When you feel cold, take exercise, if possible. This will make the hot blood flow all through your body and warm it. If you can not, you should put on more clothes, go to a warm room, in some way get warm and keep warm, or the cold will make you sick.
TAKING COLD.
If your skin is chilled, the tiny mouths of the perspiration tubes are sometimes closed and can not throw out the waste matter. Then, if one part fails to do its work, other parts must suffer. Perhaps the inside skin becomes inflamed, or the throat and lungs, and you have a cold, or a cough.
ALCOHOL AND COLD.
People used to think that nothing would warm one so well on a cold day, as a glass of whiskey, or other alcoholic drink.
It is true that, if a person drinks a little alcohol, he will feel a burning in the throat, and presently a glowing heat on the skin.
The alcohol has made the hot blood rush into the tiny tubes near the skin, and he thinks it has warmed him.
But if all this heat comes to the skin, the cold air has a chance to carry away more than usual. In a very little time, the drinker will be colder than before. Perhaps he will not know it; for the cheating alcohol will have deadened his nerves so that they send no message to the brain. Then he may not have sense enough to put on more clothing and may freeze. He may even, if it is very cold, freeze to death.
People, who have not been drinking alcohol are sometimes frozen; but they would have frozen much quicker if they had drunk it.
Horse-car drivers and omnibus drivers have a hard time on a cold winter day. They are often cheated into thinking that alcohol will keep them warm; but doctors have learned that it is the water-drinkers who hold out best against the cold. Alcohol can not really keep a person warm.