When the wind blows, clouds of dust whirl down the street, and it seems as if you could hardly draw your breath.

You turn your head away, press your lips together, and try not to breathe much, even through your nose yet, in spite of all that, so much dust is in your mouth that you almost taste it, and so much is in your eyes that they ache and grow red. Tears run down your cheeks even though you are not crying. You cough and use your handkerchief, and after you reach home you may feel as if you had caught a hard cold.

There is reason for this, for many kinds of dust have edges and corners and rough sides. A speck of coal dust from the engine really scratches the delicate inside skin of the eye with its corners, though the hands and face cannot feel them. As for the lungs, they are so much more delicate that even ordinary dust in an ordinary home is bad for them.

If you want to know whether or not there is dust in the air you are breathing, look at a band of sunshine as it streams in through the window. In almost every room, in this sunshine, you will see hundreds and thousands of dust-specks that look like tiny air ships floating up and down on the sunbeam,—fairy ships of shining gold.

Now pick up a corner of the rug and shake it, or draw a heavy curtain back and forth on its pole, and look at the band of sunshine again. Suddenly the little fleet is ten thousand times as big. Thousands and thousands of those air ships are crowding each other and racing on the stream of sunlight. It is a beautiful sight, although, of course, it is not good for any pair of lungs to inhale such air as that. We must remember that dust is just as thick everywhere else in the room as it is in the sunshine.

After all, however, the worst thing about dust is the microbes that are in it; and it is easy to see that they are always thickest where the dust is thickest, for instance, in the streets of a city. People who know this are the ones who take the greatest pains to keep dust and microbes out of their lungs and out of their homes.

They know that any wind strong enough to whirl the least dust along is quite strong enough to carry whole armies of microbes from one place to another.

These microbes get into the air from the skins of people who have skin diseases; they are blown by millions from every heap of dry rubbish that you see, from garbage cans and sewers, from dead animals and soiled clothes. In fact, they multiply fastest in unclean places. Study your own home town. Is the neighborhood clean?

Microbes that give consumption are thick in the saliva of men and women who have that disease. These people are often careless. They spit on the street, where the saliva dries after a while; passers-by step on it and crush it; ladies brush it around with their skirts; it gets into the air; the wind blows it through our streets into our homes and our schoolhouses; it settles in our carpets and our curtains; we breathe it into our lungs, and if we are not very healthy the microbes stay there and end by giving us the disease itself.

This is such a dreadful prospect that some cities have made laws against spitting in public places. Some people still do it, however, and that is why we should not breathe the dust in the street, and why we should banish it from our schoolrooms and our homes.

Nevertheless, in spite of all we can do, it will get in sometimes; then comes the important question of dusting. Some people have a queer way of doing it. I have seen them go round switching things with a feather duster. The dust flies up at once and floats in the sunbeam, while the woman herself breathes it until it settles down again. If the windows are open some of it gets out of doors; otherwise it stays here and there in the room. It is scattered, that is all.

A soft, damp, dusting cloth is better than a feather duster; but if this is likely to injure anything, use a dry cloth and shake it out of the window very often.

In a certain school in Worcester, Massachusetts, there is what they call the "Health Brigade." Here the children take turns in wearing the uniforms and in doing the dusting. They wait eagerly for their turn to come around, and they keep the rooms so clean with their damp dusting cloths, that in 1902, when they did their work, fewer children were ill than ever before since the beginning of the school.

Damp dusters and school children did better work in that school building than feather dusters and janitors.

Albert S. Lyons

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