Home dissertations

This is serious talk, but it isn't more serious than the facts call for. Doctors who spend their lives looking into these things, tell us that every year, out of a certain number in town or country, beside the old and infirm, those who inherit disease or die of accident, twenty thousand die needlessly of illness from bad air and bad food. They are not all poor folks who live in squalid, fever-stricken alleys and must buy the refuse of the markets to eat at all. The most luxurious homes suffer equally with the poor, and no house is safe until the skeleton has been hunted out and laid permanently by daily, intelligent care. Housekeeping is not a mere matter of comfort and respectability, and every woman and girl must learn their responsibilities ; for the health, strength and life of the family is in their hands. The food people eat three times a day, the water they drink, the air they breathe, constantly have more to do with their happiness and success than money or talents, and more to do with their long life than any other care and medicine. Pure water is growing scarcer to find as the country is older and more closely settled. For water may look clear as mountain brooks and taste sweet as the rill from a glacier, yet be very unsafe to use. One thing you may be sure of, that though water which is bright and sparkling may be unsafe to drink, water which isn't clear, and looks and tastes unpleasant, is sure to be dangerous. What are you going to do about it ? Use filtered water for drinking and cooking entirely. You can buy a filter for five dollars, and you will find it the best use you can make of the money. Let alone health and safety, in a week after using it you will begin to wonder why the meat and vegetables taste so much better, and remark how much better tea and coffee this seems to be than the last you had, and after a little you will discover it is owing to the filtered water. Everything cooked in pure water has a finer taste, and tea and coffee are not the same things made with it. But a filter wants care ; for the sponge which strains the worst impurities out of the water, should be washed and dried in the sun, or in the oven every day, or it soon grows foul. The best way is to have two sets of sponge, and let one air all day while the other is in use. Then the packing of sand and charcoal in time is clogged with impurities which begin to wash back into the water, and the sand has to be washed, sunned and dried and the charcoal burnt over in a red-hot retort to consume the waste with which it is loaded. Be sure to get one of the new filters with two sets of strainers, which can be unscrewed as easily as you take the mold out of an ice-cream freezer, so that one set can be cleansed while the other is at work. To make sure of pure water, change the packing once in three months. If you cannot have a filter, and are not certain of the safety of the water, boil it, and let it cool in a porous earthen jar in the shade and wind. Boiling frees it from animalcula or vegetable matter, and softens it, and emigrants whose neighbors were sickening all around them from bad water of ponds and marshy springs, have kept in - perfect health by drinking no water which had not first been boiled.