes could range over far
+distances, unchecked, instead of being hemmed in most of the time by four
+walls. They were farsighted. Indeed, their survival depended upon their being
+far-sighted; like the animals which they killed or which killed them, according
+as the human or the beast had the best eyes. Nowadays, in order to live we must
+read and write. That is, the primal demand upon the eye is that it shall see
+keenly near at hand instead of far off. The whole hereditary training of the
+organ has been inverted, as if a mountaineer should be set to diving for
+pearls; and the poor thing hasn&rsquo;t had time to adjust itself yet. We
+employ our vision for close work ten times as much as we did a hundred years
+ago and ten thousand times as much as we did ten thousand years ago. But the
+influence of those ten thousand years is still strong upon us, and the human
+child is born with the eye of a savage or an animal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What kind of an animal&rsquo;s eyes have I got?&rdquo; demanded Bettina.
+&ldquo;A antelope&rsquo;s?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Almost as far-sighted,&rdquo; returned the Health Master, wriggling out
+from under her and catching her expertly as she fell. &ldquo;And how do you
+think an antelope would be doing fine needlework in a kindergarten?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, Strong, few of us go blind,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;And of
+those who do, nearly half are needlessly so. That we aren&rsquo;t all groping,
+sightless, about the earth is due to the marvelous adaptability of our eyes.
+And it is exactly upon that adaptability that we are so prone to impose;
+working a willing horse to death. In the young the muscles of accommodation,
+whereby the vision is focused, are almost incredibly powerful; far more so than
+in the adult. The Cherub, here, could force her vision to almost any kind of
+work and the eye would not complain much&mdash;at this time. But later on the
+effects would be manifest. Therefore we have to watch the eye very closely
+until it begins to grow old, which is at about twelve years or so. In the adult
+the eye very readily lets its owner know if anything is wrong. Only fools
+disregard that warning. But in the developing years we must see to it that
+those muscles, set to the task of overcoming generations of custom, do not
+overwork and upset the whole nervous organization. Sometimes glasses are
+necessary; usually, only care.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In a few generations we&rsquo;ll all have four eyes, won&rsquo;t
+we?&rdquo; asked Bobs, making a pair of mock spectacles with his circled
+fingers and thumbs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, let&rsquo;s hope not. The cartoonists of prophecy always give the
+future man spectacles. But I believe that the tendency will be the other way,
+and that, by evolution to meet new conditions, the eye will fit itself for its
+work, unaided, in time. Meantime, we have to pay the penalty of the change.
+That&rsquo;s a small price for living in this wonderful century.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You say that half the blind are needlessly so,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+&ldquo;Is that from preventable disease?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About forty per cent, of the wholly blind. But the half-blind and the
+nervously wrecked victims of eye-strain owe their woes generally to sheer
+carelessness and neglect. By the way, eye-strain itself may cause very serious
+forms of disease, such as obstinate and dangerous forms of indigestion,
+insomnia, or even St. Vitus&rsquo;s dance and epilepsy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;re not telling us anything about eye diseases, Dr.
+Strong,&rdquo; said Julia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There speaks our Committee on School Conditions, filled full of
+information,&rdquo; said the Health Master with a smile. &ldquo;Junkum has made
+an important discovery, and made it in time. She has found that two children
+recently transferred from Number 14 have red eyes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Maybe they&rsquo;ve been crying,&rdquo; suggested Bettykin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They were when I saw them, acute Miss Twinkles, although they
+didn&rsquo;t mean it at all. One was crying out of one eye, and one out of the
+other, which gave them a very curious, absurd, and interesting appearance. They
+had each a developing case of pink-eye.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Horses have pink-eye, not people,&rdquo; remarked Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To be more accurate, then, conjunctivitis. People have that; a great
+many people, once it gets started. It looks very bad and dangerous; but it
+isn&rsquo;t if properly cared for. Only, it&rsquo;s quite contagious. Therefore
+the Committee on Schools, with myself as acting executive, accomplished the
+temporary removal of those children from school.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And then,&rdquo; the Committee joyously took up the tale, &ldquo;we went
+out and trailed the pink-eye.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We did. We trailed it to its lair in School Number 14, and there we
+found one of the most dangerous creatures which civilization still allows to
+exist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the school?&rdquo; said Bettykin. &ldquo;Oo-oo! What was it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was a Rollertowl,&rdquo; replied the doctor impressively and in a
+sonorous voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never heard of it,&rdquo; said the Cherub, awestruck. &ldquo;What is
+it like?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He means a roller-towel, goosie,&rdquo; explained Julia. &ldquo;A towel
+on a roller, that everybody wipes their hands and faces on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Exactly. And because everybody uses it, any contagious disease that
+anybody has, everybody is liable to catch. I&rsquo;d as soon put a rattlesnake
+in a school as a roller-towel. In this case, half the grade where it was had
+conjunctivitis. But that isn&rsquo;t the worst. There was one case of trachoma
+in the grade; a poor little Italian whose parents ignorantly sent her to an
+optician instead of an oculist. The optician treated her for an ordinary
+inflammation, and now she will lose the sight of one eye. Meantime, if any of
+the others have been infected by her, through that roller-towel, there will be
+trouble, for trachoma is a serious disease.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you throw out the roller-towel?&rdquo; asked Charley with a hopeful
+eye to a fray.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. We got thrown out ourselves, didn&rsquo;t we, Junkum?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pretty near,&rdquo; corroborated Julia. &ldquo;The principal told Dr.
+Strong that he guessed he could run his school himself and he didn&rsquo;t need
+any interference by&mdash;by&mdash;what did he call us, Dr. Strong?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Interlopers. No, Cherub, an interloper is no relation to an antelope. It
+was four days ago that we left that principal and went out and whistled for the
+Fool-killer. Yesterday, the principal came down with a rose-pink eye of his
+own; the Health Officer met him and ordered him into quarantine, and the
+terrible and ferocious Rollertowl is now writhing in its death-agonies on the
+ash-heap.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What about other diseases?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde after a pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing from me. The eye will report them itself quick enough. And as
+soon as your eye tells you that anything is the matter with it, you tell the
+oculist, and you&rsquo;ll probably get along all right, as far as diseases go.
+It is not diseases that I have to worry about, as your Chinese-plan physician,
+so much as it is to see that you give your vision a fair chance. Let&rsquo;s
+see. Charley, you&rsquo;re the Committee on Air, aren&rsquo;t you? Could you
+take on a little more work?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Try me,&rdquo; said the boy promptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right; we&rsquo;ll make you the Committee on Air and Light,
+hereafter, with power of protest and report whenever you see your mother going
+out in a polka-dotted, cross-eyed veil, or your grandmother reading a Bible
+that needs burning worse than any heretic ever did, or any of the others
+working or playing without sufficient illumination. Here endeth this lecture,
+with a final word. This is it:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The eye is the most nervous of all the body&rsquo;s organs. Except in
+early childhood, when it has the recklessness and overconfidence of unbounded
+strength, it complains promptly and sharply of ill-usage. Now, there are a few
+hundred rules about when and how to use the eyes and when and how not to use
+them. I&rsquo;m not going to burden you with those. All I&rsquo;m going to
+advise you is that when your eyes burn, smart, itch, or feel strained,
+there&rsquo;s some reason for it, and you should obey the warning and stop
+urging them to work against their protest. In fact, I might sum it all up in a
+motto which I think I&rsquo;ll hang here in the library&mdash;a terse old
+English slang phrase.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Mind your eye,&rsquo;&rdquo; replied the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap06"></a>VI.<br />
+THE RE-MADE LADY</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;O</span>f
+all unfortunate times!&rdquo; lamented Mrs. Clyde, her piquant face twisted to
+an expression of comic despair. &ldquo;Why couldn&rsquo;t he have given us a
+little more notice?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Impatiently she tossed aside the telegram which announced that her
+husband&rsquo;s old friend, Oren Taylor, the artist, would arrive at seven
+o&rsquo;clock that evening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let it bother you, dear,&rdquo; said Clyde.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll take him to the club for dinner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t. Have you forgotten that I&rsquo;ve invited Louise Ennis
+for her quarterly&mdash;well&mdash;visitation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clyde whistled. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s rather a poser. What business have I got to
+have a cousin like Louise, anyway!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon this disloyal observation Dr. Strong walked into the library. He was a
+very different Dr. Strong from the nerve-shaken wanderer who had dropped from
+nowhere into the Clyde household a year previous as its physician on the
+Chinese plan of being employed to keep the family well. The painful lines of
+the face were smoothed out. There was a deep light of content, the content of
+the man who has found his place and filled it, in the level eyes; and about the
+grave and controlled set of the mouth a sort of sensitive buoyancy of
+expression. The flesh had hardened and the spirit softened in him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you hear that, Strong?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Clyde, turning to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have trained ears,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong solemnly.
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re absolutely impervious to any speech not intended for
+them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Open them to this: Louise Ennis is invited for dinner to-night. So is my
+old friend Oren Taylor, who wires to say that he&rsquo;s passing through
+town.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is that Taylor, the artist of &lsquo;The First Parting&rsquo;? I shall
+enjoy meeting him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you won&rsquo;t enjoy meeting Cousin Louise,&rdquo; declared Mr.
+Clyde. &ldquo;We ask her about four times a year, out of family piety.
+You&rsquo;ve been lucky to escape her thus far.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rather a painful old party, your cousin?&rdquo; inquired the physician,
+smilingly, of Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Old? Twenty-two,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;But she looks fifty and
+feels a hundred.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Allowing for feminine exaggeration,&rdquo; amended Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what&rsquo;s so wrong with her?&rdquo; demanded the physician.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nerves,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stomach,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Headaches,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Toe-aches,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too much money,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too much ego,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dyspepsia.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hypochondria.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Chronic inertia.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Set it to music,&rdquo; suggested Dr. Strong, &ldquo;and sing it as a
+duet of disease, from ablepsy to zymosis, inclusively. I shall be immensely
+interested to observe this prodigy of ills.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have plenty of opportunity,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde rather
+maliciously. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re to sit next to her at dinner to-night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then put Bettykin on the other side of me,&rdquo; he returned.
+&ldquo;With that combination of elf, tyrant, and angel close at hand, I can
+turn for relief from the grave to the cradle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Indeed you cannot. Louise can&rsquo;t endure children. She says they get
+on her nerves. <i>My</i> children!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now you <i>have</i> put the finishing touch to your character
+sketch,&rdquo; observed Dr. Strong. &ldquo;A woman of child-bearing age who
+can&rsquo;t endure children&mdash;well, she is pretty far awry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet I can remember Louise when she was a sweet, attractive young
+girl,&rdquo; sighed Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;That was before her mother died, and
+left her to the care of a father too busy making money to do anything for his
+only child but spend it on her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re talking about Lou Ennis, I know,&rdquo; said Grandma
+Sharpless, who had entered in time to hear the closing words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said. Dr. Strong. &ldquo;What is our expert
+diagnostician&rsquo;s opinion of the case? You know I always defer to you,
+ma&rsquo;am, on any problem that&rsquo;s under the surface of things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;None of your soft sawder, young man!&rdquo; said the old lady, her
+shrewd, gray eyes twinkling from her shrewd, pink face. &ldquo;My opinion of
+Louise Ennis? I&rsquo;ll give it to you in two words. Just spoiled.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Taking my warning as I find it,&rdquo; remarked the physician, rising,
+&ldquo;I shall now retire to put on some chain armor under my evening coat, in
+case the Terrible Cousin attempts to stab me with an oyster-fork.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dinner was not, as Mrs. Clyde was forced to admit afterward, by any means
+the dismal function which she had anticipated. Oren Taylor, an easy,
+discursive, humorous talker, set the pace and was ably seconded by Grandma
+Sharpless, whose knack of incisive and pointed comment served to spur him to
+his best. Dr. Strong, who said little, attempted to draw Miss Ennis into the
+current of talk, and was rewarded with an occasional flash of rather acid wit,
+which caused the artist to look across the table curiously at the girl. So far
+as he could do so without rudeness, the physician studied his neighbor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw a tall, amply-built girl, with a slackened frame whose muscles had
+forgotten how to play their part properly in holding the structure firm. Her
+face was flaccid. Under the large but dull eyes, there was a bloodless
+puffiness. Discontent sat enthroned at the corners of the sensitive mouth. A
+faint, reddish eruption disfigured her chin. Her two strong assets, beautifully
+even teeth and a wealth of soft, fine hair, failed wholly to save her from
+being a flatly repellent woman. Dr. Strong noted further that her hands were
+incessantly uneasy, and that she ate little and without interest. Also she
+seemed, in a sullen way, shy. Yet, despite all of these drawbacks, there was a
+pathetic suggestion of inherent fineness about her; of qualities become
+decadent through disuse; a charm that should have been, thwarted and perverted
+by a slovenly habit of life. Dr. Strong set her down as a woman at war with
+herself, and therefore with her world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After dinner Mr. and Mrs. Clyde slipped away to see the children. The artist
+followed Dr. Strong, to whom he had taken a liking, as most men did, into the
+small lounging-room, where he lighted a cigar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too bad about that Miss Ennis, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; said Taylor
+abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His companion looked at him interrogatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Such a mess,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;Such a ruin. Yet so much left
+that isn&rsquo;t ruined. That face would be worth a lot to me for the
+&lsquo;Poet&rsquo;s Cycle of the Months&rsquo; that I&rsquo;m painting now.
+What a <i>November</i> she&rsquo;d make; &lsquo;November, the withered mourner
+of glories dead and gone.&rsquo; Only I suppose she&rsquo;d resent being asked
+to sit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Illusions are the last assets that a woman loses,&rdquo; agreed Dr.
+Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To think,&rdquo; pursued the painter, &ldquo;of what her Maker meant her
+to be, and of how she has belied it! She&rsquo;s essentially and fundamentally
+a beautiful woman; that is why I want her for a model.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;&ldquo;In the structure of her face, perhaps&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; and all through. Look at the set of her shoulders, and the lines of
+her when she walks. Nothing jerry-built about her! She&rsquo;s got the contours
+of a goddess and the finish of a mud-pie. It&rsquo;s maddening.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;More maddening from the physician&rsquo;s point of view than from the
+artist&rsquo;s. For the physician knows how needless it all is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is she your patient?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If she were I&rsquo;d be ashamed to admit it. Give me military authority
+and a year&rsquo;s time and if I couldn&rsquo;t fix her so that she&rsquo;d be
+proud to pose for your picture&mdash;Good Heavens!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From behind the drapery of the passageway appeared Louise Ennis. She took two
+steps toward the two men and threw out her hands in an appeal which was almost
+grotesque.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it true?&rdquo; she cried, turning from one to the other. &ldquo;Tell
+me, is it really true?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My dear young lady,&rdquo; groaned Taylor, &ldquo;what can I say to
+palliate my unpard&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nevermind that! I don&rsquo;t care. I don&rsquo;t care anything about
+it. It&rsquo;s my own fault. I stopped and listened. I couldn&rsquo;t help it.
+It means so much to me. You can&rsquo;t know. No man can understand. Is it true
+that I&mdash;that my face&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oren Taylor was an artist in more than his art: he possessed the rare sense of
+the fit thing to do and say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is true,&rdquo; he answered quietly, &ldquo;that I have seen few
+faces more justly and beautifully modeled than yours.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you,&rdquo; she said, whirling upon Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Can you do
+what you said? Can you make me good-looking?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not I. But you yourself can.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, how? What must I do? D&mdash;d&mdash;don&rsquo;t think me a
+fool!&rdquo; She was half-sobbing now. &ldquo;It may be silly to long so
+bitterly to be beautiful. But I&rsquo;d give anything short of life for
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not silly at all,&rdquo; returned Dr. Strong emphatically. &ldquo;On the
+contrary, that desire is rooted in the profoundest depths of sex.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And is the best excuse for art as a profession,&rdquo; said the painter,
+smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only tell me what to do,&rdquo; she besought. &ldquo;Gently,&rdquo; said
+Dr. Strong. &ldquo;It can&rsquo;t be done in a day. And it will be a costly
+process.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That doesn&rsquo;t matter. If money is all&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t all. It&rsquo;s only a drop in the bucket. It will cost
+you dear in comfort, in indulgence, in ease, in enjoyment, in
+habit&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll obey like a child.&rdquo; Again her hands went tremulously
+out to him; then she covered her face with them and burst into the tears of
+nervous exhaustion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is no place for me,&rdquo; said the artist, and was about to escape
+by the door, when Mrs. Clyde blocked his departure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, you are in here,&rdquo; she said gayly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d been
+wondering&mdash;Why, what&rsquo;s the matter? What is it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There has been an unfortunate blunder,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong quickly.
+&ldquo;I said some foolish things which Miss Ennis overheard&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; interrupted the painter. &ldquo;The fault was
+mine&mdash;&rdquo; And in the same breath Louise Ennis cried:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t overhear! I listened. I eavesdropped.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you quite mad, all of you?&rdquo; demanded the hostess.
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t somebody tell me what has happened?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s true,&rdquo; said the girl wildly; &ldquo;every word they
+said. I <i>am</i> a mess.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s arms went around the girl. Sex-loyalty raised its war signal
+flaring in her cheeks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Who</i> said that?&rdquo; she demanded, in a tone of which Dr. Strong
+observed afterward, &ldquo;I never before heard a woman roar under her
+breath.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind who said it,&rdquo; retorted the girl. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s true
+anyway. It wasn&rsquo;t meant to hurt me. It didn&rsquo;t hurt me. He is going
+to cure me; Dr. Strong is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cure you, Louise? Of what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of ugliness. Of hideousness. Of being a mess.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, my dear,&rdquo; said the older woman softly, &ldquo;you
+mustn&rsquo;t take it to heart so, the idle word of some one who doesn&rsquo;t
+know you at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; retorted the other passionately.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve always been pretty!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A compliment straight from the heart,&rdquo; murmured the painter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The color came into Mrs. Clyde&rsquo;s smooth cheek again. &ldquo;What have you
+promised her, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing. I have simply followed Mr. Taylor&rsquo;s lead. His is the
+artist eye that can see beauty beneath disguises. He has told Miss Ennis that
+she was meant to be a beautiful woman. I have told her that she can be what she
+was meant to be if she wills, and wills hard enough.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you will take charge of her case?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That, of course, depends upon you and Mr. Clyde. If you will include
+Miss Ennis in the family, my responsibilities will automatically extend to
+her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most certainly,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;And now, Mr.
+Taylor,&rdquo; she added, answering a look of appeal from that uncomfortable
+gentleman, &ldquo;come and see the sketches. I really believe they are
+Whistler&rsquo;s.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they left, Dr. Strong looked down at Louise Ennis with a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At present I prescribe a little cold water for those eyes,&rdquo; said
+he. &ldquo;And then some general conversation in the drawing-room. Come here
+tomorrow at four.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;I want to begin at once.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So as to profit by the impetus of the first enthusiasm? Very well. How
+did you come here this evening?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In my limousine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sell it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sell my new car? At this time of year?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Store it, then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And go about on street-cars, I suppose?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all. Walk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But when it rains?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Run.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eagerness died out of Louise Ennis&rsquo;s face. &ldquo;Oh, I know,&rdquo; she
+said pettishly. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s that old, old exercise treatment. Well,
+I&rsquo;ve tried that, and if you think&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stopped in surprise, for Dr. Strong, walking over to the door, held the
+portière aside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After you,&rdquo; he said courteously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is that all the advice you have for me?&rdquo; she persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After you,&rdquo; he repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;m sorry,&rdquo; she said sulkily. &ldquo;What is it you
+want me&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pardon me,&rdquo; he interrupted in uncompromising tones. &ldquo;I am
+sure they are waiting for us in the other room.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are treating me like a spoiled child,&rdquo; declared Miss Ennis,
+stamping a period to the charge with her high French heel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Precisely.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She marched out of the room, and, with the physician, joined the rest of the
+company. For the remainder of the evening she spoke little to any one and not
+at all to Dr. Strong. But when she came to say good-night he was standing
+apart. He held out his hand, which she could not well avoid seeing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you get up to-morrow,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;look in the mirror,
+[she winced] and say, &lsquo;I can be beautiful if I want to hard
+enough.&rsquo; Good-bye.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Luncheon at the Clydes&rsquo; next day was given up to a family discussion of
+Miss Louise Ennis, precipitated by Mr. Clyde, who rallied Dr. Strong on his
+newest departure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Turned beauty doctor, have you?&rdquo; he taunted good-humoredly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Trainer, rather,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You might be in better business,&rdquo; declared Mrs. Sharpless, with
+her customary frankness. &ldquo;Beauty is only skin-deep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s quotations,&rdquo; remarked Dr. Strong to the
+saltcellar, &ldquo;are almost as sure to be wrong as her observations are to be
+right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was a wiser man than you or I who spoke that truth about
+beauty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense! Beauty only skin-deep, indeed! It&rsquo;s liver-deep anyway.
+Often it&rsquo;s soul-deep. Do you think you&rsquo;ve kept your good looks,
+Grandma Sharpless, just by washing your skin?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you try to dodge the issue by flattery, young man,&rdquo;
+said the old lady, the more brusquely in that she could see her son-in-law
+grinning boyishly at the mounting color in her face. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m as the
+Lord made me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And as you&rsquo;ve kept yourself, by clean, sound living. Miss Ennis
+isn&rsquo;t as the Lord made her or meant her. She&rsquo;s a mere parody of it.
+Her basic trouble is an ailment much more prevalent among intelligent people
+than they are willing to admit. In the books it is listed under various kinds
+of hyphenated neurosis; but it&rsquo;s real name is fool-in-the-head.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Curable?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Clyde solicitously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no known specific except removing the seat of the trouble
+with an axe,&rdquo; announced Dr. Strong. &ldquo;But cases sometimes respond to
+less heroic treatment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not this case, I fear,&rdquo; put in Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Louise will
+coddle herself into the idea that you have grossly insulted her. She
+won&rsquo;t come back.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t she!&rdquo; exclaimed Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;Insult or no
+insult, she would come to the bait that Dr. Strong has thrown her if she had to
+crawl on her knees.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Come she did, prompt to the hour. From out the blustery February day she lopped
+into the physician&rsquo;s pleasant study, slumped into a chair, and held out
+to him a limp left hand, palm up and fingers curled. Ordinarily the most
+punctilious of men, Dr. Strong did not move from his stance before the fire. He
+looked at the hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that for?&rdquo; he inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you going to feel my pulse?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor take my temperature?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor look at my tongue?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly not. I have a quite sufficient idea of what it looks
+like.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tone was almost brutal. Miss Ennis began to whimper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a m&mdash;m&mdash;mess, I know,&rdquo; she blubbered.
+&ldquo;But you needn&rsquo;t keep telling me so.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A mess can be cleared up,&rdquo; said he more kindly, &ldquo;under
+orders.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll do whatever you tell me, if only&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stop! There will be no &lsquo;if&rsquo; about it. You will do as you are
+bid, or we will drop the case right here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no! Don&rsquo;t drop me. I will. I promise. Only, please tell me
+what is the matter with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong, smiling inwardly, recalled the diagnosis he had announced to the
+Clydes, but did not repeat it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I know there must be. I have such strange symptoms. You can&rsquo;t
+imagine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fumbling in her hand-bag she produced a very elegant little notebook with a
+gold pencil attached. Dr. Strong looked at it with fascinated but ominous eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve jotted down some of the symptoms here,&rdquo; she continued,
+&ldquo;just as they occurred. You see, here&rsquo;s Thursday. That was a heart
+attack&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me see that book.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She handed it to him. He carefully took the gold pencil from its socket and
+returned it to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, is there anything in this but symptoms? Any addresses that you want
+to keep?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only one: the address of a freckle and blemish remover.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll come to that later. Meantime&mdash;&rdquo; He tossed the
+book into the heart of the coal fire where it promptly curled up and perished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why&mdash;why&mdash;why&mdash;&rdquo; gasped the
+visitor,&mdash;&ldquo;how dare you? What do you mean? That is an ivory-bound,
+gold-mounted book. It&rsquo;s valuable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I told you, I believe, that the treatment would be expensive. This is
+only the beginning. Of all outrageous, unforgivable kinds of self-coddling, the
+hypochondria that keeps its own autobiography is the worst.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Regrettable though it is to chronicle, Miss Ennis hereupon emitted a semi-yelp
+of rage and beat the floor with her high French heels. Instantly the
+doctor&rsquo;s gaze shifted to her feet. Just how it happened she could not
+remember, but her right foot, unprotected, presently hit the floor with a
+painful thump, while the physician contemplated the shoe which he had deftly
+removed therefrom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two inches and a half at least, that heel,&rdquo; he observed.
+&ldquo;Talk about the Chinese women torturing their feet!&rdquo; He laid the
+offending article upon the hearth, set his own soundly shod foot upon it, and
+tweaked off two inches of heel with the fire-tongs. &ldquo;Not so
+pretty,&rdquo; he remarked, &ldquo;but at least you can walk, and not tittup in
+that. Give me the other.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shocked and astounded into helplessness, she mechanically obeyed. He performed
+his rough-and-ready repairs, and handed it back to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Speaking of walking,&rdquo; he said calmly, &ldquo;have you stored your
+automobile yet?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No! I&mdash;I&mdash;I&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After to-morrow I don&rsquo;t want you to set foot in it. Now, then,
+we&rsquo;re going to put you through a course of questioning. Ready?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Ennis settled back in her chair, with the anticipatory expression of one
+to whom the recital of her own woe is a lingering pleasure. &ldquo;Perhaps if I
+told you,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;just how I feel&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind that. Do you drink?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No!&rdquo; The answer came back on the rebound. &ldquo;Humph!&rdquo; Dr.
+Strong leaned over her. She turned her head away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You asked me as if you meant I was a drunkard,&rdquo; she complained.
+&ldquo;Once in a while, when I have some severe nervous strain to undergo, I
+need a stimulant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh. Cocktail?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. A mild one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A mild cocktail! That&rsquo;s a paradox I&rsquo;ve never encountered.
+How often do you take these mild cocktails?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, just occasionally.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, a meal is an occasion. Before meals?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sometimes,&rdquo; she admitted reluctantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t have one here last night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you ate almost nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is just it, you see. I need something: otherwise I have no
+appetite.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In other words, you have formed a drink habit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Dr. Strong!&rdquo; It was half reproach, half insulted innocence,
+that wail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After a cocktail&mdash;or two&mdash;or three,&rdquo; he looked at her
+closely, but she would not meet his eyes, &ldquo;you eat pretty well?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I suppose so.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And then go to bed with a headache because you&rsquo;ve stimulated your
+appetite to more food than your run-down mechanism can rightly handle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do have a good many headaches.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do anything for them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. I take some harmless powders, sometimes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Harmless, eh? A harmless headache powder is like a mild cocktail. It
+doesn&rsquo;t exist. So you&rsquo;re adding drug habit to drink habit.
+Fortunately, it isn&rsquo;t hard to stop. It has begun to show on you already,
+in that puffy grayness under the eyes. All the coal-tar powders vitiate the
+blood as well as affect the heart. Sleep badly?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very often.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take anything for that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean opiates? I&rsquo;m not a fool, Doctor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean you haven&rsquo;t gone quite that far,&rdquo; said the other
+grimly. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve started in on two habits; but not the worst. Well,
+that&rsquo;s all. Come back when you need to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Ennis&rsquo;s big, dull eyes opened wide. &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you going to
+give me anything? Any medicine?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t need it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or any advice?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong permitted himself a little smile at the success of his strategy.
+&ldquo;Give it to yourself,&rdquo; he suggested. &ldquo;You showed, in flashes,
+during the dinner talk last night, that you have both wit and sense, when you
+choose to use them. Do it now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl squirmed uncomfortably. &ldquo;I suppose you want me to give up
+cocktails,&rdquo; she murmured in a die-away voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Absolutely.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And try to get along with no stimulants at all?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By no means. Fresh air and exercise ad lib.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And to stop the headache powders?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Right; go on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And to stop thinking about my symptoms?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good! I didn&rsquo;t reckon on your inherent sense in vain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And to walk where I have been riding?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rain or shine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What about diet?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All the plain food you want, at any time you really want it, provided
+you eat slowly and chew thoroughly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A la Fletcher?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Horace Fletcher is one of those fine fanatics whose extravagances
+correct the average man&rsquo;s stolid stupidities. I&rsquo;ve seen his fad
+made ridiculous, but never harmful. Try it out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you won&rsquo;t tell me when to come back?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you need to, I said. The moment the temptation to break over the
+rules becomes too strong, come. And&mdash;eh&mdash;by the
+way&mdash;eh&mdash;don&rsquo;t worry about your mirror for a while.&rdquo;
+Temporarily content with this, the new patient went away with new hope. Wiping
+his brow, the doctor strolled into the sitting-room where he found the family
+awaiting him with obvious but repressed curiosity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t ethical, I suppose,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;to
+discuss a patient&rsquo;s case with outsiders?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not outsiders. And she&rsquo;s not my patient, in the
+ordinary sense, since I&rsquo;m giving my services free. Moreover, I need all
+the help I can get.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What can <i>I</i> do?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde promptly. &ldquo;Drop in
+at her house from time to time, and cheer her up. I don&rsquo;t want her to
+depend upon me exclusively. She has depended altogether too much on doctors in
+the past.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde chuckled. &ldquo;Did she tell you that the European medical faculty
+had chased her around to every spa on the Continent? Neurasthenic dyspepsia,
+they called it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pretty name! Seventy per cent of all dyspeptics have the seat of the
+imagination in the stomach. The difficulty is to divert it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s your plan?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ve several, when the time comes. For the present I&rsquo;ve
+got to get her around into condition.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Spoiled mind, spoiled body,&rdquo; remarked Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Exactly. And I&rsquo;m going to begin on the body, because that is the
+easiest to set right. Look out for an ill-tempered cousin during the next
+fortnight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His prophecy was amply confirmed by Mrs. Clyde, who made it her business, amid
+multifarious activities, to drop in upon Miss Ennis with patient frequency. On
+the tenth day of the &ldquo;cure,&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde reported to the household
+physician:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I go there again I shall probably <i>slap</i> her. She&rsquo;s become
+simply unbearable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Fine! She has had the nerve to
+stick to the rules. We needn&rsquo;t overstrain her, though. I&rsquo;ll have
+her come here tomorrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Accordingly, at six o&rsquo;clock in the evening of the eleventh day, the
+patient stamped into the office, wet, bedraggled, and angry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now look!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;You made me store my motor-car. All
+the street-cars were crowded. My umbrella turned inside out. I&rsquo;m a
+perfect drench. And I know I&rsquo;ll catch my death of cold.&rdquo; Whereupon
+she laid a pathetic hand on her chest and coughed hollowly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stick out your foot,&rdquo; ordered Dr. Strong. And, as she obeyed:
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s well. Good, sensible storm shoes. I&rsquo;ll risk your
+taking cold. How do you feel? Better?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. Worse!&rdquo; she snapped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose so,&rdquo; he retorted with a chuckle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is more,&rdquo; she declared savagely, &ldquo;I look worse!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So your mirror has been failing in its mission of flattery. Too bad. Now
+take off your coat, sit right there by the fire, and in an hour you&rsquo;ll be
+dry as toast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An hour? I can&rsquo;t stay an hour!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s six o&rsquo;clock. I must go home. Besides,&rdquo; she added
+unguardedly, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m half starved.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Indeed!</i> Had a cocktail to-day?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. Certainly not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet you have an appetite. A bad sign. Oh, a very bad sign&mdash;for the
+cocktail market.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m so tired all the time. And I wake up in the morning with
+hardly any strength to get out of bed&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or the inclination? Which?&rdquo; broke in the doctor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And my heart gives the queerest jumps and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thought we&rsquo;d thrown that symptom-book into the fire. Stand up,
+please.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stood. Dr. Strong noted with satisfaction how, already, the lithe and
+well-set figure had begun to revert to its natural pose, showing that the
+muscles were beginning to do their work. He also noted that the hands, hitherto
+a mere <i>mélange</i> of nervously writhing fingers, hung easily slack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your troubles,&rdquo; he said pleasantly, &ldquo;have only just begun. I
+think you&rsquo;re strong enough now to begin work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not,&rdquo; she protested, half weeping. &ldquo;I feel faint
+this minute.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good, healthy hunger. Of course, if a glance in your mirror convinces
+you that you&rsquo;ve had enough of the treatment&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Ennis said something under her breath which sounded very much like
+&ldquo;Brute!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you ever had a good sweat?&rdquo; he asked abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her lips curled superciliously. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not given to perspiration,
+I&rsquo;m thankful to&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did I say &lsquo;perspire&rsquo;?&rdquo; inquired he. &ldquo;I
+understood myself to say &lsquo;sweat.&rsquo; Have you ever&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;High time you began. Buy yourself the heaviest sweater you can
+find&mdash;you may call it a &lsquo;perspirationer&rsquo; if you think the
+salesman will appreciate your delicacy&mdash;and I&rsquo;ll be around to-morrow
+and set up a punching-bag for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A device which you strike at. The blow forces it against a board and it
+returns and, unless you dodge nimbly, impinges upon your countenance. In other
+words, whacks you on the nose. Prizefighters use it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you want me to be like a prizefighter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The most beautiful pink-and-white skin and the clearest eye I&rsquo;ve
+ever seen belonged to a middleweight champion. Yes, I&rsquo;d like to see you
+exactly like him in that respect. One hour every day&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I simply can&rsquo;t. I shan&rsquo;t have time. With the walking I do
+now I&rsquo;m busy all the morning and dead tired all the afternoon; and in the
+evening there is my bridge club&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, you play bridge. For money?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Naturally we don&rsquo;t play for counters.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;d give it up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are not employed as a censor of my morals, Dr. Strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; but I&rsquo;ve undertaken to censor your nerves. And gambling, for a
+woman in your condition, is altogether too much of a strain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The corners of Miss Ennis&rsquo;s mouth quivered babyishly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+sure, then, that working like a prizefighter will be too much strain.
+You&rsquo;re wearing me out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a cruel tyrant,&rdquo; mocked Dr. Strong; &ldquo;and worse is
+to come. We&rsquo;ll clear out a room in your house and put in not only the
+punching-bag, but also pulleys and a rowing-machine. And I&rsquo;ll send up an
+athletic instructor to see that you use them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t have him. I&rsquo;ll send him away!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By advice of your mirror?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Ennis frankly and angrily wept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now I&rsquo;ll tell you a secret about yourself.&rdquo; Miss Ennis
+stopped weeping.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ninety-nine cases out of a hundred I couldn&rsquo;t handle as I am
+handling your case. They would need a month&rsquo;s rest and building up before
+they&rsquo;d be fit for real work. But you are naturally a powerful, muscular
+woman with great physical endurance and resiliency. What I am trying to do is
+to take advantage of your splendid equipment to pull you out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What would you do with the ordinary case?&rdquo; asked the girl,
+interested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, put her to bed, perhaps. Perhaps send her away to the woods. Maybe
+set a nurse over her to see that she didn&rsquo;t take to writing her symptoms
+down in a book. Keep her on a rigid diet, and build her up by slow and dull
+processes. You may thank your stars that&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t thank my stars at all!&rdquo; broke in the patient, as her
+besetting vice of self-pity asserted itself. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d much rather do
+that than be driven like a galley-slave. I&rsquo;m too tired to get any
+pleasure out of anything&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Even bridge?&rdquo; interposed the tormentor softly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;and when night comes I fall into bed like a helpless log.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the best news I&rsquo;ve heard yet. You&rsquo;re
+progressing. Now take that new appetite of yours home to dinner. And
+don&rsquo;t spoil it by eating too fast. Good-night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fully a fortnight later Grandma Sharpless met Dr. Strong in the hallway as he
+came in from a walk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What have you been doing to Louise Ennis?&rdquo; she demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lots of things. What&rsquo;s wrong now? Another fit of the sulks?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Worse,&rdquo; said the old lady in a stage whisper. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s
+got <i>paint</i> on her face.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong laughed. &ldquo;Really? It might be worse. In fact, as a symptom, it
+couldn&rsquo;t be better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Young man, do you mean to tell me that face-paint is a good thing for a
+young woman?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no. It&rsquo;s vulgar and tawdry, as a practice. But I&rsquo;m glad
+to know that Miss Ennis has turned to it, because it shows that she recognizes
+her own improvement and is trying to add to it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the stuff will ruin her skin,&rdquo; cried the scandalized old lady.
+&ldquo;See what dreadful faces women have who use it. Look at the
+actresses&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, look at them!&rdquo; broke in the physician. &ldquo;There is no
+class of women in the world with such beautiful skin as the women of the stage.
+And that in spite of hard work, doubtful habits of eating, and irregular hours.
+Do you know why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ll tell me that paint does it,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Sharpless with a sniff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not the paint itself. But the fact that in putting it on and taking it
+off, they maintain a profound cleanliness of skin which the average woman
+doesn&rsquo;t even understand. The real value of the successful skin-lotions
+and creams so widely exploited lies in the massage which their use
+compels.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aside from the stuff on her face,&rdquo; remarked Mrs. Sharpless,
+&ldquo;Louise looks like another woman, and acts like one. She came breezing in
+here like a young cyclone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which means trouble,&rdquo; sighed Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Now that her
+vitality is returning, it will demand something to feed on. Well, we shall
+see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found his patient standing&mdash;not sitting, this time&mdash;before the
+fireplace, with a face of gloom. Before he could greet her, she burst
+out:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How long am I to be kept on the grind? I see nobody. I have nothing to
+amuse me. I&rsquo;ve had a row with father.&rdquo; Dr. Strong smiled.
+&ldquo;The servants are impertinent.&rdquo; The smile broadened. &ldquo;The
+whole world is hateful!&rdquo; The doctor&rsquo;s face was now expanded into a
+positive grin. &ldquo;I despise everything and everybody! I&rsquo;m
+bored.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Passing that over for the moment for something less important,&rdquo;
+said Dr. Strong smoothly, &ldquo;where do you buy your paint?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t paint!&rdquo; retorted the girl hotly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, your rouge. Your skin-rejuvenator. Your essence of bloom of youth
+or whatever poetic name you call it by. Let me see the box.&rdquo; Mutiny shone
+from the scowling face, but her hand went to her reticule and emerged with a
+small box. It passed to the physician&rsquo;s hand and thence to the fire.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll use paint if I want to,&rdquo; declared the girl.
+&ldquo;Undoubtedly. But you&rsquo;ll use good paint if you use any. Get a
+theatrical paper, read the ads, and send for the highest grade of grease-paint.
+I won&rsquo;t say anything about the vulgarity of the practice because
+I&rsquo;m not censoring your manners. I&rsquo;ll only state that three months
+from now you won&rsquo;t want or need paint. Did you get this stuff,&rdquo; he
+nodded toward the fireplace whence issued a highly perfumed smoke, &ldquo;from
+that address in your deceased symptom-book?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That was the firm which advertised to remove pimples, wasn&rsquo;t
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Ennis shrank. &ldquo;Pimple is an inexcusable word,&rdquo; she protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Word? We&rsquo;re dealing in realities now. And pimples were an
+inexcusable reality in your case, because they were the blossoms of gluttony,
+torpor, and self-indulgence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He leaned forward and looked closely at her chin. The surface, once blotched
+and roughened, was now of a smooth and soft translucency. &ldquo;You once
+objected to the word &lsquo;sweat,&rsquo;&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;Well, it
+has eliminated the more objectionable word &lsquo;pimple&rsquo; from your
+reckoning. And it has done the job better than your
+blemish-remover&mdash;-which leaves scars.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her hand went to her temple, where there was a little group of silvery-white
+patches on the skin. &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you fix that?&rdquo; she asked
+anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. Your &lsquo;remover&rsquo; was corrosive sublimate. It certainly
+removed the blemish. It would also have removed your entire face if you had
+used enough of it. Nothing can restore what the liquid fire has burned away.
+That&rsquo;s the penalty you pay for foolish credulousness. Fortunately, it is
+where it won&rsquo;t show much.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gloom surged back into her face. &ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t make any
+difference,&rdquo; she fretted. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m still a mess in looks even if
+I don&rsquo;t feel so much like one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One half of looks is expression,&rdquo; stated the doctor didactically.
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like yours. What&rsquo;s your religion?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His patient stared. &ldquo;Why, I&rsquo;m a Presbyterian, I suppose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Humph! You suppose! It doesn&rsquo;t seem to have struck in very hard.
+Any objection to going to a Christian Science church?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Christian Science! I thought the regular doctors considered it the worst
+kind of quackery.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The regular doctors,&rdquo; returned Dr. Strong quickly, &ldquo;once
+considered anaesthesia, vaccination, and the germ theory as quackery. We live
+and learn, like others. There&rsquo;s plenty of quackery in Christian Science,
+and also quite a little good. And nowadays we&rsquo;re learning to accept the
+good in new dogmas, and discard the bad.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you really wish me to go to the Christian Science church?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why not? You&rsquo;ll encounter there a few wild fanatics. I&rsquo;ll
+trust your hard common sense to guard you against their proselytizing.
+You&rsquo;ll also meet a much larger number of sweet, gentle, and cheerful
+people, with a sweet, helpful, and cheerful philosophy of life. That&rsquo;ll
+help to cure you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what will they cure me of, since you say I have no disease?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ll cure you of turning your mouth down at the corners instead
+of up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this, the mouth referred to did, indeed, turn up at the corners, but in no
+very pleasant wise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think they&rsquo;ll amuse me?&rdquo; she inquired contemptuously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, as for amusement, I&rsquo;ve arranged for that. You&rsquo;re bored.
+Very well, I expected it. It&rsquo;s a symptom, and a good one, in its place.
+I&rsquo;ll get you a job.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Indeed! And if I don&rsquo;t want a job?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No matter what you want. You need it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Settlement work, I suppose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing so mild. Garbage inspection.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What!&rdquo; Louise Ennis closed her eyes in expectation of a qualm of
+disgust. The qualm didn&rsquo;t materialize. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter
+with me?&rdquo; she asked in naïve and suppressed chagrin. &ldquo;I ought to
+feel&mdash;well, nauseated.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense! Your nerves and stomach have found their poise. That&rsquo;s
+all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what do I know about garbage?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know it when you see it, don&rsquo;t you? Now, listen. There has
+been a strike of the city teamsters. Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer, wants
+volunteers to inspect the city and report on where conditions are bad from day
+to day. You&rsquo;ve got intelligence. You can outwalk nine men out of ten. And
+you can be of real service to the city. Besides, it&rsquo;s doctor&rsquo;s
+orders.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The story of Louise Ennis&rsquo;s part in the great garbage strike, and of her
+subsequent door-to-door canvass of housing conditions, has no place in this
+account. After the start, Dr. Strong saw little of her; but he heard much from
+Mrs. Clyde, who continued her frequent visits to the Ennis household; not so
+much, as she frankly admitted, for the purpose of furnishing bulletins to Dr.
+Strong, as because of her own growing interest in and affection for the girl.
+And, as time went on, Strong noticed that, on the occasions when he chanced to
+meet his patient on the street, she was usually accompanied by one or another
+of the presentable young men of the community, a fact which the physician
+observed with professional approval rather than personal gratification.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t her health alone,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, when they were
+discussing her, one warm day in the ensuing summer. &ldquo;These six months
+seem to have made a new person of her. Trust the children to find out
+character. Bettykins wants to spend half her time with Cousin Lou.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve surely worked a transformation, Strong,&rdquo; said Clyde.
+&ldquo;But, of course, the raw material was there. You couldn&rsquo;t do much
+for the average homely woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The average woman isn&rsquo;t homely,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s got good looks either spoiled or undeveloped.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perfectly true,&rdquo; confirmed Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Any young woman
+whose face isn&rsquo;t actually malformed can find her place in the eternal
+scheme of beauty if she tries. Nature works toward beauty in all matters of
+sex. Where beauty doesn&rsquo;t exist it is merely an error in Nature&rsquo;s
+game.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then the world is pretty full of errors,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most of them aren&rsquo;t Nature&rsquo;s errors. They are the mistakes
+of the foolish human. Take almost any woman, not past the age of development,
+build up her figure to be supple and self-sustaining; give her a clear eye,
+quick-moving blood, fresh skin, and some interest in the game of life that
+shall keep mind and body alert&mdash;why, the radiant force of her abounding
+health would make itself felt in a blind asylum. And all this she can do for
+herself, with a little knowledge and a good deal of will.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that isn&rsquo;t exactly beauty, is it?&rdquo; asked Clyde, puzzled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it? In the soundest sense, I think it is. Anyway, put it
+this way: No woman who is wholly healthy, inside and out, can fail to be
+attractive.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish that painter-man could see Louise now, as an example,&rdquo; said
+Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oren Taylor?&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Why, he can. He goes East
+next week, and I&rsquo;ll wire him to stop over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oren Taylor arrived late on a warm afternoon. As he crossed the lawn, Louise
+Ennis was playing &ldquo;catch&rdquo; with Manny Clyde. Her figure swung and
+straightened with the lithe muscularity of a young animal. Her cheek was clear
+pink, deepening to the warmer color of the curved lips. The blue veins stood
+out a little against the warm, moist temples from which she brushed a vagrant
+lock of hair. Her eyes were wide and lustrous with the eager effort of the
+play, for the boy was throwing wide in purposeful delight over her swift
+gracefulness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Great Heavens!&rdquo; exclaimed the artist, staring at her. &ldquo;Who
+did that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Strong did that,&rdquo; explained Clyde; &ldquo;as per
+specifications.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A triumph!&rdquo; declared Taylor. &ldquo;A work of art.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong; &ldquo;a renewal of Nature.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In any case, a lady remade and better than new. My profound
+felicitations, Dr. Strong.&rdquo; He walked over to the flushed and lovely
+athlete. &ldquo;Miss Ennis,&rdquo; he said abruptly, &ldquo;I want your
+permission to stay over to-morrow and sketch you. I need you in my
+&lsquo;Poet&rsquo;s Cycle of the Months.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you do, Mr. Taylor?&rdquo; she returned demurely. &ldquo;Of
+course you can sketch me, if it doesn&rsquo;t interfere with my working
+hours.&rdquo; A quick smile rippled across her face like sunlight across water.
+&ldquo;The same subject?&rdquo; she asked with mischievous nonchalance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. Not even the same season,&rdquo; he replied emphatically, coloring,
+as he bethought him of his &ldquo;November, the withered mourner of glories
+dead and gone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What part am I to play now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let Dr. Strong name it,&rdquo; said Taylor with quick tact. &ldquo;He
+has prepared the model.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl turned to the physician, a little deeper tinge of color in her face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Referred to Swinburne,&rdquo; said Strong lightly, and quoted:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;When the hounds of Spring are on Winter&rsquo;s traces,<br />
+The mother of months in valley and plain<br />
+Fills the shadows and windy places<br />
+With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Atalanta,&rdquo; said Oren Taylor, bowing low to her; &ldquo;the maiden
+spirit of the spring.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap07"></a>VII.<br />
+THE RED PLACARD</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;W</span>ell?&rdquo;
+questioned Mrs. Clyde, facing the Health Master haggardly, as he entered the
+library.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, come!&rdquo; he protested with his reassuring smile.
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t take it so tragically. You&rsquo;ve got a pretty
+sick-looking boy there. But any thoroughgoing fever makes a boy of nine pretty
+sick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What fever?&rdquo; demanded the mother. &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s start with what it isn&rsquo;t&mdash;and thank Heaven. It
+isn&rsquo;t typhoid. And it isn&rsquo;t diphtheria.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it&rsquo;s&mdash;it&rsquo;s&mdash;;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s scarlet fever,&rdquo; broke in her mother, Mrs. Sharpless,
+who had followed the doctor into the room. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what it
+is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Clyde shuddered at the name. &ldquo;Has he got the rash?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. But he will have to-morrow,&rdquo; stated the old lady positively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you think so, too, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde appealed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll accept Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s judgment,&rdquo; answered
+the physician. &ldquo;She has seen more scarlet fever in her time than I, or
+most physicians. And experience is the true teacher of diagnosis.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you can&rsquo;t be sure!&rdquo; persisted Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;How can
+you tell without the rash?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not in any way that I could put into words,&rdquo; said her mother.
+&ldquo;But there&rsquo;s something in the look of the throat and something
+about the eyes and skin&mdash;Well, I can&rsquo;t describe it, but I know it as
+I know my own name.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There speaks the born diagnostician,&rdquo; observed the Health Master.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid the verdict must stand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then&mdash;then,&rdquo; faltered Mrs. Clyde, &ldquo;we must act at once.
+I&rsquo;ll call up my husband at the factory.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What for?&rdquo; inquired Dr. Strong innocently. &ldquo;Why, to let him
+know, of course.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t. When I undertook to act as Chinese-plan physician to the
+Clyde household, I was not only to guard the family against illness as well as
+I could, but also to save them worry. This is Saturday. Mr. Clyde has had a
+hard, trying week in the factory. Why break up his day?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Clyde drew a long breath and her face lightened. &ldquo;Then it
+isn&rsquo;t a serious case?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Scarlet fever is always serious. Any disease which thoroughly poisons
+the system is. But there&rsquo;s no immediate danger; and there shouldn&rsquo;t
+be much danger at any time to a sturdy youngster like Charley, if he&rsquo;s
+well looked after.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the other children!&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde turned to Mrs. Sharpless.
+&ldquo;Where can we send them, mother?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nowhere.&rdquo; It was the doctor who answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Surely we can&rsquo;t keep them in the house!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde.
+&ldquo;They would be certain to catch it from Charley.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By no means certain. Even if they did, that would not be the worst thing
+that could happen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No? What would, then?&rdquo; challenged Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That they should go out of this house, possibly carrying the poison with
+them into some other and defenseless community.&rdquo; Dr. Strong spoke a
+little sternly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Neither woman replied for a moment. When Mrs. Clyde spoke, it was with a
+changed voice. &ldquo;Yes. You are right. I didn&rsquo;t think. At least I
+thought only of my own children. It&rsquo;s hard to learn to think like a
+mother of all children.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s as near to the divine as any human can come,&rdquo; returned
+the Health Master gently. &ldquo;However, I think I can promise you that, if
+the twins and Bettykin haven&rsquo;t been touched with the poison already, they
+shan&rsquo;t get it from Charley. We&rsquo;ll organize a defense&mdash;provided
+only the enemy hasn&rsquo;t established itself already. Now the question is,
+where did the poison come from? We&rsquo;ll have Junkum in and see if she can
+help us find out.&rdquo; Julia, the more efficient of the eleven-year-old
+twins, a shrewd and observing youngster, resembling, in many respects, her
+grandmother, came at the doctor&rsquo;s summons and was told what had befallen
+Charley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Junkum. Then, &ldquo;Can I nurse him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should think not!&rdquo; burst out her mother and grandmother in a
+breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Later on you can help,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;In fact, I shall
+probably need your help. Now, Junkum, you remember I told you children a month
+ago that there was scarlet fever about and warned you to guard your mouths and
+noses with special care. Can you recall whether Charley has been
+careless?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Julia took the matter under consideration. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve all been, I
+guess,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Clara Wingate gave a party last week and there
+was bobbing for apples, and everybody had their faces in the same tub of
+water.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; and Irving Wingate has since come down with scarlet fever,&rdquo;
+added Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Enough said!&rdquo; asserted the Health Master. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t
+think of any better way to disseminate germs than an apple-bobbing contest. It
+beats even kissing games. Well, the mischief is done.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then they&rsquo;ll all have it,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde miserably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, let&rsquo;s hope not. Nothing is more mysterious than the way
+contagion hits one and misses others. I should say there was at least an even
+chance of the rest escaping. But we must regard them as suspects, and report
+the house for quarantine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ugh!&rdquo; shuddered Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;I hate that word. And think of
+my husband coming home to find a flaming red placard on the house!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll give him warning before he leaves the factory. And now for
+our campaign. Item 1: a trained nurse. Item 2: a gas-range.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The trained nurse, certainly,&rdquo; agreed Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;But why
+the gas-range? Isn&rsquo;t Charley&rsquo;s room warm enough?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite. The stove isn&rsquo;t for warmth; it&rsquo;s for safety.
+I&rsquo;m going to establish a line of fire beyond which no contagion can pass.
+We&rsquo;ll put the stove in the hall, and keep on it a tin boiler full of
+water just at the simmering point. Everything which Charley has used or touched
+must go into that or other boiling water as soon as it leaves the room: the
+plates he eats from, the utensils he uses; his handkerchiefs, night-clothes,
+towels&mdash;everything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That will be a hard regimen to keep up,&rdquo; Mrs. Clyde objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Martial law,&rdquo; said the Health Master positively. &ldquo;From the
+moment the red placard goes up, we&rsquo;re in a state of siege, and I&rsquo;m
+in command. The rules of the camp will be simple but strict. Whoever violates
+any of them will be liable to imprisonment in the strictest quarantine.
+We&rsquo;ll have a household conference to-night and go over the whole matter.
+Now I&rsquo;m going to telephone the Health Department and ask Dr. Merritt to
+come up and quarantine us officially.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what of Charley?&rdquo; exclaimed Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re
+not going to keep me away from my boy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not when you put it in that way and use that tone,&rdquo; smiled Dr.
+Strong. &ldquo;I probably couldn&rsquo;t if I tried. Under official quarantine
+rules you&rsquo;ll have to give up going anywhere outside the house. Under our
+local martial law you&rsquo;re not to touch Charley or anything that he
+handles, nor to kiss the other children. And you&rsquo;re to wash your hands
+every time you come out of the sick-room, though it&rsquo;s only to step beyond
+the door.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is an order,&rdquo; said the mother gravely. &ldquo;Will he be very
+ill, do you think?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So far the cases have been mild. His is likely to be, too. But
+it&rsquo;s the most difficult kind of case to handle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see that at all,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will, when he becomes convalescent. Then is when my troubles will
+begin. For the present the bulk of the work inside the sick-room will be upon
+the trained nurse and Mrs. Clyde. I&rsquo;ll have my troubles outside, watching
+the rest of the family.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not since Dr. Strong came to the Clydes&rsquo; as guardian of their health had
+there been an emergency meeting called of the Household Protective Association,
+as the Health Master termed the organization which he had formed (mainly for
+educative purposes) within the family. That evening he addressed a full
+session, including the servants, holding up before them the red placard which
+the Health Department had sent, and informing them of the quarantine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No school?&rdquo; inquired the practical-minded Bobs,
+&ldquo;Hooray!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No school for you children, until further notice,&rdquo; confirmed the
+physician.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And no business for me, I suppose,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, frowning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes. You can come and go as you please, so long as you keep away
+from Charley&rsquo;s room. Every one is barred from Charley&rsquo;s room until
+further instructions, except Mrs. Clyde; and she is confined within military
+bounds, consisting of the house and yard. And now for the most important
+thing&mdash;Rosie and Katie,&rdquo;&mdash;the cook and the
+maid&mdash;&ldquo;pay particular heed to this&mdash;nothing of any kind which
+comes from the sick-room is to be touched until it is disinfected, except under
+my supervision. When I&rsquo;m not in the house, the nurse&rsquo;s authority
+will be absolute. Now for the clinic; we&rsquo;ll look over the throats of the
+whole crowd.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Throat inspection appeared to be the Health Master&rsquo;s favorite pursuit for
+the next few days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t dare open my mouth,&rdquo; protested Bobs, &ldquo;for fear
+he&rsquo;ll peek into it and find a spot.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Strong spends a lot more time watching us than he does watching
+Charley,&rdquo; remarked Junkum. &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s the sick one,
+anyway&mdash;us or him?&rdquo; she concluded, her resentment getting the better
+of her grammar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ho!&rdquo; jeered Bobs, and intoned the ancient couplet, made and
+provided for the correction of such slips:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Her ain&rsquo;t a-callin&rsquo; we,<br />
+Us don&rsquo;t belong to she.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anyhow, I ain&rsquo;t sick,&rdquo; asseverated Bettina; &ldquo;but he
+shut me up in my room for a day jus&rsquo; because my swallow worked kinda
+hard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I&rsquo;m going to have scarlet fever I want to have scarlet fever
+and get done with it!&rdquo; declared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bobs. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m getting tired of staying out of school. Charley&rsquo;s
+having all the fun there is out of this, getting read to all the time by that
+nurse and Mother.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meantime nothing of interest was happening in the sick-room. Interesting phases
+seldom appear in scarlet fever, which is well, since, when they do appear, the
+patient usually dies. Not at any time did Charley evince the slightest tendency
+to forsake a world which he had found, on the whole, to be a highly
+satisfactory place of residence. In fact, he was going comfortably along
+through a typically light onset of the disease; and was rather less ill than he
+would have been with a sound case of measles. Already the furrows in Mrs.
+Clyde&rsquo;s forehead had smoothed out, and Grandma Sharpless had ceased
+waking, in the dead of night, with a catch at her heart and the totally
+unfounded fear that she had &ldquo;heard something,&rdquo; when one morning
+Charley awoke, scratched a tiny flake of skin off his nose, yawned, and emitted
+a hollow groan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it, Charley boy?&rdquo; asked his mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m tired of staying in bed,&rdquo; announced the young man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you feel?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The patient sat up, the better to consider the matter. &ldquo;I feel,&rdquo; he
+stated in positive accents, &ldquo;like a bucket of oyster stew, a steak as big
+as my head, with onions all over it, a whole apple pie, a platter of ice-cream,
+and a game of baseball.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Clyde laughed happily. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell the Health Master,&rdquo;
+she said. She did, and Dr. Strong came up and looked the patient over
+carefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You lie back there, young fellow,&rdquo; he ordered, &ldquo;and play
+sick, no matter how well you feel, until I tell you different.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How about that beefsteak and pie, Doctor?&rdquo; inquired the boy
+wistfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mere prospects,&rdquo; retorted the hard-hearted physician. &ldquo;But
+you can have some ice-cream.&rdquo; Conclave of the elders that evening to
+consider the situation was opened by Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve now reached the critical point,&rdquo; he began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Critical?&rdquo; gasped Mrs. Clyde, whose nerves had been considerably
+stretched in the ten days of sick-room work. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t he getting
+well?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s getting well quite as quickly as I want him to. Perhaps a
+little more quickly. The fever is broken and he is beginning to peel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then what&rsquo;s the difficulty?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just this. Charley is a sturdy boy. The light attack he&rsquo;s had
+hasn&rsquo;t begun to exhaust his vitality. From now on, he is going to be a
+bundle of energy, without outlet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From now on till when?&rdquo; It was Grandma Sharpless who wanted to
+know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two weeks anyway. Perhaps more.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you going to keep that poor child in bed for two weeks after
+he&rsquo;s practically well?&rdquo; said the mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For three weeks if the whole family will help me. It&rsquo;s not going
+to be easy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t that a little extreme, Strong?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only the precaution of experience. The danger-point in scarlet fever
+isn&rsquo;t the illness; it&rsquo;s the convalescence. People think that when a
+child is cured of a disease, he is cured of the effects of the disease also.
+That mistake costs lives.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because the poison is still in the system?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rather, the effects of the poison. Though the patient may feel quite
+well, the whole machinery of the body is out of gear. What do you do when your
+machinery goes wrong, Clyde?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stop it, of course.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; repeated the Health Master. &ldquo;Obviously we
+can&rsquo;t stop the machinery of life, but we can ease it down to its lowest
+possible strain, until it has had a chance to readjust itself. That is what I
+want to do in Charley&rsquo;s case.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How does this poison affect the system?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I could discover that, I&rsquo;d be sure of a place in history. All
+we know is that no organ seems to be exempt from its sudden return attack long
+after the disease has passed. If we ever get any complete records, I venture to
+say that we&rsquo;ll find more children dying in after years from the results
+of scarlet fever than die from the immediate disease itself, not to mention
+such after-effects as deafness and blindness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve noticed that,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, &ldquo;when we
+lived in the country. And I remember a verse on the scarlet-fever page of an
+old almanac:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+If they run from nose or ear,<br />
+Watch your children for a year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I always set down those cases to catching cold.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most people do. It isn&rsquo;t that. It&rsquo;s overstrain put on a
+poisoned system. And it&rsquo;s true not of scarlet fever alone, but of
+measles, and diphtheria, and grippe; and, in a lesser degree, of whooping-cough
+and chicken pox.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve seen such cases in your own practice?&rdquo; asked Mr.
+Clyde, and regretted the question as soon as he had put it, for there passed
+over Dr. Strong&rsquo;s face the quick spasm of pain which anything referring
+back to the hidden past before he had come to the Clyde house always brought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he replied with an effort. &ldquo;I have had such cases, and
+lost them. I might even say, killed them in my ignorance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no, Dr. Strong!&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde in quick sympathy.
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t say that. Being mistaken isn&rsquo;t killing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is, sometimes, for a doctor. I remember one little patient who had a
+very light case of scarlet fever. I let her get up as soon as the fever broke.
+Three months later she developed a dropsical tendency. And one day she fell
+dead across the doll she was playing with. The official cause of death said
+heart disease. But I knew what it was. The next case was not so wholly my
+fault. The boy was a spoiled child, who held his parents in enslavement. They
+hadn&rsquo;t the strength of character to keep him under control. He insisted
+on riding his bicycle around the yard, three days after he was out of bed.
+Against his willfulness my protests were of no account. What I should have done
+is to have thrown up the case; but I was young and the people were my friends.
+Well; that boy made, apparently, a complete recovery. A few weeks later I was
+sent for again. There was some kidney trouble. I knew, before the analysis was
+made, what it would show: nephritis. The poison had struck to the kidneys like
+a dagger. The poor little chap dragged along for some months before he died;
+and his mother&mdash;God forgive me if I did wrong in telling her the truth, as
+I did for the protection of their other child&mdash;almost lost her
+reason.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And such cases are common?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Common enough to be fairly typical. Afterward, I cited the two instances
+in a talk before our medical society. My frankness encouraged some of the other
+men to be frank; and the list of fatalities and permanent disabilities,
+following scarlet fever and measles, which was brought out at that meeting,
+nearly every case being one of rushing the convalescence&mdash;well, it
+reformed one phase of medical procedure in&mdash;in that city and
+county.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That settles it for Charley,&rdquo; decided Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;He stays
+in bed until you certify him cured, if I have to hire a vaudeville show to keep
+him amused.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My boy is not a spoiled child!&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde proudly. &ldquo;I
+can handle him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Maybe he wasn&rsquo;t before,&rdquo; remarked Grandma Sharpless dryly;
+&ldquo;but I think you&rsquo;ll have your hands full now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Therefore,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, &ldquo;I propose to enlist the
+services of the whole family, including the children.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What! Let the others go to see Charley when he&rsquo;s peeling?&rdquo;
+protested Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;They&rsquo;ll all catch it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, from the skin-flakes. That&rsquo;s the way scarlet fever
+spreads.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it?&rdquo; said the Health Master mildly. &ldquo;Then perhaps
+you&rsquo;ll explain to me why doctors aren&rsquo;t the greatest danger that
+civilization suffers from.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose they disinfect themselves,&rdquo; said the old lady, in a
+rather unconvinced tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s see how much that would amount to. The fine flakes of skin
+are likely to be pretty well disseminated in a sick-room. According to the old
+theory, every one of them is a potential disease-bearer. Now, a doctor could
+hardly be in a sickroom without getting some of them on his clothes or in his
+hair, as well as on his hands, which, of course, he thoroughly washes on
+leaving the place. But that&rsquo;s the extent of his disinfection. Why
+don&rsquo;t the flakes he carries with him spread the fever among his other
+patients?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t ask <i>me!</i>&rdquo; said Clyde. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not good
+at puzzles.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Many doctors still hold to the old theory. But I&rsquo;ve never met one
+who could answer that argument. Some of the best hospitals in the world
+discharge patients without reference to the peeling of the skin, and without
+evil results.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How is scarlet fever caught, then?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From the discharge from the inflamed nose and throat, or from the ears
+if they are affected. Anything which comes in contact with this poisonous mucus
+is dangerous. Thus, of course, the skin-flakes from the lips or the hands which
+had been in contact with the mouth or nose might carry the contagion, just as a
+fork or a tooth-brush or a handkerchief might. Now, I&rsquo;ll risk my status
+in this house on the safety of letting the other children visit Charley under
+certain restrictions.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That settles it for me,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, whose faith in his
+friend, while not unquestioning, was fundamental; and the two women agreed,
+though not without misgivings. Thereupon Bobs, Julia, and Bettina were sent
+for, and the Health Master announced that Charley would hold a reception on the
+following afternoon. There were shouts of acclamation at the prospect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But first,&rdquo; added Dr. Strong, &ldquo;there will be a rehearsal in
+the playroom, to-morrow morning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do we need a rehearsal for to see Charley?&rdquo; inquired Julia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To guard yourselves, Miss Junkum,&rdquo; returned the doctor.
+&ldquo;Possibly you don&rsquo;t know everything about scarlet fever that you
+should know. Do you, Cherubic Miss Toots,&rdquo; he added, turning upon
+Bettina, &ldquo;know what a contagious disease is?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said the diminutive maiden gravely, &ldquo;that if you
+leave Charley&rsquo;s door open the jerrums will fly out and bite
+people.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which fairly typifies the popular opinion concerning disease
+bacilli,&rdquo; observed Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I saw a jerrum once,&rdquo; continued the infant of the family.
+&ldquo;It was under a stone in a creek. It had horns and a wiggly tail. Just
+like the Devil,&rdquo; she added with an engaging smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Betty&rsquo;s been looking at the pictures in the comic
+supplements,&rdquo; explained her elder sister.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Popular education by the press!&rdquo; commented Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;Well, I haven&rsquo;t time for an exposition of the germ theory now. The
+point is this: Can you children stay an hour in Charley&rsquo;s room without
+putting a lot of things in your mouths?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, I never put anything in my mouth. You taught us better than
+that,&rdquo; said Julia reproachfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor was little impressed by the reproach. &ldquo;Humph!&rdquo; he
+grunted. &ldquo;Well, suppose you stop nibbling at your
+hair&rdquo;&mdash;Julia&rsquo;s braid flew back over her
+shoulder&mdash;&ldquo;and consider that, when you put your fingers in your
+mouth, you may be putting in, also, a particle of everything that your fingers
+have touched. And in Charley&rsquo;s room there might be jerrums, as Twinkles
+calls them, from his mouth which would be dangerous. Rehearsal at noon
+tomorrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Expectant curiosity brought the children early to the playroom whither they
+found that the Health Master had preceded them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When&rsquo;s it going to begin?&rdquo; asked Bettina.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Presently,&rdquo; replied the master of ceremonies. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re
+going to pretend that this is Charley&rsquo;s room. Just at present I&rsquo;m
+busy with some work.&rdquo; He shook a notebook at them. &ldquo;Go ahead and
+amuse yourselves till I get through.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Julia the observant noted three hues of crayon on the stand beside the doctor.
+&ldquo;Are you going to make a sketch?&rdquo; she inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never you mind. You attend to your affairs and I&rsquo;ll attend to
+mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Strong is a-goin&rsquo; to make a picture of a jerrum,&rdquo;
+Bettina informed her favorite doll, Susan Nipper, imprinting a fervent kiss on
+the pet&rsquo;s flattened face. &ldquo;Come on an&rsquo; let&rsquo;s read the
+paper.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong made a note in his book, with a pencil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Want to play catch, Junkum?&rdquo; suggested Bobs to his twin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Julia, seizing upon a glove, while Bobs, in his
+rôle of pitcher, professionally moistened the ball.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong made another note.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For half an hour they disported themselves in various ways while the Health
+Master, whose eyes were roving everywhere, made frequent entries in his book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All out now,&rdquo; he ordered finally. &ldquo;Come back in five
+minutes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before the time was up, they were clustered at the door. Dr. Strong admitted
+them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Does the rehearsal begin now?&rdquo; asked Bobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all over,&rdquo; said the physician. &ldquo;Look around
+you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ow-w-w!&rdquo; wailed Bettina. &ldquo;Look at Susan Nipper&rsquo;s
+nose!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That once inconspicuous feature had turned a vivid green.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the baseball is red,&rdquo; cried Bobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So&rsquo;s my glove,&rdquo; announced Julia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Walking over to her, the Health Master caught her left hand and smeared it with
+blue crayon. For good measure he put a dab on her chin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My story-book is all blue, too,&rdquo; exclaimed the girl.
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s it for?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just by way of illustration,&rdquo; explained the doctor. &ldquo;The
+mouths of all of us contain germs of one kind or another. So I&rsquo;ve assumed
+that Bob&rsquo;s mouth has red, and Junkum&rsquo;s blue, and Miss
+Twinkle&rsquo;s green. Every chalk mark shows where you&rsquo;ve spread your
+germs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then the red on the ball is where I wet my fingers for that
+in-curve,&rdquo; said Bobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And on my glove is where I caught it,&rdquo; said Julia. &ldquo;But
+what&rsquo;s the blue doing on my left hand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know,&rdquo; announced Bobs triumphantly. &ldquo;You got that slow
+drop on the end of your finger and jammed your finger in your mouth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It hurt,&rdquo; defended Julia. &ldquo;Look at the walls&mdash;and the
+Indian clubs&mdash;and the chair.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Crayon marks were everywhere.<a href="#fn2" name="fnref2" id="fnref2"><sup>[2]</sup></a>
+In some places it was one color; in others another; in many, a crazy pattern of
+red, blue, and green.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="fn2" id="fn2"></a> <a href="#fnref2">[2]</a>
+For this ingenious example of the crayon marks I am indebted to Dr. Charles
+V. Chapin, Health Officer of Providence, Rhode Island, and a distinguished
+epidemiologist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And if I carried it out,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;your faces would
+all be as bad.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care!&rdquo; murmured Betty to Susan Nipper; &ldquo;I
+<i>will</i> kiss you even if you do turn green.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you mustn&rsquo;t kiss Charley,&rdquo; interposed Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;If you&rsquo;ve had enough rehearsal, we&rsquo;ll go and make our call
+right after luncheon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Entering the sick-room, the three visitors stood a little abashed and strange.
+Their hearty, rough-and-tumble brother looked strangely drawn and brighteyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello, kids!&rdquo; said he, airily. &ldquo;Make yourselves at
+home.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bettykin was the first to break the ice. &ldquo;Did it hurt, Charley?&rdquo;
+she asked, remembering her own experience with adenoids.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nope,&rdquo; said the convalescent. &ldquo;Only thing that hurts is
+being kept in bed when I want to be up and around. What&rsquo;s new?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Much was new, there in the room, and the children took it in, wide-eyed.
+Although it was early May, the windows were screened. All the hangings and
+curtains had been taken out of the room, which looked bare and bright. On the
+door of the bathroom was a huge roller-towel of soft, cloth-like paper,
+perforated in lengths so as to be easily detachable, and below it a
+scrap-basket, with a sign: &ldquo;Throw Paper Towels in Here to be Burned after
+Using.&rdquo; Between the two windows was a larger sign:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Keep your Fingers Away from Your Mouth and Nose.<br />
+Don&rsquo;t Handle Utensils Lying About.<br />
+Don&rsquo;t Open an Unscreened Window.<br />
+After Touching Anything which may have been Contaminated Wash Your Hands at
+Once.<br />
+Use the Paper Towels; They&rsquo;re the Only Safe Kind.<br />
+One Dollar Reward to Any One Discovering a Fly in the Room.<br />
+Wash Your Hands Immediately After Leaving the Room.<br />
+Keep Outside the Dead-line.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+PENALTIES
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+For First Violation of Rules&mdash;Offender Reads to Patient One Hour. Second
+Violation&mdash;Banishment for Balance of Day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The dead-line is that thing, I suppose,&rdquo; said Junkum, pointing to
+a tape stretched upon standards around the bed at a distance of a yard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it a game?&rdquo; questioned the hopeful Bettina. &ldquo;No,
+Bettykin. It&rsquo;s a germ-cage. No germs can get out of that unless
+they&rsquo;re carried out by somebody or something. And, in that case,
+they&rsquo;re boiled to death on the gas-stove outside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment Charley called for a drink of water. After he had emptied the
+glass, his mother took it out and dropped it into the disinfecting hot bath.
+Then she washed her hands, dried them on a strip of the paper towel and dropped
+that in the basket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I see,&rdquo; said Julia, the observant. &ldquo;Nothing gets any scarlet
+fever on it except what Charley touches. And everything he touches has to be
+washed as soon as it comes out of the dead-line.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Exactly. We&rsquo;ll make a trained nurse of you, yet, Junkum,&rdquo;
+approved the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then,&rdquo; said Julia slowly, &ldquo;I think Bobs ought to wash his
+hands now. Mother opened the door after handling Charley&rsquo;s glass, and
+when he went to watch her wash the glass, he put his hand on the knob.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One mark against Bobs,&rdquo; announced the doctor. &ldquo;The rigor of
+the game.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A game it proved to be, with Charley for umpire, and a very keen umpire, as he
+was the beneficiary of the penalties. For some days Charley quite fattened on
+literature dispensed orally by the incautious. Presently, however, they became
+so wary that it was hard to catch them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, indeed, was the doctor hard put to it to keep the invalid amused. The
+children invented games and charades for him. A special telephone wire was run
+to his room so that he might talk with his friends. Bobs won commendations by
+flying a kite one windy day and passing the twine up through Charley&rsquo;s
+window, whereby the bedridden one spent a happy afternoon &ldquo;feeling her
+pull.&rdquo; And the next day Betty won the first and only dollar by
+discovering a small and early fly which, presumably, had crawled in by the hole
+bored for the kite twine. As to any encroachments upon the physical quiet of
+his patient or the protective guardianship surrounding him, the Health Master
+was adamant, until, on a day, after examining the prisoner&rsquo;s throat and
+nose, and going over him, as Mr. Clyde put it, &ldquo;like a man buying a horse
+that&rsquo;s cheaper than he ought to be,&rdquo; he sent for the Health
+Officer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a clean throat,&rdquo; said Dr. Merritt. &ldquo;Never mind
+the desquamating skin. We&rsquo;ll call it off.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whereupon Charley was raised from his bed, and having symbolically broken the
+tape-line about his bed, headed a solemn and slow procession of the entire
+family to the front porch where he formally took down the red placard and tore
+it in two. The halves still ornament the playroom, as a memento.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this memorable ceremony, Mrs. Clyde retired to the library and, quite
+contrary to her usually self-restrained nature, dissolved into illogical tears,
+in which condition she was found by the rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know what&rsquo;s the matter,&rdquo; she
+sobbed, in response to her husband&rsquo;s inquiry. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just
+because I hated the very thought of that abominable red sign so,&mdash;as if we
+were unclean&mdash;like lepers.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, we&rsquo;re not lepers and if we can continue in that blessed
+state,&rdquo; remarked Dr. Strong cheerfully, &ldquo;we can escape most of the
+ills that flesh is heir to. After all, from a scientific point of view,
+contagion is merely the Latin synonym for a much shorter and uglier
+word.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which is&mdash;&rdquo; queried Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dirt,&rdquo; said the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap08"></a>VIII.<br />
+HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;H</span>opeless from the
+first,&rdquo; said old Mrs. Sharpless, with a sigh, to her daughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Clyde nodded. &ldquo;I suppose so. And she has so much to live for,
+too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s this that&rsquo;s hopeless from the first?&rdquo; asked the
+Health Master, looking up from the novel which he was enjoying in what he
+called his &ldquo;lazy hour,&rdquo; after luncheon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Westerly&rsquo;s case,&rdquo; said the younger woman. &ldquo;Even
+now that she&rsquo;s gone to the hospital, the family won&rsquo;t admit that
+it&rsquo;s cancer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, of the liver, I suppose,&rdquo; commented the physician.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why on earth should you suppose that?&rdquo; demanded Mrs. Sharpless
+suspiciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, because cancer of the liver is the only form which could possibly
+be regarded as hopeless from the first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All cancer, if it is really cancer, is hopeless,&rdquo; declared the old
+lady with vigorous dogmatism. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me. I&rsquo;ve seen too
+many cases die and too few get well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Were those &lsquo;few&rsquo; hopeless, too?&rdquo; inquired Dr. Strong
+with bland slyness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess they weren&rsquo;t cancer, at all,&rdquo; retorted Mrs.
+Sharpless; &ldquo;just doctors&rsquo; mistakes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Doctors do make mistakes,&rdquo; admitted the representative of the
+profession, &ldquo;and cancer is one of the diseases where they are most
+commonly at fault. But the error isn&rsquo;t of the kind that you suggest,
+Grandma Sharpless. Where they go wrong so often is in mistaking cancer for some
+less malignant trouble; not in mistaking the less malignant forms for cancer.
+And that wastes thousands of lives every year which might have been
+saved.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How could they have been saved?&rdquo; asked the old lady combatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me do the questioning for a minute, and perhaps we&rsquo;ll get at
+that. Now, these many cases that you&rsquo;ve known: were most of the fatal
+ones recent?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not very,&rdquo; she replied, after some consideration. &ldquo;No; most
+of them were from ten years ago, back.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Exactly. Now, the few that recovered: when did these occur?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Within a few years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;None of the old cases recovered?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But a fair proportion of the more recent ones have?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All these were operated on, weren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; I believe they were. But not all that were operated on
+lived.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did a single one of those not operated on live?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not so far as I can remember.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, there we have the truth about cancer in a few words; or, anyway, a
+good part of the truth. Up to twenty years ago or so, cancer was practically
+incurable. It always returned after operation. That was because the surgeon
+thought he needed only to cut out the cancer. Now he knows better; he knows
+that he must cut out all the tissue and the glands around the obvious cancer,
+and thus get the root of the growth out of the system.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And that cures?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In a great majority of cases, <i>if it is done early enough</i>.&rdquo;
+The Health Master dropped his book and beat time with an emphatic forefinger to
+his concluding words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But Agnes Westerly&rsquo;s is cancer of the breast,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Clyde, as if that clinched the case against the patient.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just about the most favorable locality.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought it was the worst.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where on earth do intelligent women collect their superstitions about
+cancer?&rdquo; cried Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Carcinoma of the breast is the
+commonest form among women, and the easiest to handle. Show me a case in the
+first stages and, with a good surgical hospital at hand, I&rsquo;d almost
+guarantee recovery. It&rsquo;s simply a question of removing the entire breast,
+and sometimes the adjacent glands. Ninety per cent of the early cases should
+get well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the operation itself is so terrible,&rdquo; shuddered Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Terrible? Unpleasant, I&rsquo;ll admit. But if you mean terrible in the
+sense of dangerous, or even serious, you&rsquo;re far wrong again. The
+percentage of mortality from the operation itself is negligible. But the
+percentage of mortality without operation is 100 out of 100. So the choice is
+an easy one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They seem to hold out little hope for Agnes Westerly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s hear about the circumstances,&rdquo; suggested Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About two years ago&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a bad beginning,&rdquo; interrupted the physician, shaking
+his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;She noticed a small lump in her right breast. It didn&rsquo;t
+trouble her much&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seldom does at the start.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;And she didn&rsquo;t want to alarm her husband; so she said
+nothing about it. It kept getting a little larger very slowly, but there was no
+outside sore; so she thought it couldn&rsquo;t be serious. If it were, she
+thought, it would pain her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That fatal mistake! Pain is a late symptom in cancer&mdash;usually too
+late.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was curious the way she finally came to find out. She read an
+advertisement in the paper, headed, &lsquo;Any Lump in Woman&rsquo;s Breast is
+Cancer.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; I know that advertisement. It&rsquo;s put out by a scoundrel named
+Chamlee. Surely, she didn&rsquo;t try his torturing treatment?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no. Agnes is too intelligent for that. But it frightened her into
+going to her doctor. He told her that a radical operation was her only chance.
+She was terribly frightened,&mdash;more afraid of the knife than of the
+disease, she told me,&mdash;and she insisted on delay until the pain grew
+intolerable. And now, they say, there&rsquo;s only a slight chance. Isn&rsquo;t
+it pitiful?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pitiful, and typical. Mrs. Westerly, if she dies, is a type of suicide,
+the suicide of fear and ignorance. Two years&rsquo; waiting! And every day
+subtracting from her chance. That&rsquo;s the curse of cancer; that people
+won&rsquo;t understand the vital necessity of promptness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But is it true that any lump in a woman&rsquo;s breast is cancer?&rdquo;
+asked Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; it&rsquo;s a lie; a damnable lie, circulated by that quack to scare
+foolish women into his toils. Most of such lumps are non-malignant growths.
+This is true, though: that any lump in a woman&rsquo;s breast is suspicious. It
+may be cancer; or it may develop into cancer. The only course is to find
+out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;&ldquo;With the knife.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t that rather a severe method for a symptom that may not mean
+anything?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not too severe, considering the danger. Whatever the lump may be, it has
+no business there in the breast, any more than a bullet has. If it is only a
+small benign tumor, the process of taking it out is very simple, and there is
+nothing further to do. While the patient is still under the anaesthetic, a
+microscopical examination of the tissue, which can be made in a few minutes in
+a well-equipped hospital, will determine whether the growth is malignant. If
+so, the whole breast is taken off, and the patient, in all probability, saved.
+If not, sew up the wound, and the subject is none the worse. Much the better,
+in fact, for the most innocent growth may develop cancer by irritation. Thirty
+per cent, or more, of breast cancers develop in this way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But irritation alone won&rsquo;t cause cancer, will it?&rdquo; asked
+Mrs. Clyde, her restlessly inquiring mind reaching back, as was typical of her
+mental processes, toward first causes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. There must be something else. What that something is, we don&rsquo;t
+know. But we are pretty certain that it doesn&rsquo;t develop unless there is
+irritation of some kind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t cancer a germ disease?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nobody knows. Some day we may&mdash;probably shall&mdash;find out.
+Meantime we have the knowledge of how to prevent it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How to prevent a disease you don&rsquo;t know the nature of?&rdquo; said
+Mrs. Sharpless incredulously. &ldquo;That sounds like nonsense.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Does it? What about smallpox? We haven&rsquo;t any idea of what smallpox
+really is; but we are able to control it with practical certainty through
+vaccination.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Doctors don&rsquo;t vaccinate for cancer,&rdquo; remarked the
+practical-minded old lady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They have tried serums, but that is no use. As I said, the immediate
+occasion of cancer is irritation. There is overwhelming proof that an unhealing
+sore or irritation at any point is likely to result in the development of a
+cancer at that point, and at least a highly probable inference that, without
+such irritation, the disease would not develop.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then why not get rid of the irritation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, there&rsquo;s the point. That&rsquo;s where the tremendous
+life-saving could be effected. Take a very simple instance, cancer of the lip.
+In a thousand cases recorded by one of the Johns Hopkins experts, there
+wasn&rsquo;t one but had developed from a small sore, at first of innocent
+nature. It isn&rsquo;t too much to say that this particular manifestation of
+cancer is absolutely preventable. If every person with a sore on the lip which
+doesn&rsquo;t heal within three weeks were to go to a good surgeon, this
+hideous and defacing form of tumor would disappear from the earth. As for
+carcinoma of the tongue, one of the least hopeful of all varieties, no careful
+person need ever develop it. Good dentistry, which keeps the mouth free of
+jagged tooth-edges, is half the battle. The other half is caution on the part
+of smokers. If a white patch develops in the mouth, tobacco should be given up
+at once. Unless the patch heals within a few weeks, the patient should consult
+a physician, and, if necessary, have it removed by a minor operation.
+That&rsquo;s all there is to that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if the irritant sore is internal?&rdquo; inquired Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To the watchful it will give evidence of its presence, usually in time.
+If it is in the intestines or stomach, there is generally some uneasiness,
+vague, perhaps, but still suspicious, to announce the danger. Surgical records
+covering a long period show that eighty per cent of stomach cancers were
+preceded by definite gastric symptoms of more than a year&rsquo;s duration. If
+it is in the uterus, there are definite signs which every woman ought to be
+taught to understand. And here, to go back to the matter of cure, even if the
+discovery isn&rsquo;t made until cancer has actually developed, there is an
+excellent chance in the early stages. Cancer of the stomach used to be sure
+doom to a hideous death. Now, taking the cases as they come, the desperate
+chances with the early cases, more than a quarter are saved in the best
+surgical hospitals. Where the growth is in the womb or the intestines, with
+reasonably early discovery, a generous half should be repaired and returned to
+active life as good as new.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That doesn&rsquo;t seem possible,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless flatly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Simply because you&rsquo;ve been steeped in the fatalism which surrounds
+cancer. That fatalism, which is so hard to combat, is what keeps women from the
+saving hope of the knife. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve got to die anyway,&rsquo; they say,
+&lsquo;and I&rsquo;m not going to be carved up before I die.&rsquo; And so they
+throw away what chance they have. Oh, if only I had control of the newspapers
+of this city for one day a week or a month,&mdash;just for a half-column
+editorial,&mdash;what a saving of life I could effect! A little simple advice
+in straight-out terms would teach the people of this community to avoid poor
+Mrs. Westerly&rsquo;s fate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And drive &lsquo;em all into the hands of the doctors,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Sharpless shrewdly. &ldquo;A fine fattening of fees for your trade, young
+man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you think so? Do you think that cancer <i>ever</i> fails to come to
+the physician at last? And do you think the fee is less because the surgeon has
+to do twice the amount of work with a hundredth of the hope of success?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No-o-o,&rdquo; admitted the old lady, with some hesitancy; &ldquo;I
+didn&rsquo;t think of it in that light.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Few do. Oh, for the chance to teach people to think straight about this!
+Publicity is what we need so bitterly, and the only publicity goes to the
+quacks who pay for it, because the local newspapers don&rsquo;t want to write
+about &lsquo;unpleasant topics,&rsquo; forsooth!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you want a chance for some publicity in a small way?&rdquo; asked
+Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do I! Show me the chance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Mothers&rsquo; Association meets here this afternoon. We
+haven&rsquo;t much business on hand. Come in and talk to us for an hour.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fine!&rdquo; said the Health Master, with enthusiasm. &ldquo;Half of
+that time will do me. How many will be there?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About sixty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well. Just have me introduced with the statement that I&rsquo;m
+going to talk informally on a subject of importance to all of you; and then
+help me out with a little object lesson. I&rsquo;ll want sixty sealed envelopes
+for the members to draw.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you conducting a lottery, young man?&rdquo; queried Grandma
+Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In a way. Rather I&rsquo;m arranging an illustration for the great
+lottery which Life and Death conduct.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+Two hours later, the business of the meeting having been concluded, Mrs. Clyde
+asked, from the assembled mothers, the privilege of the floor for Dr. Strong,
+and this being granted, aroused the curiosity of the meeting by requesting each
+member to draw an envelope from the basket which she carried around, while the
+presiding officer introduced the speaker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me begin,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;with an ungallant
+assumption. I&rsquo;m going to assume that I&rsquo;m talking to a gathering of
+middle-aged women. That being the case, I&rsquo;m going on to a very unpleasant
+statement, to wit, that one out of every eight women here may reasonably expect
+to die of cancer in some form.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little subdued flutter passed through the room, and the name of Agnes
+Westerly was whispered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; it is Mrs. Westerly&rsquo;s case which is responsible for my being
+here,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, who had abnormally keen hearing. &ldquo;I would
+like to save at least part of the eight out of your number, who are
+statistically doomed, from this probable fate. To bring the lesson home to you,
+I have had each of you draw an envelope. Eight of these represent death by
+cancer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every eye in the room turned, with rather ghastly surmise, to the little white
+squares. But old Mrs. Sharpless rose from her place, marched upon the Health
+Master, as one who leads a charge, and in low but vehement tones protested:
+&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t be a party to any such nonsense. The idea! Scaring some
+woman that&rsquo;s as well as you are into nervous collapse with your black dot
+or red cross or whatever you&rsquo;ve got inside these envelopes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Grandma Sharpless, Grandma Sharpless! Have you known me all this
+time not to trust me further than that?&rdquo; whispered the Health Master.
+&ldquo;Wait and see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little woman near the rear of the room spoke up with a fine bravado:
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not afraid. It can&rsquo;t give me cancer.&rdquo; Then a
+pause, and a sigh of relief, which brought out a ripple of nervous laughter
+from the rest, as she said, &ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing in mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor in mine,&rdquo; added a young and pretty woman, in the second row,
+who had furtively and swiftly employed a hatpin to satisfy her curiosity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor mine!&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Nor mine!&rdquo; added a dozen voices, in
+varying tones of alleviated suspense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not in any of them,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, smiling. &ldquo;My little
+design was to arouse you collectively to a sense of the danger, not to frighten
+you individually into hysterics.&rdquo; (At this point Mrs. Sharpless sat down
+abruptly and fanned a resentful face.) &ldquo;The ugly fact remains, however:
+one out of every eight here is marked for death by the most dreadful of
+diseases, unless you do something about it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What can we do?&rdquo; inquired the minister&rsquo;s wife, in the pause
+that followed this statement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Educate yourselves. If, in the process, you educate others, so much the
+better. Now I propose to tell you all about cancer in half an hour. Does that
+sound like a large contract? When I say &lsquo;all,&rsquo; I mean all that it
+is necessary for you to know in order to protect yourselves. And, for good
+measure, I&rsquo;ll answer any questions&mdash;if I can&mdash;within the limit
+of time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What <i>is</i> cancer?&rdquo; asked a voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! There is one that I can&rsquo;t answer. No one knows. If I told you
+that it was a malignant tumor, that would be true, but it wouldn&rsquo;t be an
+answer, because we don&rsquo;t know the real nature and underlying cause of the
+tumor. Whether it is caused by a germ, science has not yet determined. But
+though we know nothing of the fundamental cause of the disease, we do
+understand, definitely, what is the immediate causative influence. It
+practically always arises from some local sore or irritation.
+Therefore&mdash;and here is my first important point&mdash;it is
+preventable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That would be only theoretically, wouldn&rsquo;t it, Dr. Strong?&rdquo;
+asked the little woman who had first braved the venture of the sealed envelope.
+&ldquo;One can&rsquo;t get through life without bumps and scratches.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True. But ordinary bumps or scratches properly looked after don&rsquo;t
+cause cancer. The sore must be an unhealing one, or the irritation a continued
+condition, in order to be dangerous. Remember this: any sort of a sore,
+inflammation, or scarification, external or internal, which continues more than
+a few weeks, is an invitation to cancer. Therefore, get rid of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But suppose the injury is in the stomach, where it can&rsquo;t be got
+at?&rdquo; asked a member.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why can&rsquo;t it be got at?&rdquo; demanded Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How can it be got at?&rdquo; retorted the questioner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By opening up the stomach and examining it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t want anybody to open up my stomach just to see what
+is inside it!&rdquo; declared Mrs. Sharpless vigorously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very likely not. Perhaps you&rsquo;d feel different if you&rsquo;d had
+steady pain or indigestion for two or three years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Does that mean cancer?&rdquo; asked a tall, sallow woman anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not by any means necessarily. But it may well mean gastric ulcer, and
+that may develop into cancer. Three fourths of the cases of carcinoma of the
+stomach which come into the surgeon&rsquo;s hands have developed from gastric
+ulcer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is there no cure but the knife?&rdquo; inquired Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not for the cancer. For the gastric ulcer, yes. Careful medical care and
+diet often cure it. The trouble is that patients insist on diet and drugs in
+cases where they have proved themselves ineffectual. Those cases should come to
+the surgeon. But it will take long to educate the public to the significance of
+long-continued abdominal pain or indigestion. The knife is the last thing they
+are willing to think of.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But stomach operations are terribly dangerous, aren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;
+inquired a member.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not any more. They were once. The operation for gastric ulcer in the
+early stage is simple. Even developed cancer of the stomach can be cured by the
+knife in from twenty-five to thirty per cent of the cases. Without the knife,
+it is sure death. I&rsquo;m glad we got to the stomach first, because that is
+the most obscure and least hopeful of the common locations of the growth. In
+carcinoma of the breast, the most prevalent form among women, there is one
+simple, inclusive rule of prevention and cure. Any lump in the breast should be
+regarded, as Blood-good of Johns Hopkins puts it, &lsquo;as an acute
+disease.&rsquo; It should come out immediately. If such growths come at once to
+the surgeon, prevention and cure together would save probably ninety per cent
+of those who now die from this &lsquo;creeping death,&rsquo; as our parents
+called it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, I&rsquo;ll ask you to imagine for the moment that I am conducting a
+clinic, for I&rsquo;m not going to mince words in speaking of cancer of the
+womb, the next commonest form. Any persistent irritation there is a peril. If
+there is a slight, steady, and untimely discharge, that&rsquo;s a danger
+signal. The woman should at once have a microscopical examination made. This is
+simple, almost painless, and practically a sure determination of whether there
+is cancer or not. The thing to do is to find out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if it is cancer, is there any chance?&rdquo; asked the lady of the
+hatpin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would you regard tuberculosis as hopeless?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your parents would have. But you have profited by popular education. If
+the public understood what to do in cancer as thoroughly as they know about
+tuberculosis, we&rsquo;d save almost if not quite as many victims from the more
+terrible disease. Fatalism is as out of place in the one as in the other. The
+gist of the matter is taking the thing in time. Let me read you what the
+chairman of the Cancer Campaign Committee of the Congress of Surgeons of North
+America, Dr. Thomas S. Cullen, of Baltimore, says: &lsquo;Surgeons are
+heartsick to see the many cancer patients begging for operations when the
+disease is so far advanced that nothing can be done. Cancer is in the beginning
+a local process and not a blood disease, and in its early stages can be
+completely removed. When the cancer is small the surgeon can, with one fourth
+the amount of labor, accomplish ten times the amount of good.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Does that always mean the knife?&rdquo; asked a timid-looking woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Always. There is no other hope, once the malignant growth has begun. But
+the knife is not so terrible. In fact, in the early stages it is not terrible
+at all. Modern surgery has reduced pain to a minimum. The strongest argument
+against dread is a visit to a well-equipped surgical hospital, where one can
+see patients sitting up in bed and enjoying life a few days after a major
+operation. Even at the worst, the knife is less terrible than death, its
+certain alternative.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why do you call it the certain alternative?&rdquo; asked the
+minister&rsquo;s wife. &ldquo;I have seen facial cancer cured by concentrated
+ray treatment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That wasn&rsquo;t cancer; it was lupus,&rdquo; replied Dr. Strong;
+&ldquo;a wholly different thing. True cancer of the face in its commonest
+location, the lips, is the most frequently cured of any form, but only by
+operation. Now here&rsquo;s an interesting and suggestive point; taking
+lip-cancer patients as they come to us, we get perhaps sixty-five per cent of
+complete cures. With cancer of the womb, we get in all not more than forty per
+cent of recoveries. Perhaps some of you will be able to suggest the explanation
+for this contrast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because cancer of the lip isn&rsquo;t as deadly a disease,&rdquo;
+ventured some one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cancer is cancer, wherever it is located. Unless it is removed it is
+always and equally deadly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it is because the internal operation is so much more
+dangerous,&rdquo; offered another member.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; uterine operations are easy and simple. It is simply because the
+sore on the face is obvious, plain, unmistakable evidence of something wrong;
+and the patient ordinarily gets into the surgeon&rsquo;s hands early; that is,
+before the roots of the growth have spread and involved life itself. The
+difference in mortality between carcinoma of the lip and carcinoma of the womb
+is the difference between early operation and delayed operation. If uterine
+cancer or breast cancer were discovered as early as lip cancer, we&rsquo;d save
+practically as many of the internal as we do of the external cases. And if all
+the lip cancer cases were noticed at the first development, we&rsquo;d save
+ninety-five per cent of them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it the business of the physician to find out about the
+internal forms?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Often the physician hasn&rsquo;t the chance. The woman ought to do the
+first diagnosing herself. That is, she must be taught to recognize suspicious
+symptoms. In Germany there has been a campaign of education among women on
+cancer of the womb. The result is that more than twice as many Germans come to
+the operating table, in time to give a fair chance of permanent recovery in
+this class of cases, as do Americans.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How is the American woman, who knows nothing about such matters, to find
+out?&rdquo; queried the minister&rsquo;s wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is a campaign of education now under way here. Publications giving
+the basic facts about cancer, its prevention and cure, in simple and popular
+form, can be had from the American Society for the Control of
+Cancer,&mdash;Thomas M. Debevoise, secretary, 62 Cedar Street, New York City;
+or more detailed advice can be had from the Cancer Campaign Committee of the
+Congress of Surgeons of North America, Dr. Thomas S. Cullen, chairman, 3 West
+Preston Street, Baltimore; or from Dr. F. R. Green, 535 Dearborn Avenue,
+Chicago, Illinois, secretary of the Council of Health and Public Instruction of
+the American Medical Association.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why not more easily and readily one&rsquo;s own physician?&rdquo; asked
+Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Women don&rsquo;t go to their own physicians early enough. It is
+necessary that they be trained to understand symptoms which do not at first
+seem serious enough for medical attention. Besides, I regret to confess, in
+this matter of cancer our physicians need educating, too. They are too prone to
+say, if they are not sure of the diagnosis, &lsquo;Wait and see.&rsquo; Waiting
+to see is what kills three fourths of the women who succumb to cancer. Let me
+illustrate this peril by two cases which have come under my observation: The
+wife of a lawyer in a Western city had a severe attack of stomach trouble. Her
+doctor, a young and open-minded man, had the courage to say, &lsquo;I
+don&rsquo;t know. But I&rsquo;m afraid it&rsquo;s cancer. You&rsquo;d better go
+to such-and-such a hospital and let them see.&rsquo; The woman went. An
+exploratory incision was made and carcinoma found in the early stage. It was
+cut out and to-day she is as good as new.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, this same lawyer had a friend who had been treated for months by a
+stomach specialist of some reputation. Under the treatment he had grown
+steadily thinner, paler, and weaker. &lsquo;Indigestion, gastric
+intoxication,&rsquo; the specialist repeated, parrotlike, until the man
+himself, in his misery, began to suspect. At this point the lawyer friend got
+hold of him and took him to the hospital where his wife had been. The surgeons
+refused the case and sent the man away to die. Indignant, the lawyer sought the
+superintendent of the hospital.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Why won&rsquo;t you take my friend&rsquo;s case?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;It is inoperable.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Isn&rsquo;t it cancer of the stomach, like my
+wife&rsquo;s?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Yes.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;You cured my wife. Why can&rsquo;t you cure my friend?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The official shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want an answer,&rdquo; insisted the lawyer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Well, frankly,&rsquo; said the other, &lsquo;your wife&rsquo;s
+physician knew his business. Your friend&rsquo;s physician is a fool. He has
+killed his patient by delay.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Back home went the lawyer, and spread that story quietly. To-day the
+specialist&rsquo;s practice is almost ruined; but he has learned an expensive
+lesson. The moral is this: If your doctor is doubtful whether your trouble is
+cancerous, and advises delay, get another doctor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then, there is the &lsquo;conservative&rsquo; type of practitioner, who
+is timid about making a complete job of his operation. One of this kind had the
+case of an acquaintance of mine who was stricken with cancer of the breast. The
+physician, under persuasion of his patient, I presume, advised excising only
+the tumor itself, but the husband, who had been reading up on cancer, insisted
+on a radical operation. The entire breast was removed. A year later the
+woman&rsquo;s unmarried sister was afflicted in exactly the same way; but the
+discovery was made earlier, so that the case was a distinctly favorable one.
+The girl, however, would not consent to the radical operation, and the
+physician (the same man) declared it unnecessary. The tumor alone was cut out.
+The cancer reappeared and another operation was necessary. The girl died after
+cruel suffering. The married sister is alive, and, five years after the
+operation, as sound as a bell. That physician is a wiser man; also a sadder
+one. There&rsquo;s a special moral to this, too: the operator has but one
+chance; he must do his work thoroughly, or he might better not do it at all.
+When cancer returns after operation&mdash;which means that the roots were not
+eradicated&mdash;it is invariably fatal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here are a few things which I want every one of you to remember. Had I
+had time I&rsquo;d have had them printed for each of you to take home, so
+important do I think them:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No cancer is hopeless when discovered early.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most cancer, discovered early, is permanently curable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The only cure is the knife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Medicines are worse than useless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Delay is more than dangerous; it is deadly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The one hope, and a strong one, is prompt and radical operation. A
+half-operation is worse than none at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most, if not all, cancer is preventable by correcting the minor
+difficulty from which it develops.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With recognition of, and prompt action upon early symptoms, the death
+rate can be cut down at least a half; probably more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The fatalism which says: &lsquo;If it&rsquo;s cancer, I might as well
+give up,&rsquo; is foolish, cowardly, and suicidal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And, finally, here is some simple advice, intelligible to any thinking
+human being, which has been indorsed in printed form by the Congress of
+Surgeons of North America:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Be careful of persistent sores or irritations, external or
+internal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Be careful of yourself, without undue worry. At the first
+suspicious symptom go to some good physician and demand the truth. Don&rsquo;t
+wait for pain to develop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;If the doctor suspects cancer insist that he confirm or disprove
+his suspicions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t be a hopeless fatalist. If it&rsquo;s cancer face it
+bravely. With courage and prompt action the chances of recovery are all in your
+favor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t defer an advised operation even for a day; and
+don&rsquo;t shrink from the merciful knife, when the alternative is the
+merciless anguish of slow death.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For the woman who fears the knife, Dr. Charles H. Mayo, one of the
+greatest of living surgeons, has spoken the final words: &lsquo;The risk is not
+in surgery, but in <i>delayed surgery</i>.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have said my say, ladies, and there are five minutes left. Has any one
+any further questions?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was none. But as he stepped down, Mrs. Sharpless whispered to him:
+&ldquo;I watched them while you talked, and half of those women are thinking,
+and thinking <i>hard</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+Six months thereafter, Mrs. Clyde came into the Health Master&rsquo;s office
+one day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just come from a sort of experience meeting of the
+Mothers&rsquo; Club,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What was the topic this time?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aftermath.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your cancer talk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anything definite?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Definite, indeed! Between fifteen and twenty of the members went away
+from that meeting where you talked, suspecting themselves of cancer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s too many.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. Ten of them had their fears set at rest right away.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry to have frightened them; but one has to do a little harm
+in aiming at almost any good.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This was worth it. Half a dozen others had minor operations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps saving major ones later.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very likely. And four of them actually had cancer. Three out of the four
+are going to be well women. The fourth has an even chance. Dr. Strong, I
+don&rsquo;t think you&rsquo;ve done so good a day&rsquo;s work since you
+brought health into this house.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thank you,&rdquo; said the doctor simply; &ldquo;I think you are
+right. And you&rsquo;ve given me the most profound and about the rarest
+satisfaction with which the physician is ever rewarded.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And that is?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The practical certainty of having definitely saved human life,&rdquo;
+said the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap09"></a>IX.<br />
+THE GOOD GRAY DOCTOR</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> twenty-dollar bill!
+Crisp, fresh, and golden, it rose monumentally from the basis of nickels,
+dimes, and quarters which made up the customary collection of the Bairdstown
+Memorial Church. Even the generosity of the Clyde family, who, whenever they
+spent a week-end at Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s farm outside the little city, attended
+the Sunday services, looked meager and insignificant beside its yellow-backed
+splendor. Deacon Wilkes, passing the plate, gazed at it in fascination.
+Subsequent contributors surreptitiously touched it in depositing their own
+modest offerings, as if to make certain of its substance. It was even said at
+the Wednesday Sewing Circle that the Rev. Mr. Huddleston, from his eminence in
+the pulpit, had marked its colorful glint with an instant and benign eye and
+had changed the final hymn to one which specially celebrated the glory of
+giving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Clyde pew also there was one who specially noted the donor, but with an
+expression far from benign. Dr. Strong&rsquo;s appraising glance ranged over
+the plump and glossy perfection of the stranger, his symphonic grayness,
+beginning at his gray-suède-shod feet, one of which unobtrusively protruded
+into the aisle, verging upward through gray sock and trouser to gray frock
+coat, generously cut, and terminating at the sleek gray head. Even the tall hat
+which the man dandled on his knees was gray. Against this Quakerish
+color-scheme the wearer&rsquo;s face stood out, large, pink, and heavy-jowled,
+lighted by restless brown eyes. His manner was at once important and reverent,
+and his &ldquo;amen&rdquo; a masterpiece of unction. No such impressive
+outlander had visited Bairdstown for many a moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the service the visitor went forward to speak with Mr. Huddleston. At the
+same time Dr. Strong strolled up the aisle and contrived to pass the two so, as
+to obtain a face-to-face view of the stranger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At nine o&rsquo;clock to-morrow, then, and I shall be delighted to see
+you,&rdquo; the pastor was saying as Dr. Strong passed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-morning, Professor,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, with an accent on the
+final word as slight as the nod which accompanied it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-morning! Good-morning!&rdquo; returned the other heartily. But his
+glance, as it followed the man who had accosted him, was puzzled and not wholly
+untroubled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is your munificent friend?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde, as the Health
+Master emerged from the church and joined her husband and herself in their car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When I last ran across him he called himself Professor Graham Gray, the
+Great Gray Benefactor,&rdquo; replied Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dresses the part, doesn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo; observed Mr. Clyde.
+&ldquo;Where was it that you knew him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the Pacific Coast, five years ago. He was then
+&lsquo;itinerating&rsquo;&mdash;the quack term for traveling from place to
+place, picking up such practice as may be had by flamboyant advertising.
+Itinerating in eyes, as he would probably put it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A wandering quack oculist?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Optician, rather, since he carried his own stock of glasses. In fact
+that&rsquo;s where his profit came in. He advertised treatment free and charged
+two or three dollars for the glasses, special rates to schoolchildren. The
+scheme is an old one and a devilish. Half of the children in San Luis Obispo
+County, where I chanced upon his trail, were wearing his vision-twisters by the
+time he was through with them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What kind of glasses were they?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sometimes magnifying lenses. Mostly just plain window glass. Few
+children escaped him, for he would tell the parents that only prompt action
+could avert blindness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At least the plain glass couldn&rsquo;t hurt the children,&rdquo;
+suggested Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t it! It couldn&rsquo;t fail to hurt them. Modify the sight
+of a delicate instrument like a child&rsquo;s eye continuously by the most
+transparent of barriers, and it is bound to go wrong soon. The magnifying
+glasses are far worse. There are hundreds of children in that one locality
+alone who will carry the stigma of his quackery throughout their lives.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you think he is here with a view to practicing his amiable
+trade?&rdquo; inquired Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only in part, if at all. I understand that he has changed his
+line.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How comes he by all that showy money, then?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By murder.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Clydes, accustomed to their physician&rsquo;s hammerstroke turns of speech,
+took this under consideration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he wasn&rsquo;t committing murder in the church just now, I
+suppose,&rdquo; insinuated Mrs. Clyde at length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not directly. His immediate business there, I suspect, was
+bribery.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of whom?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The minister.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, come, Strong!&rdquo; protested Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Mr. Huddleston
+isn&rsquo;t an intellectual giant, I grant you; but he&rsquo;s certainly a
+well-meaning and honorable old fellow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some cynical philosopher has remarked that wicked men have a talent for
+doing harm, but fools have a genius. Mr. Huddleston&rsquo;s goodness and
+honesty, taken in connection with his hopeless ignorance of human nature, are
+just so much capital to hand for a scoundrel like this Gray.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What does he expect to get for his twenty-dol-lar bill?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;First, a reputation for piety and generosity. Second, that reputation
+duly certified to by the leading minister of the town.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In other words, a testimonial.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Precisely. For home use, and cheap at twenty dollars. Preparatory to
+operating in a town, your itinerating quack bribes two people&mdash;if he can.
+First, the editor of the local paper; second, the pastor of the leading church.
+The editor usually takes the money with his eyes wide open; the minister with
+his eyes tight shut.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How can his eyes be shut to such a business?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because so much dust has been thrown in them by the so-called religious
+journals.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Surely you don&rsquo;t mean that religious journals exploit quackery in
+their pages!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They are the mainstay of the quack and patent medicine business,&rdquo;
+declared the Health Master. &ldquo;Leaving out the Christian Science papers,
+which, of course, don&rsquo;t touch this dirty money, the religious press of
+all denominations, with a few honorable individual exceptions, sells out to any
+form of medical fraud which has a dollar to spend. Is it strange that the
+judgment of some of the clergy, who implicitly trust in their sectarian
+publications, becomes distorted? It&rsquo;s an even chance that our Great Gray
+faker&rsquo;s advertisement is in the religious weekly which lies on Mr.
+Huddleston&rsquo;s study-table at this moment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grandma Sharpless turned around from her seat in front, where she always
+ensconced herself so that, as she put it, she could see what was coming in time
+to jump. &ldquo;I know it is,&rdquo; she stated quietly. &ldquo;For while I was
+waiting in the parsonage last week I picked up the &lsquo;Church Pillar&rsquo;
+and saw it there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Trust Grandma Sharpless&rsquo;s eyes not to miss anything that comes
+within their range,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I missed the sense of that advertisement till just now,&rdquo;
+retorted the old lady. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just remembered about this Graham
+Gray.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What about him?&rdquo; asked the Health Master with eagerness, for Mrs.
+Sharpless&rsquo;s memory was as reliable for retaining salient facts as her
+vision was for discerning them. &ldquo;Do you know him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only by his works. Last year a traveling doctor of that name stopped
+over at Greenvale, twenty miles down the river, and gave some of his lectures
+to Suffering Womanhood, or some such folderol. He got hold of Sally Griffin,
+niece of our farmer here, while she was visiting there. Sally&rsquo;s as sound
+as a pippin, except for an occasional spell of fool-in-the-head, and I guess no
+school of doctoring ever helps that common ailment much. Well, this Gray got
+her scared out of her wits with symptoms, and sold her twenty-five
+dollars&rsquo; worth of medicine to cure her of something or other she
+didn&rsquo;t have. Cured!&rdquo; sniffed the lively narrator. &ldquo;If I
+hadn&rsquo;t taken the stuff away from her and locked it up, I expect
+she&rsquo;d be in the churchyard by now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The whole philosophy of quackery explicated and punctured, by one who
+knows,&rdquo; chuckled Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;None of your palaver with me, young man!&rdquo; returned the brisk old
+lady, who was devoted to the Health Master, and showed it by a policy of
+determined opposition of the letter and whole-hearted support of the spirit and
+deed, in all things. &ldquo;Probably he knows as much as most of your regular
+doctors, at that!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At least he seems to know human nature. That&rsquo;s the strong point of
+the charlatan. But have you got any of his medicine left?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; I think I can lay my hands on what&rsquo;s left of it. I remember
+that Sally boohooed like a baby, grown woman that she is, when I took it away
+from her.&rdquo; Dr. Strong&rsquo;s eyebrows went up sharply. &ldquo;As soon as
+we get to the house I&rsquo;ll look it up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On their arrival at the roomy old farmstead which Mr. Clyde had remodeled and
+modernized for what he called &ldquo;an occasional three days of grace&rdquo;
+from his business in the city of Worthington, Grandma Sharpless set about the
+search, and presently came to the living-room bearing in one hand a large
+bottle and in the other a newspaper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Since you&rsquo;re interested in Professor Gray,&rdquo; she said,
+&ldquo;here&rsquo;s what he says about himself in yesterday&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Bairdstown Bugle.&rsquo; I do think,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;that the
+Honorable Silas Harris might be in better business with his paper than
+publishing such truck as this. Listen to it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+GOSPEL HERBS WILL CURE YOUR ILLS
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Women of Bairdstown; Read your Bible! Revelation 22d chapter, 2d verse. God
+promises that &ldquo;the Herbs of the field shall heal the nations.&rdquo; In a
+vision from above, the holy secret has been revealed to me. Alone of all men, I
+can brew this miracle-working elixir.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The blasphemous old slinkum!&rdquo; Grandma Sharpless interrupted
+herself to say angrily. &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t even quote the Scriptures
+right!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, blasphemy is a small matter for a rascal of his kind,&rdquo; said
+the Health Master lightly. &ldquo;Go on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She read on:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Come to me, ye women who suffer, and I will give you relief. All those
+wasting and wearing ailments from which the tender sex suffers, vanish like
+mist before the healing, revivifying influence of Gospel Herbs. Supposed
+incurable diseases: Rheumatism, Dropsy, Diabetes and all kidney ills, Stomach
+Trouble, Scrofula, Blood Poison, even the dreaded scourge, Consumption, yield
+at once to this remedy.<br />
+    Though my special message is to women, I will not withhold this boon from any
+suffering human. Come one and all, rich and poor, young and old, of either sex.
+Your money refunded if I do not cure you. Public meeting Monday and Tuesday
+evenings, at eight o&rsquo;clock sharp in the Scatcherd Opera House; admission
+free to all. Private consultation at the Mallory Hotel, Monday, Tuesday, and
+Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Remember, I cure where the doctors fail; or no
+pay.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+Prof. Graham Gray,<br />
+The Great Gray Benefactor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Sharpless held out for the general view the advertisement, which occupied,
+in huge type, two thirds of a page of the &ldquo;Bugle.&rdquo; The remainder of
+the page was taken up with testimonials to the marvelous effects of the Gospel
+Herbs. Most of the letters were from far-away towns, but there were a few from
+the general vicinity of Bairdsville.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meantime Dr. Strong had been delicately tasting and smelling the contents of
+the bottle, which were thick and reddish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you make out is in it?&rdquo; asked Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Death&mdash;and a few worse things. Grandma Sharpless, you say that the
+girl cried for this after you took it from her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not only that; she wrote to the Professor for more. And when it came I
+smashed the bottle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ought to have the honorary degree of M.D. Well, it&rsquo;s pretty
+plain, but to make sure I&rsquo;ll send this to Worthington for an
+analysis.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So our friend, the gray wolf, is going to prowl in Bairdstown for the
+next three days!&rdquo; Thomas Clyde began to rub his chin softly; then not so
+softly; and presently quite hard. His wife watched him with troubled eyes. When
+his hand came down to rest upon his knee, it was doubled into a very
+competent-looking fist. His face set in the expression which the newspapers of
+his own city had dubbed, after the tenement campaign of the year before,
+&ldquo;Clyde&rsquo;s fighting smile.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Tom!&rdquo; broke out his wife, &ldquo;what kind of trouble are you
+going to get into now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Trouble?&rdquo; repeated the head of the family, in well-simulated
+surprise. &ldquo;Why, dear, I wasn&rsquo;t even thinking of trouble&mdash;for
+myself. But I believe it is time for a little action. Let&rsquo;s call this a
+household meeting&rdquo; (this was one of the established methods of the Clyde
+clan) &ldquo;and find out. As it isn&rsquo;t a family affair, we won&rsquo;t
+call in the children this time. Strong, what, if anything, are we going to do
+about this stranger in our midst? Are we going to let him take us in?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The question is,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong quickly, &ldquo;whether the
+Clyde family is willing to loan its subsidized physician temporarily to the
+city of Bairdstown.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the Chinese plan,&rdquo; supplemented Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly. On the Chinese plan of trying to save the community from a
+visitation instead of waiting to cure them of the incurable results of
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By visitation I suppose you mean Professor Gray?&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Exactly. I should rank him rather higher than an epidemic of scarlet
+fever, as an ally of damage and death.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll vote &lsquo;Yes,&rsquo;&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde rather
+plaintively. &ldquo;Only, I wish you two men didn&rsquo;t have so much Irish in
+your temperament.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I scorn your insinuation,&rdquo; replied her husband. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+the original dove of peace, but this Gray person ruffles my plumage. What do
+you say, Grandma?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bairdstown is my own place, partly. I know the people and they know me
+and I won&rsquo;t sit quiet and see &lsquo;em put upon. I vote
+&lsquo;Yes.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Make it unanimous!&rdquo; said Clyde. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the first move
+of the army of relief? I&rsquo;m in on this somewhere, Strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Contribute your car for a couple of days, then, and we&rsquo;ll go out
+on a still hunt for the elusive clue and the shy and retiring evidence. In
+other words, we&rsquo;ll scour the county, and look up some of these local
+testimonials which the Great Gray One gathered in last year, and now prints in
+the &lsquo;Bugle.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll stop in town and see Mr. Huddleston to-morrow,&rdquo;
+said Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t get any results,&rdquo; prophesied the Health Master.
+&ldquo;But, anyway, get him to come to the Gray lecture on Tuesday evening.
+We&rsquo;ll need him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the ensuing two and a half days and two nights Mrs. Clyde had speech of
+her husband but once; and that was at 2 a.m. when he woke her up to tell her
+that he was having the time of his life, and she replied by asking him whether
+he had let the cat in, and returned to her dreams.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bairdstown&rsquo;s Suffering Womanhood&mdash;as per advertisement&mdash;turned
+out extensively and self-commiseratingly to the free lecture of Tuesday
+evening, bringing with them a considerable admixture of the male populace,
+curious, cynical, or expectant. On the platform sat a number of &ldquo;special
+guests,&rdquo; including the Rev. Mr. Huddleston, mild of face and white of
+hair, and the Honorable Silas Harris, owner of the &ldquo;Bugle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cured&rdquo; patients, to the number of half a dozen, fidgeted in the
+seats of honor with expressions of conscious and pleasurable importance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They appear to be enjoying poor health quite literally,&rdquo; whispered
+Clyde to Dr. Strong, as the two, begrimed with the dust of a long day&rsquo;s
+travel just finished, slipped quietly into side seats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At once the entertainment began. A lank, harshfaced, muscular man whom
+Professor Gray introduced as his assistant, seated himself at the piano, and
+struck a chord, whereupon the Professor, in a powerful voice, sang what he
+termed the &ldquo;Hymn of Healing,&rdquo; inviting the audience to
+&ldquo;assist&rdquo; in the chorus, which gem of poesy ran as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed!<br />
+    Trust in the gospel advice.<br />
+Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field;<br />
+    Healed without money or price.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some poetic license in that last line,&rdquo; murmured Clyde to his
+companion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The next portion of our programme,&rdquo; announced the Great Gray
+Benefactor, &ldquo;will be corroborative readings from the Good Book.&rdquo;
+And he proceeded to deliver in oratorical style sundry Bible quotations so
+patched together and garbled as to ascribe, inferentially, miraculous powers to
+the Gospel Herbs. Then came the lecture proper, which was merely an
+amplification of the &ldquo;Bugle&rdquo; advertisement, interspersed with
+almanac funny stories and old jokes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now, before our demonstration,&rdquo; concluded Professor Graham
+Gray, &ldquo;if there is any here seeking enlightenment or help, let him rise.
+This is your meeting, dear friends, as much as mine; free to your voices and
+your needs, as well as to your welcome presence here. I court inquiry and fair
+investigation. Any questions? If not, we&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One moment!&rdquo; The whole assemblage turned, as on a single pivot, to
+the side aisle where Dr. Strong had risen and now stood, tall, straight, and
+composed, waiting for silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our friend on the right has the floor,&rdquo; said the Professor
+suavely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You state that this God-given secret remedy was imparted to you for the
+relief of human misery?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thousands of grateful patients attest it, my friend.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then, with human beings suffering and dying all about you, why do you
+continue to profit by keeping it secret?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Down sat the questioner. A murmur rose and ran, as the logic of the question
+struck home. But the quack had his answer pat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Does not the Good Book say that the laborer is worthy of his hire? Do
+your regular physicians, of whom I understand you are one, treat cases for
+nothing? Ah,&rdquo; he went on, outstretching his hands to the audience with a
+gesture of appeal, &ldquo;the injustice which I have suffered from the jealousy
+and envy of the medical profession! Never do I enter a town without curing many
+unfortunates that the regular doctors have given up as hopeless. Hence the
+violence of their attacks upon me. But I forgive them their prejudice, as I
+pity their ignorance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some applause followed the enunciation of this noble sentiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We have with us to-night,&rdquo; pursued the speaker, quick to catch the
+veering sentiment, &ldquo;a number of these marvelous cures. You shall hear
+from the very mouths of the saved ones testimony beyond cavil. I will call
+first on Mrs. Amanda Gryce, wife of Mr. Stanley Gryce, the well and favorably
+known laundryman. Speak up clearly, Mrs. Gryce, and tell your story.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s two years now that I been doctorin&rsquo;,&rdquo; said the
+lady thus adjured, in a fluttering voice. &ldquo;I doctored with a allopathic
+physician here, an&rsquo; with a homypath over to Roxton, an&rsquo; with a
+osty-path down to Worthington, an&rsquo; with Peruny in betwixt, an&rsquo; they
+didn&rsquo;t any of &lsquo;em do me no good till I tried Professor Gray. He
+seen how I felt without askin&rsquo; me a question. He just pulled down my
+eyelid an&rsquo; looked at it. &lsquo;You&rsquo;re all run down; gone!&rsquo;
+says he. An&rsquo; thet&rsquo;s jest what I was. So he treated me with his herb
+medicine an&rsquo; I feel like a new woman. An&rsquo; I give Professor Graham
+Gray the credit an&rsquo; the thanks of a saved woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not to mention seven dollars an&rsquo; a half,&rdquo; supplemented a
+mournful drawl from the audience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You hush, Stan Gryce!&rdquo; cried the healed one, shrill above the
+laughter of the ribald. &ldquo;Would you begrutch a few mizzable dollars for
+your poor, sufferin&rsquo; wife&rsquo;s health?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An alarmed child of ten was next led forward and recited in sing-song
+measure:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;had&mdash;the&mdash;fits&mdash;for&mdash;most&mdash;three&mdash;
+years&mdash;and&mdash;I&mdash;was&mdash;cured&mdash;by
+Gospel&mdash;Herbs&mdash;and&mdash;I&mdash;have&mdash;come&mdash;here&mdash;to&mdash;say&mdash;God&mdash;bless&mdash;my&mdash;dear
+benefactor&mdash;Professor&mdash;Graham&mdash;Gray,&rdquo;&mdash;and sat down
+hard at the last word, whereupon a tenor squeak in the far gallery took up the
+refrain:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d scarcex peckwon of my yage<br />
+To speakin public on the stage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again there was a surge of mirth, and the lecturer frowned with concern. But he
+quickly covered whatever misgivings he might have had by bringing forward other
+&ldquo;testimonies&rdquo;: old Miss Smithson whose nervousness had been quite
+dispelled by two doses of the herbs; Auntie Thomas (colored) whose
+&ldquo;misery&rdquo; had vanished before the wonder-working treatment; and the
+Widow Carlin, whose boy had been &ldquo;spittin&rsquo; blood like as if he was
+churchyard doomed,&rdquo; but hadn&rsquo;t had a bad coughing spell since
+taking the panacea. And all this time Dr. Strong sat quiet in his seat, with a
+face of darkening sternness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have heard your fellow-citizens,&rdquo; the lecturer took up his
+theme again, &ldquo;testify to the efficacy of my methods. And you see on this
+rostrum with me that grand and good old man, the worthy pastor of so many of
+you, my dear and honored friend&mdash;I feel that I may call him friend, since
+I have his approval of my humble labors&mdash;the Reverend Doctor Huddleston.
+You see also here, lending the support of his valued presence, the Honorable
+Silas Harris, whom you have twice honored by sending him to the state
+legislature. Their presence is the proudest testimonial to my professional
+character. In Mr. Harris&rsquo;s fearless and independent journal you have read
+the sworn evidence of those who have been cured by my Godgiven remedies;
+evidence which is beyond challenge&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I challenge it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong, who had been hopefully awaiting some such opening, was on his feet
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have had your say!&rdquo; cried Professor Gray, menacing him with a
+shaking hand. &ldquo;These people don&rsquo;t want to hear you. They understand
+your motives. You can&rsquo;t run this meeting.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gesture was a signal. The raw-boned accompanist, whose secondary function
+was that of bouncer, made a quick advance from the rear, reached for the
+unsuspicious Health Master&mdash;and recoiled from the impact of Mr. Thomas
+Clyde&rsquo;s solid shoulder so sharply that only the side wall checked his
+subsidence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better stay out of harm&rsquo;s way, my friend,&rdquo; suggested Clyde
+amiably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Immediately the hall was in an uproar. The more timid of the women were making
+for the exits, when a high, shrill voice, calling for order strenuously,
+quelled the racket, and a very fat man waddled down the middle aisle, to be
+greeted by cries of &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s the Mayor.&rdquo; Several excited
+volunteers explained the situation to him from as many different points of
+view, while Professor Graham Gray bellowed his appeal from the platform.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All I want is fair play. They&rsquo;re trying to break up my
+meeting.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; returned Dr. Strong&rsquo;s calm voice.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m more than anxious to have it continue.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a happy inspiration, Mr. Clyde jumped up on his bench.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I move Mayor Allen take the chair!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Professor
+Gray says that he courts fair investigation. Let&rsquo;s give it to him, in
+order.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A shout of acclaim greeted this suggestion. Bairdstown&rsquo;s Suffering
+Womanhood and Bored Manhood was getting more out of a free admission than it
+had ever had in its life before. Ponderously the obese Mayor hoisted his weight
+up the steps and shook hands with the reluctant lecturer. He then invited Dr.
+Strong to come to the platform.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is my meeting!&rdquo; protested the Great Gray Benefactor. &ldquo;I
+hired this hall and paid good money for it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You said it was our meeting as much as yours!&rdquo; roared an insurgent
+from the crowd, and a chorus of substantiation followed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ten minutes will be all that I want,&rdquo; announced Dr. Strong as he
+took a chair next the Mayor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s fair!&rdquo; shrilled the Chairman. &ldquo;On the
+Professor&rsquo;s own invitation.&rdquo; In a tone lowered to the alarmed
+quack&rsquo;s ear, he added: &ldquo;Of course, you can back out if you want to.
+But I&rsquo;d advise you to do it quick if you&rsquo;re going to do it at all.
+This is a queer-tempered town.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So significant was his tone that the other judged advance to be safer than
+retreat. Therefore, summoning all his assurance, he sought, in an impassioned
+speech, to win back his hearers. He was a natural orator, and, when he reached
+his peroration, he had a large part of his audience with him again. In the
+flush of renewed confidence he made a grave tactical error, just when he should
+have closed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let this hireling of the Doctors&rsquo; Trust, the trust that would
+strangle all honest competition, answer these if he can!&rdquo; he shouted,
+shaking the page of testimonials before his adversary&rsquo;s face. &ldquo;Let
+him confute the evidence of these good and honorable women who have appeared
+here to-night; women who have no selfish aims to subserve. Let him impugn the
+motives of the reverend clergyman and of the honored statesman who sit here
+with me. Let him do this, or let him shrink from this hall in the shame and
+dishonor which he seeks to heap upon one whose sole ambition it is to relieve
+suffering and banish pain and death.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was hearty applause as the speaker sat down and Dr. Strong arose to face
+a gathering now turned for the most part hostile. He wasted no time in
+introduction or argument. &ldquo;Mr. Chairman,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;Professor
+Gray rests his case on his testimonials. With Mr. Clyde I have investigated a
+number of them, and will give you my results. Here are half a dozen
+testimonials to the value of one of his nostrums, the Benefaction Pills, from
+women who have been cured, so they state, of diseases ranging from eczema
+through indigestion to consumption. All, please note, by the same wonderful
+medicine. And here,&rdquo; he drew a small box from his pocket, &ldquo;is a
+sample of the medicine. I have just had it analyzed. What do you suppose they
+are? Sugar! Just plain sugar and nothing else.&rdquo; Professor Gray leaped to
+his feet. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t deny the cures!&rdquo; he thundered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t deny that these people are well to-day. And I don&rsquo;t
+deny that the testimonials from them are genuine, as documents. But your sugar
+pills had no more to do with the cure than so much moonshine. Listen, you
+people! Here is the core and secret of quackery:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All diseases tend to cure themselves, through the natural resistance of
+the body. But for that we should all be dead. This man, or some other of his
+kind, comes along with his promises and pills, and when the patient recovers
+from the disease in the natural course of events, he claims the credit.
+Meantime, he is selling sugar at about one hundred dollars per pound.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sugar,&rdquo; said the quack, quick-wittedly. &ldquo;But what kind of
+sugar? This sugar, as he calls it, is crystal precipitated from the extract of
+these healing herbs. No chemist can determine its properties by any
+analysis.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well turned,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, with a smile. &ldquo;I
+can&rsquo;t immediately disprove that, though I could with time. But, whatever
+the case with his sugar, any chemist can analyze this.&rdquo; He held up a
+small bottle, half filled with a red-brown liquid. &ldquo;This is the Extract
+of Gospel Herbs. Now, let us see what this does.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He referred to his copy of the &ldquo;Bugle,&rdquo; containing the
+testimonials. &ldquo;Here is Mrs. Sarah Jenkins, of the neighboring town of
+Maresco, where Professor Gray lectured a year ago, cured of Bright&rsquo;s
+disease and dropsy; Miss Allie Wheat, of Weedsport, cured of cancer of the
+stomach; and Mrs. Howard Cleary, of Roxton, wholly relieved of nervous
+breakdown and insomnia. All genuine testimonials. Mr. Clyde and I have traced
+them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Professor Gray raised his head with a flash of triumph. &ldquo;You see!&rdquo;
+he cried. &ldquo;He has to admit the genuineness of my testimonials!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of your testimonials; yes. But what about your cures? Mrs. Jenkins has,
+as she said, ceased to suffer from her ills. She died of Bright&rsquo;s disease
+and dropsy three months after Professor Gray cured her of them. Miss Wheat,
+whose cancer was purely imaginary, is now a hopeless wreck, in a sanitarium
+whither the Gospel Herbs drove her. Mrs. Cleary&mdash;but let me read what she
+testified to. Here it is in the paper with a picture of the Cleary
+home:&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Dear Professor Gray: You have indeed been a benefactor to me. Before our
+baby was born my husband and I were the happiest of couples. Then I became a
+nervous wreck. I couldn&rsquo;t sleep. I was cross and irritable. My nerves
+seemed all on fire. Your first treatment worked wonders. I slept like a log.
+Since then I have not been without Gospel Herbs in the house, and I am a well
+woman.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(Signed) Mrs. Howard Cleary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That was a year ago,&rdquo; continued Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Yesterday we
+visited the Cleary home. We found a broken husband and a deserted baby. The
+young wife we traced to Worthington, where we discovered her&mdash;well, I
+won&rsquo;t name to this audience the sort of place we found her in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But so far as there can be a hell on this earth, she had descended into
+it, and this,&rdquo; he held the vial high to view, &ldquo;<i>this</i> sent her
+there.&rdquo; His fingers opened; there was a crisp little crash of glass, and
+the red-brown liquid crept and spread along the floor, like blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Morphine,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Morphine, which enslaves the
+body and destroys the soul. There are your Gospel Herbs!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A murmur rose, and deepened into a growl. The Great Gray Benefactor, his face
+livid, sprang forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lies!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;All lies! Where&rsquo;s his proof?
+What&rsquo;s he got to show? Nothing but his own say-so. If there&rsquo;s a law
+in the land, I&rsquo;ll make him sweat for this. Mr. Huddleston, I appeal to
+you for justice.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We shall be glad to hear from the Reverend Mr. Huddleston,&rdquo; mildly
+suggested the chairman, who was evincing an enjoyment of the proceedings quite
+puzzling to Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old clergyman got slowly to his feet. His mild, weak face was troubled.
+&ldquo;Let us bear and forbear,&rdquo; he pleaded in a tremulous voice.
+&ldquo;I cannot believe these charges against our good friend, Professor Gray.
+I am sure that he is a good and worthy man. He has given most liberally to the
+church. I am informed that he is a member of his home church in good and
+regular standing, and I find in the editorial columns of the &lsquo;Church
+Pillar&rsquo; a warm encomium upon his beneficent work, advising all to try his
+remedies. Surely our friend, Dr. Strong, has been led astray by mistaken zeal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only yesterday two members of my congregation, most estimable ladies,
+called to see me and told me how they had benefited by a visit just made to
+Professor Gray. He had treated them with his new Gospel Elixir, of which he has
+spoken to me. There was evidence of its efficacy in their very bearing and
+demeanor&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should say there was! <i>And</i> in their breath. Did you smell
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The interruption came in a very clear, positive, and distinct contralto.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Great Grimes&rsquo;s grass-green ghost!&rdquo; exclaimed Mr. Thomas
+Clyde, quite audibly amidst the startled hush. &ldquo;Grandma Sharpless is
+among those present!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;I&mdash;I do not think,&rdquo; began the clergyman,
+aghast, &ldquo;that the matter occurred to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because, if <i>you</i> didn&rsquo;t, <i>I</i> did,&rdquo; continued the
+voice composedly. &ldquo;They reeked of liquor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tension to which the gathering had been strung abruptly loosened in mirth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Sharpless will please take the platform,&rdquo; invited the
+Mayor-chairman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I&rsquo;ll do my talking from here.&rdquo; The old lady stood up, a
+straight, solid, uncompromising figure, in the center of the floor. &ldquo;I
+met those two ladies in the parsonage hall,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;They
+were coming out as I was going in. They stopped to talk to me. They both talked
+at once. I wouldn&rsquo;t want to say that they
+were&mdash;well&mdash;exactly&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Spifflicated,&rdquo; suggested a helpful voice from the far rear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Spifflicated; thank you,&rdquo; accepted the speaker. &ldquo;But they
+certainly were&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lit up,&rdquo; volunteered another first-aid to the hesitant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, lit up. One of them loaned me her bottle. If I&rsquo;m any judge of
+bad whiskey, that was it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An appreciative roar from the house testified to the fact that Mrs. Sharpless
+had her audience in hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As for you women on the stage,&rdquo; she pursued, rising to her topic,
+&ldquo;I know what&rsquo;s wrong with you.&lsquo;Mandy Gryce, if you&rsquo;d
+tend more to your house and less to your symptoms, you wouldn&rsquo;t be
+flitting from allopathic bud to homoeopathic flower like a bumblebee with the
+stomach-ache.&rdquo; (&ldquo;Hear, hear!&rdquo; from Mr. Gryce.) &ldquo;Lizzie
+Tompy, your fits are nine tenths temper. I&rsquo;d cure you of &lsquo;em
+without morphine. Miss Smithson, if you&rsquo;d quit strong green tea, three
+times a day, those nerves of yours would give you a fairer chance&mdash;and
+your neighbors, too.&rdquo; (Tearful sniffs from Miss Smithson.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Auntie Thomas, you wait and see what your rheumatism says to you
+to-morrow, when the dope has died out of your system. Susan Carlin, you ought
+to be home this minute, looking after your sick boy, instead of on a stage, in
+your best bib and tucker, giving testimonials to you-don&rsquo;t-know-what-all
+poison.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bairdstown&rsquo;s Suffering Womanhood!&rdquo; exclaimed the vigorous
+old lady, her color rising with her voice. &ldquo;Go home! Go home, you poor,
+self-coddling fussybuddies, to your washboards and your sewing-machines and
+forget your imaginary symptoms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There!&rdquo; she drew a long breath, looking about over the group of
+wilting testimonial-givers. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the first speech I have ever
+made, and I guess it&rsquo;ll be the last. But before I stop, I&rsquo;ve got a
+word to say to you, Professor Graham Gray. Bless us! Where&rsquo;s the man
+gone?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Professor Gray,&rdquo; announced the chairman with a twinkle in his
+voice, &ldquo;has retired to obtain fresh evidence. At least, that is what he
+<i>said</i> he had gone for.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the main floor came a hoarse suggestion which had the words &ldquo;tar and
+feathers&rdquo; in it. It was cut short by a metallic shriek from without,
+followed by a heavy rumbling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something seems to tell me,&rdquo; said the fat Mayor solemnly,
+&ldquo;that the 9.30 express, which just whistled for the crossing, is the
+heavier by about two hundred pounds of Great Gray Benefactor clinging to the
+rear platform, and happy to be there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And your money back if not benefited,&rdquo; piped a reedy voice from
+the front, whereupon there was another roar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The bright particular star of these proceedings having left, is there
+anything else to come before the meeting?&rdquo; inquired the chairman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to have one more word,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;Friends, as one quack is, all quacks are. They differ only in method and
+degree. Every one of them plays a game with stacked cards, in which you are his
+victims, and Death is his partner. And the puller-in for this game is the
+press.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have heard to-night how a good and wellmeaning clergyman has been
+made stool-pigeon for this murderous charlatan, through the lying of a
+religious&mdash;God save the mark!&mdash;weekly. That publication is beyond our
+reach. But there is one here at home which did the quack&rsquo;s work for him,
+and took his money for doing it. I suggest that the Honorable Silas Harris
+explain!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m running my paper as a business proposition,&rdquo; growled the
+baited editor and owner of the &lsquo;Bugle,&rsquo; &ldquo;and I&rsquo;m
+running it to suit myself and this community.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re running it to suit the crooked and cruel advertisers who
+prey on this community,&rdquo; retorted the other. &ldquo;And you&rsquo;ve
+served them further in the legislature, where you voted to kill the
+patent-medicine bill, last session, in protection of your own profits. Good
+profits, too. One third of all your advertising is medical quackery which takes
+good money out of this town by sheer swindling; money which ought to stay in
+town and be spent on the legitimate local products advertised in your paper. If
+I were a local advertiser, I&rsquo;d want to know why.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If that&rsquo;s the case,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Stanley Gryce, quick to
+catch the point, &ldquo;I guess you owe my family seven dollars an&rsquo; a
+half, Silas, and till it&rsquo;s paid up you can just drop my laundry
+announcement out of your columns.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess I&rsquo;ll stay out for a spell, too,&rdquo; supplemented Mr.
+Corson, the hay and feed man. &ldquo;For a week, my ad&rsquo;s been swamped by
+Swamp Root so deep you can&rsquo;t see it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;While you&rsquo;re about it,&rdquo; added a third, &ldquo;leave me out.
+I&rsquo;m kinder sick of appearin&rsquo; between a poisonous headache powder
+and a consumption dope. Folks&rsquo;ll be accusin&rsquo; me of seekin&rsquo;
+trade untimely.&rdquo; This was greeted with a whoop, for the speaker was the
+local undertaker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve got a league for Clean Advertising in Worthington,&rdquo;
+announced Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Why not organize something of the kind here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Help!&rdquo; shouted the Honorable Silas, throwing up his hands.
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t shoot! I holler &lsquo;Enough!&rsquo; As soon as the
+contracts are out, I&rsquo;ll quit. There&rsquo;s no money in patent-medicine
+advertising any more for the small paper, anyway.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, we&rsquo;ve done our evening&rsquo;s chores, I reckon,&rdquo;
+remarked the chairman. &ldquo;A motion to adjourn will now be in order.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Move we adjourn with the chorus of the &lsquo;Hymn of
+Healing,&rsquo;&rdquo; piped the wag with the reedy voice, and the audience
+filed out, uproariously and profanely singing:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Ye shall be healed! Ye shall be healed!<br />
+    Trust in the gospel advice.<br />
+Cured by the herbs of the wood and the field;<br />
+    Healed without money or price.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, young man,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, coming forward to join
+the Health Master, &ldquo;you certainly carried out your programme.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I?&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, affectionately tucking the old lady&rsquo;s
+arm under his. &ldquo;To you the honors of war. I only squelched a quack. You
+taught Bairds-town&rsquo;s self-coddling womanhood a lesson that will go down
+the generations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I want to know,&rdquo; said the Mayor, advancing to shake hands
+with Mrs. Sharpless, &ldquo;is this: what&rsquo;s a fussybuddy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A fussybuddy,&rdquo; instructed Grandma Sharpless wisely, &ldquo;is a
+woman who catches a stomach-ache from a patent-medicine almanac. What I want to
+know, Tom Allen, is what you had against the man. I seemed to get an inkling
+that you didn&rsquo;t exactly like him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s forgotten me,&rdquo; chuckled the Mayor, &ldquo;but I
+haven&rsquo;t forgotten him. Fifteen years ago he came along here
+horse-doctoring and poisoned a perfectly good mare for me. He won&rsquo;t try
+to poison this town again in a hurry. You finished him, Mrs. Sharpless, you and
+Dr. Strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What <i>I</i> want to know,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;is how
+poor old Mr. Huddleston feels about that contribution, now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A month later he found out. Traveling by trolley one evening, he felt a hand on
+his shoulder, and turned to face Professor Graham Gray.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No hard feelings, I hope,&rdquo; said the quack with superb urbanity.
+&ldquo;All in the way of business, I take it. I&rsquo;d have done the same to
+you, if you&rsquo;d come butting in on my trade. Say, but that old lady was a
+Tartar! She cooked my goose in Bairdstown. For all that, I got an unsolicited
+testimonial from there two weeks ago that&rsquo;s a wonder. Anonymous, too. Not
+a word of writing with it to tell who the grateful patient might be.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What was it?&rdquo; asked Dr. Strong with polite interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A twenty-dollar bill. Now, <i>what</i> do you think of that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Dr. Strong spoke again&mdash;and the Great Gray Benefactor has always
+regarded this as the most inconsequential reply he ever received to a plain
+question&mdash;it was after a long and thoughtful pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said he with conviction, &ldquo;that I&rsquo;ll start in
+going to church again, next Sunday.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap10"></a>X.<br />
+THE HOUSE THAT CAUGHT COLD</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;C</span>an you cure a
+cold?&rdquo; asked Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A flare from the soft-coal fire flickered across the library, revealing a smile
+on the Health Master&rsquo;s face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Am I a millionaire?&rdquo; he countered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not from your salary as Chinese physician to the Clydes,&rdquo; laughed
+the head of that family.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I could cure a cold, I should be, easily, more than that. I&rsquo;d
+be the foremost medical discoverer of the day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you can&rsquo;t cure a cold,&rdquo; pursued Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What <i>is</i> a cold?&rdquo; countered the Health Master in that
+insinuating tone of voice which he employed to provoke the old lady into one of
+those frequent verbal encounters so thoroughly enjoyed by both of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An ordinary common cold in the head. You know what I mean perfectly
+well, young man. The kind you catch by getting into drafts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, <i>that!</i> Well, you see, there&rsquo;s no such thing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No such thing as a cold in the head, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; said Julia,
+looking up from her book. &ldquo;Why, we&rsquo;ve all had &lsquo;em, loads of
+times.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And Bettina is coming down with one now, if I&rsquo;m any judge,&rdquo;
+said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s had the sniffles all day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s hope it isn&rsquo;t a cold. Maybe it&rsquo;s only
+chicken-pox or mumps.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you wishing chicken-pox and mumps on my baby?&rdquo; cried Mrs.
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the three years during which Dr. Strong had been the &ldquo;Chinese
+physician&rdquo; of the household, earning his salary by keeping his patients
+well instead of curing them when ill, Mrs. Clyde had never quite learned to
+guard against the surprises which so often pointed the Health Master&rsquo;s
+truths.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not by any means; I&rsquo;m only hoping for the lesser of evils.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But mumps and chicken-pox are real diseases,&rdquo; protested Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you think that a &lsquo;cold,&rsquo; as you call it,
+isn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, no,&rdquo; said Clyde hesitantly. &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t call it a
+disease, any more than I&rsquo;d call a sprain a broken leg.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it is. A very real, serious disease. Its actual name is
+coryza.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bogy-talk,&rdquo; commented Grandma Sharpless scornfully. &ldquo;Big
+names for little things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not a little thing at all, as we should all realize if our official
+death-records really dealt in facts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Death-records?&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless incredulously.
+&ldquo;People don&rsquo;t die of colds, do they?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hundreds every year; all around us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, <i>I</i> never hear of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you sure? Think back and recall how many of your friends&rsquo;
+obituary notices include some such sentence as this: &lsquo;Last Thursday
+evening Mr. Smith caught a severe cold, from which he took to his bed on
+Saturday, and did not leave it again until his death yesterday morning?&rsquo;
+Doesn&rsquo;t that sound familiar?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So familiar,&rdquo; cried Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;that I believe the
+newspapers keep it set up in type.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the newspaper always goes on to say that Mr. Smith developed
+pneumonia or grip or bronchitis, and died of that, not of the cold,&rdquo;
+objected Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes. In the mortality records poor Smith usually appears under the
+heading of one of the well-recognized diseases. It would hardly be respectable
+to die of a cold, would it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t <i>die</i> of the cold,&rdquo; insisted the old lady.
+&ldquo;He catches the cold and dies of something else.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I take a dose of poison,&rdquo; the Health Master mildly propounded,
+&ldquo;and fall down and break my neck, what do I die of?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no parallel,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless. &ldquo;And even
+if it is,&rdquo; she added, tacitly abandoning that ground, &ldquo;we&rsquo;ve
+always had colds and we always will have &lsquo;em.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not with my approval, at least,&rdquo; remarked the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess Providence won&rsquo;t wait for your approval, young man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you regard coryza as a dispensation of Providence? The Presbyterian
+doctrine of foreordination, applied to the human nose,&rdquo; smiled the
+physician. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re all predestined to the ailment, and therefore
+might as well get out our handkerchiefs and prepare to sneeze our poor sinful
+heads off. Is that about it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, it isn&rsquo;t! This is a green December and it means a full
+churchyard. We&rsquo;re in for a regular cold-breeding season.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense! Weather doesn&rsquo;t breed colds.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What does, then?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A very mean and lively little germ. He&rsquo;s rather more poisonous
+than the chicken-pox and mumps variety, although he hasn&rsquo;t as bad a name.
+In grown-ups he prepares the soil, so to speak, for other germs, by getting all
+through the system and weakening its resistant powers, thereby laying it open
+to the attacks of such enemies as the pneumococcus, which is always waiting
+just around the corner of the tongue to give us pneumonia. Or bronchitis may
+develop, or tonsillitis, or diphtheria, or kidney trouble, or indeed almost
+anything. I once heard an eminent lecturer happily describe the coryza bacillus
+as the bad little boy of the gang who, having once broken into the system,
+turns around and calls back to the bigger boys: &lsquo;Come on in, fellers. The
+door&rsquo;s open.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With children the coryza-bug makes various trouble without necessarily
+inviting the others in. A great proportion of the serious ear-troubles come
+from colds; all the way from earache to mastoiditis, and the consequent
+necessity of quick operations to save the patient&rsquo;s life. Almost any of
+the organs may be impaired by the activity of the little pest. And yet as
+intelligent a family as this&rdquo;&mdash;he looked around the
+circle&mdash;&ldquo;considers it a &lsquo;mere cold.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why haven&rsquo;t you told us before?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde bluntly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A just reproach,&rdquo; admitted the Health Master. &ldquo;Not having
+been attacked, I haven&rsquo;t considered defense&mdash;a wretched principle in
+health matters. In fact, I&rsquo;ve let the little matters of life go, too
+much, in my interest in the bigger.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what about Bettina?&rdquo; said the mother anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s have her in,&rdquo; said the Health Master, and the
+six-year-old presently trotted into the room, announcing through a somewhat
+reddened nose, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m all stobbed ub; and Katie rubbed me with
+goose-grease, and I don&rsquo;d wand to take any paregoric.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Paregoric?&rdquo; said the physician. &ldquo;Opium? I guess not. Off to
+bed with you, Toots, and we&rsquo;ll try to exorcise the demon with hot-water
+bottles and extra blankets.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Following her usual custom of kissing everybody good-night around the circle,
+Bettina held up her arms to her sister, who was nearest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; said the Health Master. &ldquo;No kissing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not even my mamma?&rdquo; queried the child. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid
+not. You remember when Charley had scarlet fever he wasn&rsquo;t allowed even
+to be very near any of you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But scarlet fever is the most contagious of any of the diseases,
+isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; asked Julia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not as contagious as a cold in the head.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how contagious a cold is,&rdquo; said Grandma
+Sharpless; &ldquo;but I do know this: once it gets into a house, it goes
+through it like wildfire.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then the house ought to be ashamed of itself. That&rsquo;s sheer
+carelessness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Half the kids in our school have got stopped-up noses,&rdquo;
+contributed Charley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why hasn&rsquo;t the Committee on Schools reported the fact?&rdquo;
+demanded the Health Master, turning an accusing eye on Julia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why&mdash;why, I didn&rsquo;t think of it,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;I
+didn&rsquo;t think it was anything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, you didn&rsquo;t! Well, if what Charley says is correct, I should
+think your school ought to be put under epidemic regimen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d have a fine row with the Board of Education, trying to
+persuade them to special action for any such cause as that,&rdquo; remarked Mr.
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s the measure of their intelligence, then,&rdquo; returned
+the Health Master. &ldquo;Sickness is sickness, just as surely as a flame is
+fire; and there is no telling, once it&rsquo;s well started, how much damage it
+may do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But a cold is only in the head, or rather, in the nose,&rdquo; persisted
+Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s where you&rsquo;re wrong. Coryza is a disease of the whole
+system, and it weakens the whole system. The symptoms are most apparent in the
+nose and mouth: and it is from the nose and mouth that the disease is spread.
+But if you&rsquo;ve got the cold you&rsquo;ve got it in every corner of your
+being. You won&rsquo;t be convinced of its importance, I suppose, until I can
+produce facts and figures. I only hope they won&rsquo;t be producible from this
+house. But by the end of the season I&rsquo;ll hope to have them. Meantime
+we&rsquo;ll isolate Bettykin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bettina was duly isolated. Meanwhile the active little coryza bacillus had got
+its grip on Mr. Clyde, who for three days attended to his business with
+streaming eyes, and then retired, in the company of various hot-water bags,
+bottles, and foot-warmers, to the sanctuary of his own bedroom, where he led a
+private and morose existence for one week. His general manager succeeded to his
+desk; likewise, to his contaminated pencils, erasers, and other implements,
+whereby he alternately sneezed and objurgated himself into the care of a
+doctor, with the general and unsatisfactory result that the balance-sheet of
+Clyde &amp; Co., Manufacturers, showed an obvious loss for the month&mdash;as
+it happened, most unfortunately, an unusually busy month&mdash;of some three
+thousand dollars, directly traceable to that unconsidered trifle, a cold in the
+head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At that you got off cheap,&rdquo; argued the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was three months after the invasion of the Clyde household by
+Bettina&rsquo;s coryza germ.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad somebody considers it cheap!&rdquo; observed Mr. Clyde.
+&ldquo;Personally I should rather have taken a trip to Europe on my share of
+that three thousand dollars.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet you were lucky,&rdquo; asserted Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Bettykin got
+through her earache without any permanent damage. Robin&rsquo;s attack passed
+off without complications. Your own onset didn&rsquo;t involve any organ more
+vital than your bank account. And the rest of us escaped.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t it prove what I said,&rdquo; demanded Grandma Sharpless;
+&ldquo;that a cold in the head is only a cold in the head?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Answer is No,&rsquo; as Togo would put it,&rdquo; replied the
+Health Master. &ldquo;In fact, I&rsquo;ve got proof here of quite the opposite,
+which I desire to present to this gathering.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This meeting of the Household Protective Association is hereby called to
+order!&rdquo; announced Mr. Clyde, in the official tones proper to the
+occasion. The children put aside their various occupations and assumed a solemn
+and businesslike aspect which was part of the game. &ldquo;The lone official
+member will now report,&rdquo; concluded the chairman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let the Health Officer of the city report for me,&rdquo; said Dr.
+Strong, taking a printed leaflet from his pocket. &ldquo;He is one of those
+rare officials who aren&rsquo;t afraid to tell people what they don&rsquo;t
+know, and may not want to know. Listen to what Dr. Merritt has to say.&rdquo;
+And he read:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;The death-rate of the city for the month of February, like the
+rate for December and January, is abnormally high, being a shade over ten per
+cent above the normal for this time of year. While the causes of mortality
+range through the commoner diseases, with a special rise in pulmonary troubles,
+it is evident that the increase must be due to some special cause. In the
+opinion of the Bureau of Health this cause is the despised and infectious
+&ldquo;cold,&rdquo; more properly known as coryza, which has been epidemic this
+winter in the city. Although the epidemic wave is now receding, its disastrous
+aftereffects may be looked for in high mortality rates for some months. Should
+a similar onset occur again, the city will be asked to consider seriously a
+thorough school campaign, with careful isolation of all suspicious
+cases.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you write that, young man?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Sharpless suspiciously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, no; I didn&rsquo;t <i>write</i> it,&rdquo; answered the Health
+Master. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go as far as to admit, however, that Dr. Merritt
+listens politely to my humble suggestions when I offer them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Humph! Ten per cent increase. What is that in real figures?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Twenty-five extra deaths a month,&rdquo; said Manny Clyde, a growing
+expert on local statistics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Seventy-five needless deaths for the three months, and more to
+come,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;besides all the disability, loss of
+time and earning power and strength, and all the pain and suffering&mdash;which
+things never get into the vital statistics, worse luck! So much to the account
+of the busy little coryza-bug.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t the Health Bureau do something?&rdquo; asked the practical
+Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not much, until its public is better educated,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong
+wearily. &ldquo;The present business of a health official is to try and beat
+the fool-killer off from his natural prey with a printed tract. It&rsquo;s
+quite a job, when you come to consider it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What he ought to have, is the club of the law!&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Precisely. The people won&rsquo;t give it to him. In this household
+we&rsquo;re better off, since we can make our own laws. Since Betty&rsquo;s
+attack we&rsquo;ve tried out the isolation plan pretty effectually; and
+we&rsquo;ve followed, as well as might be, the rule of avoiding contact with
+people having coryza.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced up at a flamboyant poster which Mrs. Clyde, who had a natural gift
+of draftsmanship, had made in a spirit of mischief, entitling it &ldquo;The Red
+Nose as a Danger Signal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As much truth as fun in that,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;But, at the
+best, we can&rsquo;t live among people and avoid all danger. In fact, avoidance
+is only the outer line of defense. The inner line is symbolized by a homely
+rule, &lsquo;Keep Comfortable.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s comfort to do with keeping well?&rdquo; asked Grandma
+Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are your nerves for?&rdquo; retorted Dr. Strong with his quizzical
+smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Young man,&rdquo; said the old lady plaintively, &ldquo;did I ever ask
+you a question that you didn&rsquo;t fire another back at me before it was
+fairly out of my mouth? My nerves, if I let myself have any, wouldn&rsquo;t be
+for anything except to plague me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, those are pampered nerves. Normal nerves are to warn you.
+They&rsquo;re to tell you whether the little things of life are right with
+you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And if they&rsquo;re not?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, then you&rsquo;re uncomfortable. Which is to say, there&rsquo;s
+something wrong; and something wrong means, in time, a lessening of vitality,
+and when you let down your body&rsquo;s vitality you&rsquo;re simply saying to
+any germ that may happen along, &lsquo;Come right in and make yourself at
+home.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps you remember when the house caught cold, how shocked Grandma
+Sharpless was at my saying that colds aren&rsquo;t caught in a draft. Well,
+they&rsquo;re not. Yet I ought to have qualified that. Now, what is a draft?
+Air in motion. If there is one thing about air that we thoroughly know,
+it&rsquo;s this: that moving air is infinitely better for us than still air.
+Even bad, stale air, if stirred vigorously into motion, seems to purify itself
+and become breathable and good. Now, the danger of a draft is that it may mean
+a sudden change of the body&rsquo;s temperature. Nobody thinks that wind is
+unhealthful, because when you&rsquo;re out in the wind&mdash;which is the
+biggest and freest kind of a draft&mdash;you&rsquo;re prepared for it. If not,
+your nerves say to you, &lsquo;Move faster; get warm.&rsquo; It&rsquo;s the
+same indoors. If the draft chills you, your nerves will tell you so. Therefore,
+mind your nerves. Otherwise, you&rsquo;ll become specially receptive to the
+coryza germ and when you&rsquo;ve caught <i>that</i>, you&rsquo;ll have caught
+cold.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;that my nerves would tell me
+why I feel so logy every morning. They don&rsquo;t say anything definite. It
+isn&rsquo;t indigestion exactly. But I feel slow and inert after breakfast, as
+if my stomach hadn&rsquo;t any enthusiasm in its job.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Breakfast is the only meal I don&rsquo;t have with you, so I don&rsquo;t
+know,&rdquo; replied the Health Master, who was a very early riser. &ldquo;But
+I should say you were eating the wrong things, perhaps.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How could that be?&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Tom has the simplest
+kind of breakfast, and it&rsquo;s the same every day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, there you are.&rdquo; The Health Master&rsquo;s tone assumed that
+the solution was found.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where are we?&rdquo; queried Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m up in the
+air!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is this remarkably regular breakfast?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eggs, rolls, and coffee.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! Eggs every morning?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two of them. Medium boiled.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not even the method is varied. Same eggs, same preparation every
+morning, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. That&rsquo;s my winter breakfast only.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well; four or five months in the year. No wonder your poor stomach
+gets bored.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter with eggs, Dr. Strong?&rdquo; inquired Manny.
+&ldquo;They let us have &lsquo;em, in training.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing is the matter with two eggs, or twenty. But when you come to two
+hundred, there&rsquo;s something very obvious the matter&mdash;monotony. Your
+stomach is a machine, it&rsquo;s true, but it&rsquo;s a human machine. It
+demands variety.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then Charles ought to be a model. He wants everything from soup to
+pie.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A thoroughly normal desire for a growing boy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He eats an awful lot of meat,&rdquo; observed Julia, who was a somewhat
+fastidious young lady. &ldquo;My Sunday-school teacher calls meat-eaters human
+tigers.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s too easy a generalization, Junkum,&rdquo; replied the
+Health Master. &ldquo;With equal logic she could say that vegetable-eaters are
+human cows.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the vegetarians make very strong arguments,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A lot of pale-eyed, weak-blooded nibblers!&rdquo; stated Grandma
+Sharpless. &ldquo;If meat weren&rsquo;t good for us, we wouldn&rsquo;t have
+been eating it all these generations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True enough. Perhaps we eat a little too much of it, particularly in the
+warm months. But in winter it&rsquo;s practically a necessity.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some of the big athletes say they&rsquo;re vegetarians,&rdquo; said
+Manny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are individual cases,&rdquo; admitted the Health Master;
+&ldquo;but in the long run it doesn&rsquo;t work. A vegetarian race is,
+generally speaking, small of stature and build, and less efficient than a
+meat-eating race. The rule of eating is solid food, sound food, plenty of it,
+and a good variety. Give your stomach a fair chance: don&rsquo;t overload it,
+don&rsquo;t understock it, and don&rsquo;t let it get bored.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some time Miss Bettina had been conducting a quiet and strategic advance
+upon the Health Master, and now by a sudden onslaught she captured his knee
+and, perching herself thereon, put a soft and chubby hand under his chin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You want something, Miss Toodles,&rdquo; he accused with a formidable
+frown. &ldquo;None of your wheedling ways with me! Out with it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Candy,&rdquo; said the child, in no way impressed by his severity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Candy, indeed! When?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now. Any time. Lots of it. Lots of sugar, too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Betty&rsquo;s developing <i>such</i> a sweet tooth!&rdquo; mourned her
+mother. &ldquo;I have to limit her rigidly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t let the child stuff herself on sweets all the
+time,&rdquo; protested Grandma Sharpless, scandalized.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor on anything else. But if she craves sweets, why not let her have
+them at the proper time?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, in my day children ate plain food and were thankful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hm! I&rsquo;m a little dubious about the thankfulness. And in your day
+children died more frequently and more easily than in ours.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They weren&rsquo;t pampered to death on candy, anyway!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Possibly they weren&rsquo;t pampered quite enough. Take the Cherub,
+here,&rdquo; he tossed Betty in the air and whisked her to his shoulder.
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s a perfect little bundle of energy, always in motion. She
+needs energy-producing food to keep going, coal for that engine. Sugar is
+almost pure carbon; that is, coal in digestible form. Of course she wants
+sweets. Her little body is logical.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But isn&rsquo;t it bad for her teeth?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; nor for her last year&rsquo;s overshoes or her tin dog&rsquo;s left
+hind leg,&rdquo; chuckled the Health Master. &ldquo;Sometimes I marvel that the
+race has survived all the superstitions surrounding food and drink.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In my father&rsquo;s household,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;the family
+principle was never to drink anything with meals. The mixture of solids and
+liquids was held to be bad. Another superstition, I suppose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At that rate, bread and milk would be rank poison,&rdquo; said Dr.
+Strong. &ldquo;Next to food, water has got the finest incrustation of
+old-wives&rsquo; warnings. Now, there&rsquo;s some doubt whether a man should
+eat whenever he wants to. Appetite, in the highly nervous American
+organization, is sometimes tricky. But thirst is trustworthy. The normal man is
+perfectly safe in drinking all the water he wants whenever he wants it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can still remember the agonies that I suffered when, as a boy, I had
+scarlet fever, and they would allow me almost no water,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One of medicine&rsquo;s direst errors,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;Nobody will ever know how much that false and cruel system has added to
+our death-rate in the past. To-day a practitioner who kept water from a fever
+patient&mdash;unless there were unusual complications&mdash;would be properly
+citable for malpractice. By the way,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;we&rsquo;re
+changing our views about feeding in long illnesses. Typhoid patients have
+always been kept down to the lowest possible diet, nothing but milk. Now, some
+of the big hospitals are feeding typhoid cases, right through the fever, on
+foods carefully selected for their heat and energy values, with the result that
+not only has the patient more strength to fight the disease, but he pulls
+through practically free from the emaciation which has always been regarded as
+inevitable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can I have my candy?&rdquo; inquired Bettina, holding to her own point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If it&rsquo;s good, sound candy. Now I&rsquo;m going to utter an awful
+heresy. Generally speaking, and in moderation, what you want is good for
+you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pure anarchy,&rdquo; laughed Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all; the law of the body, always demanding what is best for its
+development.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I want,&rdquo; declared Robin, with a sudden energy, &ldquo;to
+take off these hot, scratchy flannels.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too late now,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;until spring.
+You&rsquo;ve been wearing them all winter. But another year, if I have my way,
+you won&rsquo;t have to put them on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d let him tempt pneumonia by going through a winter with light
+summer underwear?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Unless you get out an injunction against me,&rdquo; smiled the
+physician. &ldquo;Bobs had a pretty tough time of it for the first week when he
+changed to flannels. He&rsquo;s thin-skinned, and the rough wool irritated him
+pretty badly. In fact, he had a slight fever for two days. It isn&rsquo;t worth
+that suffering. Besides, he&rsquo;s a full-blooded youngster, and doesn&rsquo;t
+need the extra warmth. You can&rsquo;t dress all children alike in material any
+more than you can dress them all from the same pattern.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I want to leave off mine, too,&rdquo; announced Charles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense! You little ruffian, you could wear sandpaper on that skin of
+yours. Don&rsquo;t talk to me, or next time I see you without your overcoat
+I&rsquo;ll order a hair shirt for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never thought much about the children&rsquo;s clothes, except
+to change between the seasons,&rdquo; confessed Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;I supposed
+that was all there is to it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not wholly. I once knew a man who died from changing his necktie.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did he put on a red tie with a pink shirt?&rdquo; interestedly queried
+Manny, who had reached the age where attire was becoming a vital interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He changed abruptly from the big puff-tie which he had worn all winter,
+and which was a regular chest-protector, to a skimpy bow, thereby exposing a
+weak chest and getting pneumonia quite naturally. Yet he was ordinarily a
+cautious old gentleman, and shifted the weight of his underclothes by the
+calendar&mdash;a rather stupid thing to do, by the way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the first of November,&rdquo; began Grandma Sharpless severely&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I know,&rdquo; cut in the Health Master. &ldquo;Your whole family
+went into flannels whether the thermometer was twenty or seventy. And
+we&rsquo;ve seen it both, more than once on that date.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What harm did it ever do them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bodily discomfort. In other words, lessened vitality. Think how much
+nervous wear is suffered by a child itching and squirming in a scratchy suit of
+heavy flannels on a warm day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Children can&rsquo;t be changing from one weight to another every day,
+can they?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No need of that. But in the fall and spring we can regulate that matter
+a little more by the thermometer, and a little less by the almanac. There is
+also the consideration of controlling heat. Now, Charley, what would you think
+of a man who, in June, say, with the mercury at seventy-five, wandered around
+in a heavy suit and his winter flannels.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d think he was sick,&rdquo; said the nine-year-old promptly,
+&ldquo;or else foolish. But what makes you ask me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just by way of calling your attention to the thermometer, which in this
+room stands at seventy-nine. And here we all sit, dressed twenty-five per cent
+warmer than if we were out doors in a June temperature several degrees colder.
+You&rsquo;re the Committee on Air and Light, Charley. I think this matter of
+heat ought to come within your province.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it makes you feel so cold when you go out,&rdquo; said Julia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course. We Americans live in one of the most trying climates in the
+world, and we add to its rigors by heating our houses like incubators. No room
+over seventy, ought to be the rule.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard to work in a cold room,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not when you&rsquo;re used to it. The Chicago schools that have started
+winter roof classes for sickly children, find that the average of learning
+capacity goes up markedly in the cold, clean air.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But they can&rsquo;t be as comfortable,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Much more so. As soon as the children get used to it, they love it, and
+they object strenuously to going back into the close rooms. The body grasps and
+assimilates the truth; the mind responds.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I like to be comfortable as well as anybody,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Sharpless, &ldquo;but I don&rsquo;t consider it the chief end of life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not the chief end,&rdquo; assented Dr. Strong; &ldquo;the chief
+means.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Comfort and health,&rdquo; mused Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;It seems a natural
+combination.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The most natural in the world. Let me put it into an allegory. Health is
+the main line, the broad line, the easy line. It&rsquo;s the simple line to
+travel, because comfort keeps pointing it out. Essentially it is the line of
+the least resistance. The trouble with most of us is we&rsquo;re always
+unconsciously taking transfers to the cross-lines. The transfer may be
+Carelessness, or Slothfulness, or Gluttony, or one of the Dissipations in food,
+drink, work or play; or it may be even Egotism, which is sometimes a poison:
+but they all take you to Sick Street. Don&rsquo;t get a transfer down Sick
+Street. The road is rough, the scenery dismal, and at the end is the
+cemetery.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the end of all roads,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then in Heaven&rsquo;s name,&rdquo; said the Health Master, &ldquo;let
+us take the longest and sunniest route and sing as we go!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap11"></a>XI.<br />
+THE BESIEGED CITY</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>o Bettina falls the
+credit of setting the match to the train. That lively-minded young lady had
+possessed herself of a large, red square of cardboard, upon which, in the midst
+of the Clyde family circle, she wrought mightily with a paint-brush.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What comes after p in &lsquo;diphtheria,&rsquo; Charley?&rdquo; she
+presently appealed to her next older brother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Charley considered the matter with head aslant. &ldquo;Another p,&rdquo; he
+answered, tactfully postponing the evil moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t look right,&rdquo; announced the Cherub, after a
+moment&rsquo;s contemplation. &ldquo;Dr. Strong, how do you spell
+&lsquo;diphtheria&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I? Why, Toots, I spell it with a capital, but leave off the final
+x,&rdquo; replied the Health Master cheerfully. &ldquo;What kind of a game are
+you playing? Quarantining your dolls?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t a game.&rdquo; Betty could be, on occasion, quite a
+self-contained young person.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it, then, if I&rsquo;m not prying too far into personal
+matters?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s for Eula Simms to put on her house.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Simmses <i>will</i> be pleased,&rdquo; remarked Julia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They ought to be,&rdquo; said Betty complacently. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+suppose they can afford a regular one like the one we put up when Charley had
+scarlet fever, two years ago. And Eula&rsquo;s big sister&rsquo;s got
+diphtheria,&rdquo; she added quite casually.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; The Health Master straightened up sharply in
+his chair. &ldquo;How do you know that, Twinkles?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eula told me across the fence this morning. She&rsquo;s excused from
+school. Three other houses on the street have got it, too. I&rsquo;m going to
+make placards for them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And do the work in play that the Health Department ought to be doing in
+the deadliest earnest! What on earth is Dr. Merritt thinking of?&rdquo; And he
+went to the telephone to call up the Health Officer and find out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re due for a bad diphtheria year, too,&rdquo; observed Grandma
+Sharpless, whose commentaries on practical matters, being always the
+boiled-down essence of first-hand observation, carried weight in the household.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve noticed that it swings around about once in every five or six
+years. And it was six years ago we had that bad epidemic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then there is the influenza epidemic of last spring to consider,&rdquo;
+said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Dr. Strong told us then that we&rsquo;d have to pay for
+that for months. So, I suppose, the city is still in a weakened condition and
+easy soil for diphtheria or any other epidemic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s measles already in our school,&rdquo; said Julia.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;ll help, too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why haven&rsquo;t you reported it, Junkum?&rdquo; asked her father.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re Chairman of the Committee on School Conditions of the Clyde
+Household Protective Association.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We only found out to-day,&rdquo; said Bobs, &ldquo;when they told us
+maybe school would close.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three years I&rsquo;ve been President of the Public Health
+League,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Clyde with a wry face, &ldquo;and nothing has
+happened. Now that I&rsquo;m just about retiring I hope there isn&rsquo;t going
+to be serious trouble. What does the Health Department say, Strong?&rdquo; he
+inquired, turning as the Health Master entered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something very wrong there. Merritt won&rsquo;t talk over the
+&lsquo;phone. Wants me to come down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This evening?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. He&rsquo;s ill, himself, and badly worried. What do <i>you</i>
+think?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It looks like some skullduggery,&rdquo; declared Mr. Clyde, borrowing
+one of his mother-in-law&rsquo;s expressive words. &ldquo;Is it possible that
+reports of diphtheria are being suppressed, and that is why the infected houses
+are not placarded?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If it is, we&rsquo;re in for trouble. As I told you, when I undertook
+the Chinese job of keeping this household in health,&rdquo; continued the
+Health Master, addressing the family, &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t reliably protect a
+family in a community which doesn&rsquo;t protect itself. There are too many
+loopholes through which infection may penetrate. So the Protective Association,
+in self-defense, may have to spur up the city to its own defense. First,
+though, I&rsquo;m going over the throats of this family and take
+cultures.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t think,&rdquo; began the mother anxiously, &ldquo;that
+the children&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; I don&rsquo;t think they&rsquo;ve got it. But the bacteriological
+analysis will show.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hate to have it done,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, shuddering. &ldquo;It
+seems so&mdash;so inviting of trouble.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Superstition,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong, smiling. &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you
+just as anxious to find out that they <i>haven&rsquo;t</i> got the infection as
+that they have? Come on, Bettykin; you&rsquo;re first.&rdquo; And, having
+prepared his material, he swabbed the throats of the whole company, after which
+he took the cultures with him to Dr. Merritt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was late when he returned, but he went direct to Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s worse than I thought, Clyde,&rdquo; said he.
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re in the first stage of a bad epidemic. The reports have been
+suppressed by Mullins, the Deputy Health Officer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did he do that for?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To cover his own inefficiency. He is City Bacteriologist, also, and the
+law requires him, in time of epidemic, to make bacteriological analyses. He
+doesn&rsquo;t know how. So he simply pigeonholed the case reports as they came
+in.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How did such a rascal ever get the job?&rdquo; asked Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Political pull. The most destructive of all the causes of death which
+never get into the mortality records,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong bitterly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How many cases?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three or four hundred, at least. It&rsquo;s got a good start. And more
+than that of measles. While he was in the business of suppressing, Mullins
+threw a lot of measles reports aside, too. I don&rsquo;t like the
+prospect.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The first thing to do,&rdquo; decided Mr. Clyde, with customary energy,
+&ldquo;is to get Dr. Mullins out. I&rsquo;ll call an emergency meeting of the
+Public Health League to-morrow. By the way, Julia has some matters to report
+from school.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, suppose we call an emergency meeting of our own of the Household
+Protective Association for to-morrow evening,&rdquo; suggested Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;Since we&rsquo;re facing an epidemic, we may as well fortify the
+youngsters as soundly as possible.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Directly after dinner on the following evening the Association was called to
+order by Mr. Clyde, presiding. It was a full meeting except for Maynard, who
+had not returned for dinner. First Dr. Strong reported that the cultures from
+the throats of the family had turned out &ldquo;negative.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So we don&rsquo;t have to worry about that,&rdquo; he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whereupon Mrs. Clyde and her mother drew long breaths of relief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now for the Committee on School Conditions,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All I&rsquo;ve heard of in our school is measles,&rdquo; announced
+Julia. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a lot of the boys and girls away.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No diphtheria?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I asked Miss Brown that at recess, and she looked queer and said,
+&lsquo;None that we know of.&rsquo; But I heard of some cases in the Academy;
+so I told Manny.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why Manny?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s Chairman of the Committee on Milk, and the Bliss children
+from our dairy go to the Academy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That explains why Maynard isn&rsquo;t here, then,&rdquo; said the
+grandmother. &ldquo;I suppose he&rsquo;s gone out to the farm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. He took the interurban trolley out, to make sure that they&rsquo;d
+be careful about keeping the children away from the dairy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good team-work, Junkum,&rdquo; approved the presiding officer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I asked Mary and Jim Bliss to come around to-morrow to see Dr.
+Strong and have him look at their throats.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ought to be drawing a salary from the city, young lady,&rdquo; said
+the Health Master warmly. &ldquo;You may have stopped a milk-route infection;
+one of the hardest kind to trace down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re talking of closing school after to-morrow,&rdquo;
+concluded the girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The very worst thing they could do,&rdquo; declared Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The very best, I should think,&rdquo; controverted Grandma Sharpless,
+who never hesitated to take issue with any authority, pending elucidation of
+the question under discussion. &ldquo;If you group a lot of children close
+together it stands to reason they&rsquo;ll catch the disease from each
+other.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not unless you group them too close. Arm&rsquo;s length is the striking
+distance of a contagious disease. <i>There&rsquo;s</i> a truth for all of us to
+remember all the time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If it <i>is</i> a truth,&rdquo; challenged Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;One of
+the surest and one of the most important,&rdquo; averred the Health Master.
+&ldquo;The only substance that carries the contagion of diphtheria or measles
+is the mucus from the nose or throat of an infected person. As far as that can
+be coughed or sneezed is the danger area. Of course, any article contaminated
+with it is dangerous also. But a hygienically conducted schoolroom is as safe a
+place as could be found. I&rsquo;d like to run a school in time of epidemic.
+I&rsquo;d make it a distributing agency for health instead of disease.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How would you manage that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By controlling and training the pupils hygienically. Don&rsquo;t you see
+that school attendance offers the one best chance of keeping track of such an
+epidemic, among the very ones who are most liable to it, the children?
+Diphtheria is contagious in the early stages, as soon as the throat begins to
+get sore, and before the patient is really ill. Just now there is an
+indeterminate number of children in every one of our schools who have incipient
+diphtheria. What is the one important thing to do about them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Find out who they are,&rdquo; said Julia quickly. &ldquo;Exactly. If you
+close school to-morrow and scatter the scholars far and wide in their homes,
+how are we going to find out this essential fact? In their own homes, with no
+one to watch their physical condition, they will go on developing the illness
+unsuspected for days, maybe, and spread it about them in the process of
+development. Whereas, if we keep them in school under a system of constant
+inspection, we shall discover these cases and surround them with safeguards.
+Why, if a fireman should throw dynamite into a burning house and scatter the
+flaming material over several blocks, he&rsquo;d be locked up as insane. Yet
+here we propose to scatter the fire of contagion throughout the city.
+It&rsquo;s criminal idiocy!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If we could only be sure of controlling it in the schools,&rdquo; said
+Grandma Sharpless, still doubtful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At least we can do much toward it. As a matter of fact the best
+authorities are very doubtful whether diphtheria is a &lsquo;school
+disease,&rsquo; anyway. There is more evidence, though not conclusive, that
+measles is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Surely we don&rsquo;t have to consider measles now, in the face of the
+greater danger.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most emphatically we do. For one thing, it will increase the diphtheria
+rate. A child weakened by measles is so much the more liable to catch any other
+disease which may be rife. Besides, measles spreads so rapidly that it often
+kills a greater total than more dangerous illnesses. We must prepare for a
+double warfare.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At the Public Health League meeting,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, &ldquo;the
+objections to closing the schools came from those who feared that an official
+acknowledgment that the city had an epidemic would hurt business.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A viciously wrong reason for being right,&rdquo; said the Health Master.
+&ldquo;By the way, I suppose that Dr. Mullins will be Acting Health Officer,
+now that Merritt is unfortunately out of it. Merritt went to the hospital in
+collapse after the session of the Board of Education at which he appeared, to
+argue for keeping the schools open.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Clyde. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve blocked Mullins off. But
+it&rsquo;s the next step that is troubling me. What would you do, Strong, if
+you were in control?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Put a medical inspector in every school,&rdquo; answered Dr. Strong
+instantly. &ldquo;Send home every child with the snuffles or an inflamed
+throat. And send with him full warning and instructions to the parents. Have
+daily inspection and instruction of all pupils.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can you make school children understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why not? It is merely a matter of telling them repeatedly: &lsquo;Keep
+your fingers and other objects away from your mouth and nose. Wash your hands
+frequently. Brush your teeth and rinse your mouth well. And keep your distance.
+Remember, that the striking distance of disease is arm&rsquo;s length.&rsquo;
+Then I would break class every hour, throw open every window, and march the
+children around for five minutes. This for the sake of improved general
+condition. Penalize the pupils for any violation of hygienic regulations.
+Hygienic martial law for war-time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good!&rdquo; applauded Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;So much for the schools. What
+about the general public?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Educate them to the necessity of watching for danger signals; the
+running nose, the sore throat, the tiny pimples on the inside of the mouth or
+cheek which are the first sign of measles. Above all, furnish free anti-toxin.
+Make it free to all. This is no time to be higgling over pennies.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like the principle of coddling our citizens by giving to
+those who can afford to pay.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better coddled citizens than dead children. Unless you give out free
+anti-toxin, physicians to families where every dollar counts will say,
+&lsquo;Oh, it may not be diphtheria. We&rsquo;ll wait and see, and maybe save
+the extra dollars.&rsquo; Diphtheria doesn&rsquo;t wait. It strikes. Then there
+is the vitally important use of anti-toxin as a preventive. To render a whole
+family immune, where there is exposure from a known case of diphtheria, is
+expensive at the present rates, but is the most valuable expedient known. It is
+so much easier to prevent than to cure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right; I give in. What else?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Education, education, education; always education of the public, till
+the last flame is stamped out. Get the press, first; that is the most direct
+and far-reaching agency. Then organize public meetings, lectures, addresses in
+churches and Sunday schools, talks wherever you can get people together to
+listen. That is what I&rsquo;d do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go ahead and do it, then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Easily said,&rdquo; smiled the Health Master. &ldquo;Who am I, to
+practice what I preach?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Provisional Health Officer of Worthington,&rdquo; came the quick answer.
+&ldquo;I have the Mayor&rsquo;s assurance that he will appoint you to-morrow if
+you will take the job.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll do it,&rdquo; said the Health Master, blinking a little with
+the suddenness of the announcement, but speaking unhesitatingly, &ldquo;on two
+conditions: open schools and free anti-toxin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll get that arranged with the Mayor. Meantime, you have
+unlimited leave of absence as Chinese physician to the Clyde household.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the Household Protective Association will have to back me,&rdquo;
+said Dr. Strong, as the meeting broke up. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t get along
+without you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Swiftly and terribly moves an epidemic, once it has gained headway. And silence
+and concealment had fostered this onset from the first. Despite the best
+efforts of the new Health Officer, within a week the streets of the city were
+abloom with the malign flower of the scarlet for diphtheria and the yellow for
+measles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;First we must find out where we stand,&rdquo; Dr. Strong told his
+subordinates; and, enlisting the services of the great body of
+physicians,&mdash;there is no other class of men so trained and inspired to
+altruistic public service as the medical profession,&mdash;he instituted a
+house-to-house search for hidden or undiscovered cases. From the best among his
+volunteers he chose a body of auxiliary school inspectors, one for every
+school, whom he held to their daily régime with military rigor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But my patients are dying while I am looking after a roomful of healthy
+children,&rdquo; objected one of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can save twenty lives by early detection of the disease, in the time
+it takes to save one by treatment,&rdquo; retorted the disciplinarian.
+&ldquo;In war the individual must sometimes be sacrificed. And this is
+war.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The one bright spot in the early days of the battle was Public School Number
+Three which the twins and Bettina attended. The medical inspector who had this
+assignment was young, intelligent, and an enthusiast. Backed by Dr. Strong, and
+effectively aided by the Clyde children, he enforced a system which brought
+prompt results. In every instance where a pupil was sent home under
+suspicion,&mdash;and the first day&rsquo;s inspection brought to light three
+cases of incipient diphtheria, and fifteen which developed into measles,
+besides a score of suspicious symptoms,&mdash;Julia, or Robin Clyde, or one of
+the teachers went along to deliver printed instructions as to the defense of
+the household, and to explain to the family the vital necessity of heeding the
+regulations until such time as the physician could come and determine the
+nature of the ailment. Within a week, amidst growing panic and peril, Number
+Three was standing like an isle of safety. After that time, not a single new
+case of either disease developed from exposure within its limits, and in only
+two families represented in the school was there any spread of contagion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the following-up into the house that does it,&rdquo; said Dr.
+Strong, at an early morning meeting of the Household Protective Association (he
+still insisted on occasional short sessions, in spite of the overwhelming
+demands on his time and energies, on the ground that these were &ldquo;the only
+chances I get to feel the support of full understanding and sympathy&rdquo;),
+&ldquo;that and the checking-up of the three carriers we found.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s a carrier?&rdquo; asked Bettina, who had an unquenchable
+thirst for finding out things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A carrier, Toodlekins, is a perfectly well person who has the germs of
+disease in his throat. Why he doesn&rsquo;t fall ill himself, we don&rsquo;t
+know. He can give the disease to another person just as well as if he were in
+the worst stages of it himself. Every epidemic develops a number of carriers.
+One of the greatest arguments for inspection is that it brings to light these
+people, who constitute the most difficult and dangerous phase of infection,
+because they go on spreading the disease without being suspected. Now,
+I&rsquo;ve got ours from Number Three quarantined. If I could catch every
+carrier in town, I&rsquo;d guarantee to be in control of the situation in three
+weeks.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our reports show over twenty of them discovered and isolated,&rdquo;
+said Mrs. Clyde, who had turned her abounding energies to the organization of a
+corps of visiting nurses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps I&rsquo;d better say something about carriers in my next
+talk,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, whose natural gift as a ready and
+convincing speaker, unsuspected by herself as well as her family until the
+night when she had met and routed the itinerating quack on his own platform,
+was now being turned to account in the campaign for short talks before Sunday
+schools and club gatherings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Develop it as part of the arm&rsquo;s-length idea,&rdquo; suggested the
+Health Master. &ldquo;Any person may be a carrier and therefore a peril on too
+close contact. Tell &lsquo;em that in words of one syllable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never use any other kind when I mean it,&rdquo; answered Mrs. Sharpless.
+&ldquo;What about that party at Mrs. Ellery&rsquo;s, Manny?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got that fixed,&rdquo; replied Maynard Clyde, who had been
+acting as general factotum for the household in its various lines of endeavor.
+&ldquo;Mrs. Ellery gave a party to our crowd Friday night,&rdquo; he explained
+to Dr. Strong, &ldquo;and Monday one of the Ellery girls came down with
+diphtheria.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What have you done about it?&rdquo; asked the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Notified all the people who were there. That was easy. The trouble is
+that a lot of the fellows have gone back to college since: to Hamilton,
+Michigan, Wisconsin, Harvard, Columbia,&mdash;I suppose there were a dozen
+colleges represented.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you think that&rsquo;s too wide a field for the follow-up
+system?&rdquo; asked his father.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, no,&rdquo; said the boy thoughtfully. &ldquo;I figured that
+starting a new epidemic would be worse than adding to an old one. So I went to
+Mrs. Ellery and got a list of her guests, and I wrote to every college the
+fellows have gone back to, and wrote to the fellows themselves. They probably
+won&rsquo;t thank me for it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They ought to give you a life-saving medal each,&rdquo; declared Dr.
+Strong. &ldquo;As for the situation here&rdquo;&mdash;his face
+darkened&mdash;&ldquo;we&rsquo;re not making any general headway. The public
+isn&rsquo;t aroused, and it won&rsquo;t be until we can get the newspapers to
+take up the fight. The thing that discourages me is that they won&rsquo;t help.
+I don&rsquo;t understand it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you? I do,&rdquo; said Clyde grimly. &ldquo;Their
+advertisers won&rsquo;t let &lsquo;em print anything about it. As I told you in
+the matter of closing the schools, business is frightened. The department
+stores, theaters, and other big advertisers are afraid that the truth about the
+epidemic would scare away trade. So they are compelling the papers to keep
+quiet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Idiots!&rdquo; cried Dr. Strong. &ldquo;Suppressing news is like
+suppressing gas. The longer you do it, the more violent the inevitable
+explosion. But when I called on the editors, they didn&rsquo;t say anything to
+me about the advertising pressure. It was, &lsquo;We should be glad to help in
+any way, Dr. Strong. But an alarmist policy is not for the best interests of
+Worthington; and the good of our community must always be the first
+consideration.&rsquo;&mdash;Bah! The variations I&rsquo;ve heard on that
+sickening theme today! The &lsquo;Press,&rsquo; the &lsquo;Clarion,&rsquo; the
+&lsquo;Evening News,&rsquo; the &lsquo;Telegram, the
+&lsquo;Observer&rsquo;&mdash;all of &lsquo;em.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t mention the &lsquo;Star,&rsquo;&rdquo; said Grandma
+Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That rag? It&rsquo;s against everything decent and for everything rotten
+in this town,&rdquo; said Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When I need a danger signal,&rdquo; observed the old lady with her most
+positive air, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll wave any kind of rag. The &lsquo;Star&rsquo;
+has circulation.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; admitted the Health Master, &ldquo;and among the very class
+we want to reach. But what&rsquo;s the use?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;m
+going to find out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One hour later she walked into the editorial sanctum of Mr. &ldquo;Bart&rdquo;
+Snyder, editor, proprietor, and controlling mind of as &ldquo;yellow&rdquo; a
+sheet as ever subsisted on a combination of enterprise, real journalistic
+ability, and blackmail. Mr. Snyder sat in a perfect slump of apparent languor,
+his body sagging back into his tilted chair, one foot across his desk, the
+other trailing like a broken wing along the floor, his shrewd, lined face
+uplifted at an acute angle with the cigar he was chewing, and his green hat
+achieving the most rakish effect possible to a third slant. His brilliant gray
+eyes were narrowed into a hard twinkle as he surveyed his visitor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Siddown,&rdquo; he grunted, and shoved a chair toward her with the
+grounded foot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grandma Sharpless did not &ldquo;siddown.&rdquo; Instead she marched over to a
+spot directly in front of him, halted, and looked straight into the hard,
+humorous face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bartholomew Snyder,&rdquo; said she crisply, &ldquo;I knew you when you
+were a boy. I knew your mother, too. She was a decent woman. Take off that
+hat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Snyder jaw fell so unpremeditatedly that the Snyder cigar dropped upon the
+littered floor. One third of a second later, the Snyder foot descended upon it
+(and it was a twenty-cent cigar, too) as the Snyder chair reverted to the
+perpendicular, and the Snyder hat came off. The Snyder countenance quivered
+into articulation and therefrom came a stunned, &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll
+be&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, you don&rsquo;t! Not in <i>my</i> presence,&rdquo; cut in his
+visitor. &ldquo;Now, you listen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m listening,&rdquo; he assured her in a strangled murmur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She seated herself and threw a quality of rigidity into her backbone calculated
+to impress if not actually to appeal. &ldquo;I want your help,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fine, fat way you&rsquo;ve got of opening up a request for a
+favor,&rdquo; he retorted, recovering himself somewhat, and in a particularly
+discouraging voice. But the shrewd old judge of human nature before him marked
+the little pursing at the corners of the mouth. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet I know
+what it is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet all the money I&rsquo;ve got in the bank and my best gold
+tooth thrown in you don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; was the prompt retort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a sporting proposition, all right,&rdquo; cried the editor
+in great admiration. &ldquo;I thought you was going to ask me to let up on the
+city administration now you&rsquo;ve got one of the fat jobs in the family,
+with your Dr. Strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a good thing you don&rsquo;t have to make guesses for a
+living,&rdquo; returned his caller scornfully. &ldquo;Pitch into the
+administration as hard as you like. I don&rsquo;t care. All I want is for you
+to print the news about this diphtheria epidemic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is that all?&rdquo; There was a profound sardonicism in the final word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come to think of it, it isn&rsquo;t. I want you to print some
+editorials, too, telling people how to take care of themselves while the
+disease is spreading.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anything more?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you might do the same thing about the measles epidemic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Harr-rr-rr!&rdquo; It was a singular growl, not wholly compounded of
+wrath and disgust. &ldquo;Doc Strong send you here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; he didn&rsquo;t!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t bite me. I believe you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Will you publish some articles?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look-a-here, Mrs. Sharpless; the &lsquo;Star&rsquo; is a business
+proposition. Its business is to make money for me. That&rsquo;s all it&rsquo;s
+here for. People say some pretty tough things about me and the paper. Well,
+we&rsquo;re pretty tough. We can stand &lsquo;em. Let &lsquo;em talk, so long
+as I get the circulation and the advertising and the cash. Now, you want me to
+print something for you. Come down to brass tacks; what is there in it for
+me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A chance to be of some real use to your city for once in your
+life,&rdquo; answered Grandma Sharpless mildly. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t that
+enough?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bart Snyder threw back his head and laughed immoderately. &ldquo;Say, I like
+you,&rdquo; he gurgled. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got nerve. Me a good Samaritan!
+It&rsquo;s so rich, I&rsquo;m half a mind to go you, if it wasn&rsquo;t for
+losing the advertising. Wha&rsquo; d&rsquo; ye want me to say, anyway, just for
+curiosity and cussedness?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just give the people plain talk,&rdquo; explained the visitor.
+&ldquo;Talk to &lsquo;em in your editorials as if you had &lsquo;em by the
+buttonhole. Say to them: &lsquo;Do you want to get diphtheria? Well, you
+don&rsquo;t need to. It&rsquo;s just as easy to avoid it as to have it. Are you
+anxious to have measles in your house? It&rsquo;s for you to decide. All you
+need is to take reasonable care against it. Infectious disease only kills
+foo&mdash;careless people.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let it go at &lsquo;fools,&rsquo;&rdquo; interjected Mr. Snyder, smiting
+his thigh. &ldquo;Go on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;d give them simple, straight advice; tell them how to
+recognize the early symptoms; how and where to get anti-toxin. And I&rsquo;d
+scare &lsquo;em, too. I&rsquo;d tell &lsquo;em there are five thousand cases of
+the two diseases in town, and there will be ten thousand in a week unless
+something is done.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up rose the editor-proprietor, kicked over his own chair, whirled Mrs.
+Sharpless&rsquo;s chair with its human burden to the desk, thrust a pencil into
+her hand, and slapped down a pad before her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Write it,&rdquo; he adjured her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who? Me?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Sharpless, her astonishment momentarily
+overwhelming her grammar. &ldquo;Bless you, man! I&rsquo;m no writer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Talk it, then, and make your pencil take down the talk. I&rsquo;ll be
+back in a minute.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That minute stretched to a good half-hour, during which period Grandma
+Sharpless talked to her pencil. When Mr. Snyder returned, he had with him a
+mournful-looking man who, he explained occultly, &ldquo;holds down our city
+desk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is our new Health Editor,&rdquo; chuckled Snyder, indicating Mrs.
+Sharpless. &ldquo;How many cases did you say there were in town,
+ma&rsquo;am?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Five thousand or more.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The city editor whistled whisperingly. &ldquo;Where do you get that?&rdquo; he
+asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From Dr. Strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s news,&rdquo; said the desk man. &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t
+suppose it was half so bad. If only we dared print it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No other paper in town dares,&rdquo; suggested the visitor
+insinuatingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Makes it all the more news,&rdquo; remarked Snyder. &ldquo;What if we
+played it up for a big feature, eh?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Advertisers,&rdquo; said the city editor significantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let &lsquo;em drop out. They&rsquo;ll come back quick enough, when
+we&rsquo;ve shown up one or two and told why they quit us. And think of the
+splash we can make! Only paper in the city that dares tell the truth.
+We&rsquo;ll rub that into our highly respectable rivals. I&rsquo;ll make you a
+proposition,&rdquo; he added, turning to his caller.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Make it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know I&rsquo;ve hammered at Tom Clyde pretty hard. I don&rsquo;t
+cotton to that saintly, holier-than-thou reform bunch at all. Well, let Clyde
+come into the &lsquo;Star&rsquo; with a signed statement as President of the
+Public Health League, and we&rsquo;ll make it the basis of a campaign that will
+rip this town wide open for a couple of weeks. I&rsquo;d like to see him in my
+paper, after all the roasting we&rsquo;ve handed him.&rdquo; And the malicious
+face wrinkled into another grin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve bought a bargain,&rdquo; stated Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;The
+statement will be ready to-night. And another from Dr. Strong for good
+measure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fine business!&rdquo; ejaculated the &ldquo;Star&rsquo;s&rdquo; owner.
+&ldquo;Not open to a reasonable offer in the newspaper game, are you?&rdquo; he
+added, laughing. &ldquo;No? Well, I&rsquo;m sorry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would there be any use in my seeing the editors of the other
+papers?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Watch them fall in line,&rdquo; was the grim response. &ldquo;Before
+we&rsquo;ve been out a day, they&rsquo;ll be tumbling over each other to make
+the dear, deluded public believe that they&rsquo;re the real pioneers in saving
+the city from the deadly germ.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, here are my notes, if you can make anything out of them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eh? Notes?&rdquo; said the newspaper man, who had been glancing at the
+sheets over Mrs. Sharp-less&rsquo;s shoulder. &ldquo;Oh&mdash;ah. Yes, of
+course. All right. Glad to have metcher,&rdquo; he added, politely ushering her
+to the door. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll send a reporter up for the statements at eight
+o&rsquo;clock.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you very much, Bartholomew Snyder,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless,
+shaking hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not a bit of it! Thanks the other way. You&rsquo;ve given me a good tip
+in my own game. Watch me&mdash;us&mdash;wake &lsquo;em up to-morrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only the combined insistence of Grandma Sharpless and diplomacy of the Health
+Master overrode Mr. Clyde&rsquo;s angry objections to &ldquo;going into that
+filthy sheet&rdquo; when the matter was broached to him that evening. For the
+good of the cause he finally acceded. And next morning the &ldquo;Star&rdquo;
+was a sight! It blazed in red captions. It squirmed and wriggled with
+illustrations of alleged germs. It shrieked in stentorian headlines. If the
+city had been beset by all the dogs of war, it couldn&rsquo;t have blared more
+martial defiance against the enemy. It held its competitors up to infinite
+scorn and derision as mean-spirited shirks and cowards, and slathered itself
+with fulsome praises as the only original prop of truth and righteousness. And,
+as the centerpoint and core of all this, flaunted-the statement and signature
+of the Honorable Thomas Clyde, President of the Worthington Public Health
+League&mdash;with photograph. The face of Mr. Clyde, as he confronted this
+outrage upon his sensibilities at the breakfast table, was gloom itself until
+he turned to the editorial page. Then he emitted a whoop of glee. For there,
+double-leaded and double-headed was a Health Column, by &ldquo;Our Special
+Writer, Grandma Sharpless, the Wisest Woman in Worthington. She will contribute
+opinions and advice on the epidemic to the &lsquo;Star&rsquo;
+exclusively.&rdquo; (Mr. Snyder had taken a chance with this latter statement.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me see,&rdquo; gasped the old lady, when her son-in-law made known
+the cause of his mirth. Then, &ldquo;They&rsquo;ve published that stuff of mine
+just as I wrote it. I didn&rsquo;t dream it was for print.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what makes it so bully,&rdquo; said the Health Master.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got the editorial trick of confidential, convincing,
+man-to-man talk down fine. What&rsquo;s more, you&rsquo;ll have to keep it up,
+now. Your friend, Snyder, has fairly caught you. Well, we need an official
+organ in the household.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vowing that she couldn&rsquo;t and wouldn&rsquo;t do it, nevertheless the new
+&ldquo;editor&rdquo; began to think of so many things that she wanted to say
+that, each day, when a messenger arrived from the &ldquo;Star&rdquo; with a
+polite request for &ldquo;copy,&rdquo; there was a telling column ready of the
+Health Master&rsquo;s wisdom, simplified and pointed by Grandma
+Sharpless&rsquo;s own pungent, crisp, vigorous, and homely style. Thanks
+largely to this, the &ldquo;Star&rdquo; became the mouthpiece of an
+anti-epidemic campaign which speedily enlisted the whole city.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the &ldquo;yellow&rdquo; was not to have the field to itself. Once the cat
+was out of the bag, the other papers not only recognized it as a cat with great
+uproar, but, so to speak, proceeded to tie a can to its tail and pelt it
+through the streets of the city. As a matter of fact, no newspaper wishes to be
+hampered in the publishing of legitimate news; and it was only by the sternest
+threats of withdrawal of patronage that the large advertisers had hitherto
+succeeded in coercing the press of Worthington. Further coercion was useless,
+now that the facts had found their way into type. With great unanimity and an
+enthusiasm none the less genuine for having been repressed, the papers rushed
+into the breach. The &ldquo;Clarion&rdquo; organized an Anti-Infection League
+of School Children, with officers and banners. The &ldquo;Press&rdquo;
+&ldquo;attended to&rdquo; the recreant Dr. Mullins so fiercely that,
+notwithstanding his pull, he resigned his position in the Health Department
+because of &ldquo;breakdown due to overwork in the course of his duties,&rdquo;
+and ceased to trouble, in official circles. Enterprising reporters of the
+&ldquo;Observer&rdquo; caused the arrest of thirty-five trolley-car conductors
+for moistening transfers with a licked thumb, and then got the street-car
+company to issue a new form of transfer inscribed across the back, &ldquo;Keep
+me away from your Mouth.&rdquo; It fell to the &ldquo;Evening News&rdquo; to
+drive the common drinking-cup out of existence, after which it instituted
+reforms in soda fountains, restaurants, and barber shops, while the
+&ldquo;Telegram&rdquo; garnered great glory by interspersing the
+inning-by-inning returns of the baseball championship with bits of counsel as
+to how to avoid contagion in the theater, in the street, in travel, in banks,
+at home, and in various other walks of life. But the &ldquo;Star&rdquo; held
+foremost place, and clinched it with a Sunday &ldquo;cut-out&rdquo; to be worn
+as a badge, inscribed &ldquo;Hands Off, Please, Until It&rsquo;s Over.&rdquo;
+All of which, while it sometimes verged upon the absurd, served the
+fundamentally valuable purpose of keeping the public in mind of the peril of
+contact with infected persons or articles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly but decisively the public absorbed the lesson. &ldquo;Arm&rsquo;s
+length&rdquo; became a catch-phrase; a motto; a slogan. People came slowly to
+comprehend the methods by which disease is spread and the principles of
+self-protection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as knowledge widened, the epidemic ebbed, though gradually. Serious
+epidemics are not conquered or even perceptibly checked in a day. They are like
+floods; dam them in one place and they break through your defenses in another.
+Inexplicable outbreaks occur just when the tide seems to have turned. And when
+victory does come, it may not be ascribable to any specific achievement of the
+hygienic forces. The most that can be said is that the persevering combination
+of effort has at last made itself felt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The red placards began to disappear; many of them, alas! only after the sable
+symbol of death had appeared beneath them. Dr. Strong and his worn-out aides
+found time to draw breath and reckon up their accounts in human life. The early
+mortality had been terrific. Of the cases which had developed in the period of
+suppression, before antitoxin was readily obtainable, more than a third had
+died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nobody will ever be indicted for those murders,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong
+to Mr. Clyde grimly. &ldquo;But we have the satisfaction of knowing what can
+really be done by prompt work. Look at the figures after the free anti-toxin
+was established.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a drop in the death rate, first to twenty per cent, then to ten, and,
+in the ebb stage of the scourge, to well below five.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How many infections we&rsquo;ve prevented by giving anti-toxin to
+immunize exposed persons, there&rsquo;s no telling,&rdquo; continued Dr.
+Strong. &ldquo;That principle of starting a back-fire in
+diphtheria,&mdash;it&rsquo;s exactly like starting a back-fire in a prairie
+conflagration,&mdash;by getting anti-toxin into the system in time to head off
+the poison of the disease itself, is one of the two or three great achievements
+of medical science. There isn&rsquo;t an infected household in the city today,
+I believe, where this hasn&rsquo;t been done. The end is in sight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you can go away and get a few days&rsquo; rest,&rdquo; said Grandma
+Sharpless, who constituted herself the Health Master&rsquo;s own health
+guardian and undiplomaed medical adviser, and to whom he habitually rendered
+meek obedience; for she had been watching with anxiety the haggard lines in his
+face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not yet,&rdquo; he returned. &ldquo;Measles we still have with
+us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Decreasing, though,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Our nurses report a
+heavy drop in new cases and a big crop of convalescents.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is those convalescents that we must watch. I don&rsquo;t want a
+generation of deaf citizens growing up from this onset.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But can you prevent it if the disease attacks the ears?&rdquo; asked
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Almost certainly. We&rsquo;ve got to inspect every child who has or had
+measles in this epidemic, and, where the ear-drum is shiny and concave, we will
+puncture it, by a very simple operation, which saves serious trouble in ninety
+per cent of the cases, at least. But it means constant watchfulness, for often
+the infection progresses without pain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At the same time your inspectors will watch for other after-effects,
+then,&rdquo; suggested Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Exactly. It&rsquo;s my own opinion that nearly all the serious diseases
+of the eye, ear, liver, kidney, heart, and so on in early middle age are the
+late remote effects of what we carelessly call the lesser diseases of
+childhood. It is only a theory as yet; though some day I think it will be
+proved. At any rate, we know that a serious and pretty definite percentage of
+all deafness follows measles; and we are going to carry this thing through far
+enough to prevent that sequel and to turn over a reasonably cleaned-up
+situation to Dr. Merritt.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s out of danger, by the way,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, &ldquo;and
+will be back at his desk in a fortnight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well; he&rsquo;ll have an easier job henceforth,&rdquo; prophesied Mr.
+Clyde. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s got an enlightened city to watch over. And he can
+thank you for that, Strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He can thank the Clyde family,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong with feeling.
+&ldquo;I could have done little without you back of me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s been interesting to extend the principles of our Household
+Protective Association to the larger world,&rdquo; smiled Clyde. &ldquo;Beyond
+our own city, too, in one case. Manny has had a letter from the Professor of
+Hygiene at Hamilton College, where he enters next year, thanking him on behalf
+of the faculty for his warning about young Hyland who was exposed to diphtheria
+at the Ellery party. He went back to Hamilton a few days after and was starting
+in to play basketball, which would have been decidedly dangerous for his team
+mates; but the authorities, after getting Manny&rsquo;s letter, kept him out of
+the gymnasium, and kept a watch on him. He developed the disease a week later;
+but there has been no infection from him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s direct result,&rdquo; approved Dr. Strong.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I call spreading the gospel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Grandma&rsquo;s our real revivalist, at that,&rdquo; said Julia.
+&ldquo;The children at Number Three pay more attention to her column than they
+do to what the teachers tell them. The principal told us that it was the
+greatest educational force for health that Worthington had ever known.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only reflected wisdom from you, young man,&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless
+to the Health Master. &ldquo;Thank goodness, I&rsquo;m through with it.
+I&rsquo;m so sick of it that I can&rsquo;t look at writing materials without
+wanting to cut the ink bottle&rsquo;s throat with my penholder. Bart Snyder has
+let me off. What&rsquo;s more, he sent me a check for $250. Pretty handsome of
+him. But I&rsquo;m going to send it back.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why waste good money, grandma?&rdquo; drawled Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t have me keep it, would you, for doing that
+work?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who said anything about keeping it? But don&rsquo;t feed it back to Bart
+Snyder. Why not contribute it to the Public Health League? It&rsquo;s always
+got a handsome deficit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In graceful recognition of my having a son-inlaw as president of it, I
+suppose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not president any more. My term was up last night. They
+didn&rsquo;t honor me with a reelection,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, with a rather
+too obvious glumness, which, for once, escaped the sharp old lady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The slinkums!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;After all the time and work
+you&rsquo;ve given to it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the ex-incumbent philosophically, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s
+one comfort. They&rsquo;ve put a better man in my place.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No such a thing,&rdquo; declared his mother-in-law, with vehement
+partisanship. &ldquo;They couldn&rsquo;t find one. Who was it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give you one guess.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Was it you, young man?&rdquo; queried she, fixing the Health Master with
+a baleful eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no; a better man than I,&rdquo; he hastened to assure her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, in the name of sakes, who, then?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde, grabbing the old lady by both shoulders and
+giving her a vigorous kiss. &ldquo;Unanimously elected amidst an uproar of
+enthusiasm, as the &lsquo;Star&rsquo; puts it. Here it is, on the first column
+of the front page.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the first time in the history of the Clyde household, the senior member
+thereof gave way to an unbridled license of speech, in the presence of the
+family.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I vum!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap12"></a>XII.<br />
+PLAIN TALK</h2>
+
+<p class="pfirst">
+<span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">&ldquo;W</span>hat do you find
+so interesting in that paper, Strong?&rdquo; asked Mr. Thomas Clyde, from his
+place in the corner of the big living-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dinner was just finished in the Clyde household, and the elders were sitting
+about, enjoying the easy and intermittent talk which had become a feature of
+the day since the Health Master had joined the family. From outside, the play
+of lively voices, above the harmonized undertones of a strummed guitar, told
+how the children were employing the after-dinner hour. Dr. Strong let the
+evening paper drop on his knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something that has set me thinking,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you ever give that restless mind of yours a vacation, young
+man?&rdquo; inquired Grandma Sharpless, looking up from her game of solitaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All that is good for it. Perhaps you&rsquo;d like to share this problem,
+and thus relieve me of part of the responsibility.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do go on, if you&rsquo;ve found anything exciting,&rdquo; besought Mrs.
+Clyde, glancing up with her swift, interrogating smile. &ldquo;The paper seemed
+unusually dull to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because you didn&rsquo;t read quite deep enough into it,
+possibly.&rdquo; He raised the journal, folded it neatly to a half-page, and
+holding it before his eyes, began smoothly:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Far, far away, as far as your conscience will let you believe, in the
+Land of Parables&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wait a minute,&rdquo; interrupted Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;That &lsquo;Land of
+Parables&rsquo; sounds as if we were going to have some Improving
+Information.&rdquo; He regarded his friend and adviser with a twinkling eye.
+&ldquo;Ought the children to miss this?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is for you to decide later,&rdquo; said the Health Master gravely.
+And he resumed:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Far, far away, as far as conscience will let you believe, in the Land of
+Parables, there once stood a prosperous and self-contented city. Men lived
+therein by rule and rote. Only what their fathers before them had believed and
+received did they believe and receive. &lsquo;As it hath been, so it is now and
+ever must and shall be,&rsquo; was the principle whereby their lives were
+governed. Therefore they endured, without hope as without complaint, the
+depredations of a hideous Monster who preyed upon them unceasingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So loathsome was this Monster that the very thought of him was held to
+taint the soul. His name was sealed away from the common speech. Only the
+boldest men spoke of him, and then in paraphrases and by circumlocutions.
+Fouled, indeed, was the fame of the woman who dared so much as confess to a
+knowledge of his existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From time to time the wise and strong men of the city banded together
+and sallied forth to drive back other creatures of prey as they pressed too
+hard upon the people. Not so with the Monster. Because of the ban of silence no
+plan could be mooted, no campaign formulated to check his inroads. So he grew
+great and ever greater, and his blood hunger fierce and ever more fierce, and
+his scarlet trail wound in and out among the homes of the people, manifest even
+to those eyes which most sedulously sought to blind themselves against it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Seldom did the Monster slay outright. But where his claws clutched or
+his fangs pierced, a slow venom crept through the veins, and life was corroded
+at its very wellsprings. Nor was this the worst. Once the blight fell upon one
+member of a household, it might corrupt, by hidden and subtle ways, the others
+and innocent, who knew not of the curse overhanging them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Upon the foolish, the reckless, and the erring the Monster most readily
+fastened himself. But man nor woman nor child was exempt. Necessity drove young
+girls, struggling and shuddering, into the Monster&rsquo;s very jaws. The
+purity of a child or of a Galahad could not always save from the serpent-stroke
+which sped from out the darkness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One moment, Strong,&rdquo; broke in Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve read
+this before?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know what is in it, if that is what you mean. Why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; hesitated the other, glancing toward his wife and her
+mother. &ldquo;Only, I suspect it isn&rsquo;t going to be pleasant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t pleasant. It&rsquo;s true.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Grandma Sharpless laid down her cards. &ldquo;Let him go on, Tom,&rdquo; she
+said decisively. &ldquo;We have no ban of silence in this house.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a nod from Clyde, the Health Master continued:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Always the taboo of silence hedged the Monster about and protected him;
+and men secretly revolted against it, yet were restrained from speech by the
+fear of public dishonor. So, in time, he came to have a Scarlet Court of Shame,
+with his retinue of slaves, whose duty it was to procure victims for his
+insatiate appetite. But this service availed his servitors nothing in
+forbearance, for, sooner or later, his breath of fiery venom blasted and
+withered them, one and all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One refuge only did the people seek against the Monster. At every
+doorpost of the city stood a veiled statue of the supposed Goddess and
+Protectress of the Household, worshiped under the name of <i>Modesty</i>, and
+to her the people appealed for succor and protection. Also they invoked her
+vengeance against such as spoke the name of the Monster, and bitter were the
+penalties wrought upon these in her name. Nevertheless there arose martyrs
+whose tongues could not be silenced by any fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One was a brave priest who stood in his pulpit unashamed and spoke the
+terrible truth of the Monster, bidding his hearers arise and band themselves
+together and strike a blow for their homes and their dear ones. But the people
+hurried forth in dread, and sought refuge before the Veiled Idol; and the
+priest&rsquo;s words rang hollow in the empty tabernacle; and his church was
+deserted and crumbled away in neglect, so that the fearful said:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Behold the righteous wrath which follows the breaking of the
+prescribed silence.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Again, a learned and pious physician and healer gathered the young men
+about him in the marketplace to give them solemn warning against the Monster
+and his scarlet slaves. But his words returned upon himself, and he was branded
+with shame as one who worshiped not the Veiled Goddess, and was presently
+driven forth from his own place into the wilderness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then there came into the hall of the City Fathers a woman with
+disheveled hair and tear-worn cheeks, who beat upon her breast and
+cried:&mdash;&ldquo;&lsquo;Vengeance, O Wise and Great Ones! My son, my little
+son went to the public baths, and the venom of the Monster was upon the waters,
+and my son is blind forever. What will ye do, that others may not suffer my
+grief?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the Wise and Great Ones spoke together and said:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Surely this woman is mad, that she thus fouls her lips.&rsquo;
+And they drove her out of their presence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From among their own number there came a terror and a portent. For their
+Leader, who had been stricken in youth, but thought himself to have thrown off
+the toils of the Monster, rose in his place and spoke in a voice that piped and
+shook:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Because no man taught me in my unripe days, I strayed into the
+paths of the Scarlet One. For the space of a generation I hoped; but now the
+clutch is upon me again, and I die. See to it, O my Fellows, that our youth no
+longer perish in their ignorance.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So he passed out from the place of honor; and the strength of his mind
+and his body was loosened until he died. But, rather than violate the taboo,
+the Wise and Great Ones gave a false name to his death, and he was buried under
+a graven lie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Finally there came to the Council Hall one with the fire of martyrdom in
+his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Though I perish,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I and mine, yet will I
+speak the truth for once. My daughter I have given in marriage, and the Monster
+has entered into the house of her marriage, and from henceforth she must go, a
+maimed creature, sexless and childless, to the end of her days. Shame upon this
+city, that it endures such shame; for my daughter is but one of many.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;The shame be yours,&rsquo; replied the Fathers, &lsquo;that you
+bring scandal upon your own. Go forth into exile, in the name of the Veiled
+Goddess, <i>Modesty</i>, beneath whose statue we meet.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the man strode forward, and with a violent hand plucked the veil
+from the statue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Not the Protectress of Homes,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;but the
+ally of the Monster. Not the Goddess, <i>Modesty</i>, but her sham sister,
+<i>Prudery</i>. Down with false gods!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So saying, he threw the idol to the ground, where it was shattered into
+a thousand pieces. With those pieces the Fathers stoned him to death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But in many households that night there was a baring of the Veiled Idol.
+And ever, behind the folds, was revealed not the pure gaze of the True Goddess,
+but the simper and leer of <i>Prudery</i>, mute accomplice of <i>Shame</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thus did the city awake. Fearfully it gathered its forces; tremblingly
+it prepared its war upon the Monster. But the Monster is intrenched. Its venom
+runs through the blood of the people, poisoning it from generation to
+generation, so that neither the grandsons nor the great-grandsons of those who
+stoned the martyr to the False Goddess shall escape the curse. The Prophet has
+said it: &lsquo;Even unto the third and the fourth generations.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>De te fabula narratur</i>; of you is the fable narrated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Land of Parables is your country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The stricken city is your city.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Monster coils at your doorway, lying in wait for your loved ones;
+and no prudence, no precaution, no virtue can guard them safely against his
+venom so long as the Silence of Prudery holds sway.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Strong let the newspaper fall on his lap, and looked slowly from face to
+face of the silent little group.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Need I tell you the name of the destroyer?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not me,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde in a low tone. &ldquo;It is a two-headed
+monster, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Health Master nodded. &ldquo;And because we all fear to utter the words
+&lsquo;venereal disease,&rsquo; our children grow up in the peril of the
+Monster whose two allies are Vice and Ignorance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One editor in this town, at least, has some gumption,&rdquo; commented
+Grandma Sharpless, peering over her spectacles at the sheet which Dr. Strong
+had let fall. &ldquo;Which paper is it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;None, if you must know. The fact is, I read that allegory into the
+newspaper, not out of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it was your own?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Such as it is,
+mine own. But the inspiration came from this headline.&rdquo; He pointed to a
+legend in heavy type:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<big><big>DIVORCE IN THE INSIDE SET</big></big><br />
+<br />
+AFTER SEX MONTHS OF MARRIAGE, MRS. BARTLEY STARR SEEKS FREEDOM&mdash;NATURE OF
+CHARGES NOT MADE PUBLIC
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know what is back of it, Strong?&rdquo; asked Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The ruin of a life. Bartley Starr has been a &lsquo;rounder.&rsquo; With
+the curse of his vices upon him he married a young and untaught girl.&rdquo; He
+repeated with slow significance a passage from the allegory. &ldquo;The Monster
+entered into the house of her marriage, and from henceforth she must go, a
+maimed creature, sexless and childless, to the end of her days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no, no!&rdquo; burst out Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Not poor little, lovely,
+innocent Margaret Starr!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too innocent,&rdquo; retorted the Health Master. &ldquo;And more than
+innocent; ignorant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But Bartley Starr!&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Who would have supposed
+him such a scoundrel? And with his bringing-up, too!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The explanation lies in his bringing-up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense! Henry Starr is as upright a man and as good a father as you
+can find in Worthington.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The former, perhaps. Not the latter, certainly. He is a worshiper of the
+False Veiled Goddess, I suspect. Hence Bartley&rsquo;s tragedy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you blame Bartley&rsquo;s viciousness upon his father?&rdquo;
+demanded Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In part, at least. I happen to know a good deal about this case. Bartley
+got his sex-education or miseducation from chance talk at school. He took that
+to college with him, and there, unguided, fell into vicious ways. I don&rsquo;t
+suppose his father ever had a frank talk with him in his life. And I judge that
+little Mrs. Starr&rsquo;s mother never had one with her, either. Look at the
+result!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But boys find out about such things some way,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde
+uneasily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some way? What way? And from whom? How much has Manny found out?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Manny&rsquo;s father.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you know?&rdquo; persisted the Health Master
+relentlessly. &ldquo;You are his father, and, what is more, his friend.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why must Manny know?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Clyde. &ldquo;Surely my son
+isn&rsquo;t going to wallow in that sort of foulness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pray God he is not!&rdquo; said Grandma Sharpless, turning her old,
+shrewd, kind face, the eyes bright and soft with feeling, toward her daughter.
+&ldquo;But, oh, my dear, my dear, the bitterest lesson we mothers have to learn
+is that our children are of the common flesh and blood of humanity.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Manny is clean-minded and high-spirited,&rdquo; said Strong. &ldquo;But
+not all of his companions are. Not a month ago I heard one of the older boys in
+his class assuring some of his fellows, in the terms of the most damnable lie
+that ever helped to corrupt youth, &lsquo;Why, it ain&rsquo;t any worse than an
+ordinary cold.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That was a stock phrase of the young toughs when I was a boy,&rdquo;
+said Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;So it still persists, does it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any worse than an ordinary cold?&rdquo; repeated Mrs. Clyde, looking
+puzzled. &ldquo;What did he mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gonorrhoea,&rdquo; said Dr. Strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Clyde winced back and half-rose from her chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you going?&rdquo; asked the Health Master rather &lsquo;grimly.
+&ldquo;Must I be mealy-mouthed on this subject? Here I am, trying to tell you
+something of the most deadly import, and am I to choose perfumed words and pick
+rose-tinted phrases?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Speak out, Strong,&rdquo; said the head of the house. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+been rather expecting this.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;First, then: you need not worry about Manny. I talked to him, long
+ago.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he&rsquo;s only a boy, still,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless
+involuntarily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He enters college this fall. And I&rsquo;ve made sure that he
+won&rsquo;t take with him the &lsquo;no worse than a cold&rsquo; superstition
+about a disease which has wrecked the lives of thousands of Bartley
+Starrs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I thought that Starr&rsquo;s was the&mdash;the other and worse
+form,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Plain talk,&rdquo; adjured the Health Master. &ldquo;You thought it was
+syphilis?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you thought syphilis worse than gonorrhoea?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Surely!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, it isn&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;ll explain that in detail presently. Just
+now&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do I have to hear all of this,&rdquo; appealed Mrs. Clyde, with a face
+of piteous disgust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, <i>I</i> told Manny,&rdquo; said the Health Master in measured
+tones. &ldquo;Must I be the one to tell Julia, too?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Julia!&rdquo; cried the mother. &ldquo;Tell Julia?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some one must tell her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That child?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fourteen years old, and in high school. Last year there were ten known
+cases of venereal disease among the high-school girls.&rdquo;<a href="#fn3" name="fnref3" id="fnref3"><sup>[3]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="fn3" id="fn3"></a> <a href="#fnref3">[3]</a>
+These and the following instances are based on actual and established medical
+findings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How horrible!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bad enough. I have known worse elsewhere. In a certain small city
+school, several years ago, it was discovered that there was an epidemic of vice
+which involved practically the whole school. And it was discovered only when
+venereal disease broke out. Our school authorities are just beginning to learn
+that immorality must be combated by watchfulness and quarantine, just as
+contagious disease must.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How was the outbreak in our high school found out?&rdquo; asked Grandma
+Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In a curious and tragic way. One of the boys developed a sudden and
+serious inflammation of the eyes. At first the ophthalmologist to whom he went
+was puzzled. Then he began to suspect. A bateriological analysis showed that it
+was a case of gonorrhoeal infection. It was by a hair&rsquo;s breadth that the
+less infected eye was saved. The sight of the other is lost. Examination showed
+that the disease was confined to the eyes. By a careful bit of medical
+detective work, the physician and the principal of the high school determined
+that the infection came from the use of a bath-towel in the house of a
+fellow-pupil where the patient had spent two or three nights. This pupil was
+examined and found to have a fully developed case, which he had concealed, in
+fear of disgrace. Consequently, the poison is now so deep-seated in him that it
+may be years before he is cured. He made a confession implicating a girl in the
+class above him. A rigid investigation followed which brought the other cases
+to light.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall take Julia out of that school at once,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde,
+half-crying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; controverted the Health Master gently. &ldquo;I
+shouldn&rsquo;t do that. In the complex life of a city like this, it is
+impossible to shelter a girl completely and permanently. Better armor her with
+knowledge. Besides, the danger in the school, being discovered, is practically
+over now. In time, and using this experience as a lever with the school
+authorities, we hope to get a course of lectures on hygiene established,
+including simple sex-instruction. Meantime this must be carried on by the
+mothers and fathers.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what am I to say to Julia?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is what I am going to tell you,&rdquo; replied the Health Master,
+&ldquo;and look to you to pass on the truth in terms too plain to admit of any
+misunderstanding. First, does she know what womanhood and motherhood
+mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not yet, I think. She seems so young. And it&rsquo;s so hard to speak of
+those things. But I thought I would try to explain to her some day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some day? At once! How can you think her too young? She has already
+undergone the vital change from childhood to womanhood, and without so much as
+a word of warning or reassurance or explanation as to what it means.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not quite without,&rdquo; put in Grandma Sharpless quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good!&rdquo; approved the Health Master. &ldquo;But be sure that the
+explanation is thorough. Tell her the significance of sex and its relation to
+reproduction and life. If you don&rsquo;t, be sure that others will. And their
+version may well be in terms which would make a mother shudder to hear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who would tell her?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Her playmates. Do you think that girls don&rsquo;t talk of the mysteries
+as much as boys? If so, you&rsquo;re sadly in error. The first essential is
+that she should understand truly and wisely what it means to be a woman. That
+is fundamental. And now for the matter of venereal disease. I am going to lay
+certain facts before you all, and you can hand on to the children such
+modifications as you deem best.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;First, gonorrhoea, because it is the worse of the two. That is not the
+accepted notion, I know: but the leading specialists one by one have come
+around to the view, that, by and large, it does more damage to humanity than
+the more greatly dreaded syphilis. For one thing, it is much more widespread.
+While there are no accurate statistics covering the field in general, it is
+fairly certain that forty per cent of all men over thirty-five in our larger
+cities have had the disease at some time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That doesn&rsquo;t seem possible,&rdquo; broke in Mr. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not to you, because you married early, and your associations have been
+largely with family, home-loving men. But ask any one of the traveling salesmen
+in your factory his view. Your traveling man is the Ulysses of modern life,
+&lsquo;knowing cities and the hearts of men.&rsquo; I think that you&rsquo;ll
+find that compared with the &lsquo;commercial&rsquo; view, my forty per cent is
+optimistic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it is easily curable, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Clyde,
+insensibly yielding to the Health Master&rsquo;s matter-of-fact tone, and
+finding, almost insensibly, that her interest in the hygienic problem had
+overcome her shamed reluctance to speak of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Often in the early stages. But it is very uncertain. And once firmly
+fixed on the victim, it is one of the most obstinate and treacherous of
+diseases. It may lie dormant for months or even years, deceiving its victim
+into thinking himself wholly cured, only to break out again in full
+conflagration, without warning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is the history of many ruined marriages. Only by the most searching
+tests can a physician make certain that the infection is stamped out. Probably
+no disease receives, on the average, such harmful treatment by those who are
+appealed to to cure it. The reason for this is that the young man with his
+first &lsquo;dose&rsquo;&mdash;that loathsome, light term of
+description!&mdash;is ashamed to go to his family physician, and so takes
+worthless patent medicines or falls into the hands of some &lsquo;Men&rsquo;s
+Specialist&rsquo; who advertises a &lsquo;sure cure&rsquo; in the papers. These
+charlatans make their money, not by skillful and scientific treatment, of which
+they know nothing, nor by seeking to effect a cure, but by actually nourishing
+the flame of the disease, so as to keep the patient under their care as long as
+possible, all the time building up fat fees for themselves. If they were able,
+as they claim, to stop the infection in a few days at a small fee, they
+couldn&rsquo;t make money enough to pay for the scoundrelly lies which
+constitute their advertisements. While they are collecting their long-extended
+payments from the victim, the infection is spreading and extending its roots
+more and more deeply, until the unfortunate may be ruined for life, or even
+actually killed by the ravages of the malignant germs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t suppose that it was ever fatal,&rdquo; said Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes. I&rsquo;ve seen deaths in hospitals, of the most
+agonizing&rsquo; kind. But it is by virtue of its byproducts, so to speak, that
+gonorrhoea is most injurious and is really more baneful to the race than
+syphilis. The organism which causes it is in a high degree destructive to the
+eyes. Newborn infants are very frequently infected in this way by gonorrhoeal
+mothers. Probably a quarter of all permanent blindness in this country is
+caused by gonorrhoea. The effect of the disease upon women is disastrous. Half
+of all abdominal operations on married women, excluding appendicitis, are the
+results of gonorrhoeal infection from their husbands. A large proportion of
+sterility arises from this cause. A large proportion of the wives of men in
+whom the infection has not been wholly eradicated pay the penalty in
+permanently undermined health. And yet the superstition endures that
+&lsquo;it&rsquo;s no worse than a bad cold.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is no such superstition about syphilis, at least,&rdquo; remarked
+Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. The very name is a portent of terror, and it is well that it should
+be so. The consequence is that the man who finds himself afflicted takes no
+chances, as a rule. He goes straight to the best physician he can find, and
+obeys orders under terror of his life. Thus and thus only, he often is cured.
+Terrible as syphilis is, there is this redeeming feature: we can tell pretty
+accurately when the organism which causes it is eliminated. Years after the
+disease itself is cured, however, the victim may be stricken down by the most
+terrible form of paralysis, resulting from it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t the Ehrlich treatment regarded as a sure cure?&rdquo; asked
+Mrs. Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No cure is sure. Salvarsan, skillfully administered, is as near a
+specific as any known form of treatment. But we don&rsquo;t know whether it has
+any effect at all upon locomotor ataxia or general paralysis, the after
+effects, which may destroy the patient fifteen or twenty years after the actual
+disease has been cured. All locomotor ataxia and all general paralysis come
+from syphilis. And these diseases are not only incurable, but are as nearly a
+hell on earth as poor humanity is ever called upon to endure. Of course, you
+know that a man who is base enough to marry with syphilis dooms his children.
+Fortunately seventy-five or eighty per cent of the offspring of such marriages
+die in infancy or early childhood. The rest grow up deficient in mind or body
+or both. Upwards of ten per cent of all insanity is syphilitic in its origin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Both venereal diseases are terribly contagious. Innocence is no
+protection. Syphilis may be contracted from a drinking-cup or eating-utensil,
+or from the lips of an infected person having an open sore on the mouth.
+Gonorrhoea is spread by towels, by bathtubs, or from contaminated toilets. No
+person, however careful, is immune from either of the &lsquo;red
+plagues.&rsquo; And yet the public is just beginning to be educated to the
+peril.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why wouldn&rsquo;t that be a good topic for the Woman&rsquo;s Club to
+discuss?&rdquo; asked Grandma Sharpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Splendid!&rdquo; said Dr. Strong. &ldquo;That is, if they would allow
+you to talk about it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Allow</i> me!&rdquo; The old lady&rsquo;s firm chin tilted up
+sharply. &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s going to put the ban of silence on me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nobody, I dare say, if you make up your mind to speak,&rdquo; replied
+Dr. Strong, smiling. &ldquo;But some will probably try. Would you believe that,
+only a short time since, a professor of hygiene in one of our leading
+universities had to abandon a course of lectures to the students because the
+wives of the faculty and trustees objected to his including venereal diseases
+in his course? And a well-known lecturer, who had been invited to speak on
+health protection before a list of colleges, suffered the indignity of having
+the invitation withdrawn because he insisted that he could not cover the ground
+without warning his hearers against the twin pestilences of vice.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are the colleges so greatly in need of that sort of warning?&rdquo;
+asked Mrs. Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Subsequent records obtained from some of the protesting institutions
+showed that one third of the students had at some time been infected.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad you&rsquo;ve told my boy,&rdquo; said Mrs. Clyde, rising.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll talk to my girls.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I to the women,&rdquo; said Mrs. Sharpless. &ldquo;Then I&rsquo;d
+better make a list, for both of you, of the literature on the subject which you
+will find useful,&rdquo; said the Health Master. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll give it to
+you later.&rdquo;<a href="#fn4" name="fnref4" id="fnref4"><sup>[4]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="fn4" id="fn4"></a> <a href="#fnref4">[4]</a>
+The list of publications on the sex problem and venereal disease recommended
+by the Health Master to the Clyde family was as follows:&mdash;
+
+Published by the California Social Hygiene Society, Room 256, U.S. Custom
+House, San Francisco, Calif.: The Four Sex Lies, When and How to Tell the
+Children, A Plain Talk with Girls about their Health and Physical Development.
+Published by the Detroit Society for Sex Hygiene, Wayne Co. Medical Society
+Building, Detroit, Mich.: To the Girl who does not Know, A Plain Talk with
+Boys. Published by the Chicago Society of Social Hygiene, 305 Reliance
+Building, Chicago, Ill: Self Protection, Family Protection, Community
+Protection. Published by the Maryland Society for Social Hygiene, 15 East
+Pleasant Street, Baltimore, Md.: The So- Called Sexual Necessity in Man, The
+Venereal Diseases. Published by the American Federation for Sex Hygiene, 105
+West 40th St., N.Y. City: List of Publications of the Constituent Societies,
+The Teaching of Sex Hygiene, Sex Instruction as a Phase of Social Education.
+Published by the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis: The Sex Problem,
+Health and the Hygiene of Sex.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time after the women had left, the two men sat silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Strong,&rdquo; said Mr. Clyde presently, &ldquo;who is Bartley
+Starr&rsquo;s physician?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Emery.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t he warn him not to marry?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He did. He positively forbade it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And Starr married that young girl in the face of that
+prohibition?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He thought he was cured. Dr. Emery couldn&rsquo;t say positively that he
+wasn&rsquo;t. He could only beg him to wait another year. Starr hadn&rsquo;t
+the courage&mdash;or the principle; he feared scandal if he postponed the
+wedding. So he disregarded the warning and now the scandal is upon him with
+tenfold weight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t there any law for such cases?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not in this state. Indiana requires that parties to a marriage swear to
+their freedom from venereal disease and certain other ailments. Other states
+have followed suit. Every state ought to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t Dr. Emery go to the girl&rsquo;s father, then?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because of our damnable law,&rdquo; returned the Health Master with a
+sudden and rare access of bitterness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean that the law forbids?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It holds the physician liable for any professional confidence
+violated.&rdquo; Dr. Strong rose and paced up and down the room, talking with
+repressed energy. &ldquo;Therein it follows medical ethics in its most
+conservative and baneful phase. The code of medical conduct provides that a
+physician is bound to keep secret all the private affairs of a patient, learned
+in the course of practice. One body, the American Institute of Homoeopathy, has
+wisely amended its code to except those cases where &lsquo;harm to others may
+result.&rsquo; That amendment was passed with particular reference to venereal
+disease.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What about contagious disease?&rdquo; asked Mr. Clyde.
+&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t the law require the physician to report diphtheria, for
+instance, and thus violate the patient&rsquo;s confidence?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly it does. All schools recognize that principle of protection to
+the public. Yet, in the case of syphilis or gonorrhoea, when the harm to the
+public health is far greater than from any &lsquo;reportable&rsquo; disease
+except tuberculosis, the physician must hold his peace, though he sees his
+patient pass out of his hands bearing fire and sword and poison to future
+generations. There&rsquo;s the Ban of Silence in its most diabolical
+form!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Clyde regarded his household physician keenly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never
+before seen you so stirred,&rdquo; he observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve reason to be stirred.&rdquo; The Health Master whirled
+suddenly upon his friend and employer. &ldquo;Clyde, you&rsquo;ve never
+questioned me as to my past.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you never wanted it cleared up?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve always been willing to take me on trust?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I appreciate it. But now I&rsquo;m going to tell you how I happened
+to come to you, a broken and ruined man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Think it over, Strong,&rdquo; advised Mr. Clyde. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t
+speak now. Not that it would make any difference to me. I know you. If you were
+to tell me that you had committed homicide, I&rsquo;d believe that it was a
+necessary and justifiable homicide.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Suicide, rather,&rdquo; returned the other with a mirthless laugh;
+&ldquo;professional suicide. I&rsquo;ll speak now, if you don&rsquo;t
+object.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go ahead, then, if it will ease your mind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a lawbreaker, Clyde. I did, years ago, what you thought Emery
+should have done. I deliberately violated the profession&rsquo;s Ban of
+Silence. The man was my patient, in the city where I had built up a good
+high-class practice. He had contracted gonorrhoea and I had treated him for a
+year. The infection seemed to be rooted out. But I knew the danger, and when he
+told me that he was engaged to be married, to a girl of my own set and a valued
+friend, I was horror-stricken. I pleaded, argued, and finally threatened. It
+was no use. He was the spoiled child of a wealthy family, impatient of any
+thwarting. One day the suspicions of the girl&rsquo;s mother were aroused. She
+came to me in deep distress. I told her the truth. The engagement was broken.
+The man did not bring suit against me, but his family used their financial and
+social power to persecute and finally drive me out of the city, a nervous
+wreck. That&rsquo;s my history.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You could have protected yourself by telling the true facts,&rdquo;
+suggested Clyde. .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes: but that would have been an unforgivable breach of confidence. The
+public had no right to the facts. The girl&rsquo;s family had.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then they should have come to your rescue with the truth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I bound them to secrecy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly Mr. Clyde rose, walked over, picked up the paper with the staring
+headlines, folded it, laid it on the table, and, in passing the physician, set
+a hand, as if by chance, upon his shoulder. From so undemonstrative a man the
+action meant much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So,&rdquo; he said with affectionate lightness, &ldquo;my Chinese
+physician had been fighting dragons before he ever came to us; worse monsters
+than he&rsquo;s been called upon to face, since. That was a splendid defeat,
+Strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A bitter one,&rdquo; said the Health Master; &ldquo;and by the same old
+Monster, in another manifestation that we&rsquo;ve been fighting here.
+We&rsquo;ve downed him now and again, you and I, Clyde. But he&rsquo;s never
+killed: only scotched. He&rsquo;s the universal ally of every ill that man
+hands on to man, and we&rsquo;ve only to recognize him under the thousand and
+one different forms he assumes to call him out to battle under his real
+name.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And that is?&rdquo; inquired Clyde.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ignorance,&rdquo; said the Health Master.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+<div style='display:block;margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HEALTH MASTER ***</div>
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