No one answered, and Etta said:—
"Boys think it manly to smoke, but it isn't. It's very dirty and very unhealthy. I heard of a little boy only twelve years old, who died very suddenly, and when the doctors examined him after his death they found the coats of his stomach all eaten up with tobacco, and yet he had only smoked cigarettes. Cigarettes are made of a little tobacco, a great deal of cabbage-leaves, old leather, and dirty paper, with snuff and ginger and strychnine, a deadly poison, to flavor them. The oil of tobacco itself is rank poison. Two or three drops of it put on the tongue of a dog or a cat will kill it in a few minutes. Besides, the smell of tobacco lingering in a boy's clothes or breath is very foul and disgusting. And worse than all, the effect of smoking is to create a thirst which pure, cool water does not satisfy, and those who begin by smoking or chewing tobacco are very likely to end by drinking beer and whiskey, and finally becoming drunkards."
Then questions to be answered at the next meeting were called for, and the following were given:—
1. Is it wrong to wear pretty clothes?
2. Why shouldn't people be selfish?
3. Is it swearing to say "good gracious!" and "mercy on us!"?
Miss Etta did not answer these, but wrote them down in her note-book, saying she would look up the subjects by the next meeting, and she wanted the members of the "Do Good Society" all to do the same, and then they could compare their answers.
The last part of the programme to-day was the reading of a story by the president. She half-read and half-told about a young man named Harry Wadsworth, who, although he was only a clerk in a railroad company, managed, by giving all his spare time and thought, to do so many kind things for other people, that when he died they all set about to honor his memory by each doing kind things for others, and others again followed their example, till thousands of people were all busy in hundreds of different places, doing just as much as they could to help other people and to discountenance everything evil, and to throw their influence on the side of everything good.
Harry Wadsworth had four mottoes, which they all adopted. They were:—
"Look out and not in.
"Look forward and not back.
"Look up and not down.
"Lend a hand."