Sometimes when you get up in the morning you feel happy and rested and good-natured. When your shoe string breaks you laugh, and when a button comes off you think it quite a joke. Then perhaps the very next day everything goes wrong from morning until night; it is hard to be good on such days, and harder yet to be cheerful.

Of course the reason is not always the same, though you will often find that you slept in pure air the first night and in impure air the second night. In fact, that is always enough to make a great difference in our feelings the next day. In pure air our lungs get more oxygen and we sleep well; if we sleep well we are rested, and when we are rested, it is the easiest thing in the world to be kind and cheerful. On the other hand, when we are not rested we can hardly help feeling cross.

The same is true about learning our lessons and reciting them well, though even teachers forget this sometimes.

I can think of two schoolrooms. In the first the children look unhappy; their eyes are dull and their cheeks are flushed, though some of them have pale faces instead. Only a few sit p straight, while none of them look as if they enjoyed studying. One class is reciting a spelling lesson, and I notice that several of the children miss the easiest words. In this room the air is wretched. I look around and cannot see any place for fresh air to enter.

The second room is of the same size, and although it holds the same number of children, still everything here is different. Both the girls and the boys look as if they enjoyed studying, most of them are sitting up straight, their eyes are bright, they do not often miss the easy words, and nobody looks cross. As might be expected, enough fresh air is coming into the room all the time to keep it fresh and pure.

If you should put very many dogs or other living creatures into a room, and then shut every door and window, the animals would use up the air as fast as children do and if they could get no more, they would die as those men died in the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Last summer a ten-year-old friend of mine caught a mouse by the tail and put it under a tumbler. She was afraid it would not get air enough, so she slipped a pencil under one edge of the glass to hold it up and let the air get in. She was so careful of the health of the mouse that it lived merrily, until one day the glass tipped over and it ran away.

Turn now to grass and trees. Notice the green leaves as they flutter in the sunshine. You would not suspect it, but even while you watch them they are at work. Each separate one is indeed taking carbon dioxide from the air and is uniting it with water to make food for itself; and later the food becomes part of the plant. Also, while these changes go on, the plant gives off some of the oxygen which is freed from the carbon dioxide.

Now this part of plant life goes on only in the light. But continually, by night as well as by day, plants live by what they are able to do with oxygen and carbon dioxide. The truth is that the growth of every plant is a complex and wonderful affair; for, whether they are in the sunshine or in total darkness, they depend both on oxygen and on carbon dioxide for their continued existence.

Light a small candle, set over it a glass jar that fits down flat on the table, and watch the flame. At first it will burn as brightly as ever; then it will grow more and more dim, until at last it will go out entirely. If you should now put a mouse or bird into the jar, it would die at once, because the oxygen in the jar has been used up by the candle.

This is not all. Men have tried experiments with gas jets, and they find that when one of them is burning it uses up more oxygen than three people that is, it will use up the air three times as fast as you or I do.

The next time you are in a lecture hall or a church in the evening, count the gas jets that are lighted. If there are one hundred of them, be sure to tell yourself that they are using up the oxygen as fast as if there were three hundred more people present.

This is bad enough, but it is worse yet to have a gas jet open when the gas is not lighted, for nothing spoils the air faster. People who do not know the danger sometimes make the terrible mistake of blowing the gas out instead of turning it off when they go to bed.

In December, 1903, in San Francisco, during one night, six people in six different houses died because the gas escaped into their rooms. They died because they breathed this gas instead of oxygen.

If you ever notice the odor of gas in a room, be sure to find out where it comes from and turn the gas off. In some cities the gas has no odor, and this makes it more dangerous.

Besides the odor of gas, other bad smells almost always show that something is spoiling the air.

Sometimes these unpleasant smells come from garbage cans and wagons. Sometimes they stream out of an unclean cellar or a basement, or from soiled rags tucked away somewhere, or from food or meat that is spoiling. Such things should never be left where they can change the air.

In some cities more people die in one part than in another, and often the whole trouble comes from impure air. Those who breathe it are not as strong as they would be if they breathed only pure air, and on this account it is easy for them to become ill. Worse yet, when such people are once ill, if they have to keep on breathing the impure air, they are far more likely to die than if they were breathing pure air.

Let us do all we can to breathe pure air every day, so that we may feel well and be well, and learn our lessons with as little trouble as possible.

Albert S. Lyons

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