“He doesn’t eat,” said Tommy, “and he upset his water dish when I tried to make him drink. I went up on the hill to get him the best grass I could find, but it’s no use; he must be sick.”
“Let me see that grass,” said the teacher. “I thought so,” she laughed, when Tommy took her to the fawn’s fodder corner; “you got a lot of wormwood leaves mixed up with the grass, and one of the leaves got in that water dish.”
Tommy stared. “Oh! maybe that’s the reason he upset his water,” he burst out; “but I had no idea that would make any difference. What makes him so very particular about a few leaves, I wonder?”
“You will know if you taste them,” said the teacher; “and maybe your fawn wanted to get even with you for teaching him to jump through a hoop.”
“Why, he seems to like that,” laughed Tommy.
“That’s just what I mean,” said the teacher; “he felt so much obliged to you and wanted to pay you back—by teaching you a good lesson. An animal, you see, won’t touch any bad-tasting food if it is in good health, and if you give it the wrong kind of drink it doesn’t mind its thirst, but waits till it gets something better. And that’s an answer to the question you asked me a few weeks ago, when you wanted to know how people could help getting fond of drinks that make them drunk and sick. They should let such stuff alone altogether, if they find out it does not taste right at first. You found out something about that yourself, didn’t you?”
“About what—the ugly taste of bad drinks, you mean?”
“Yes; don’t you remember what you told me about that hotel where you got thirsty, and tried a glass of something you thought was lemonade, and found it was beer?”
“O, yes! I remember,” laughed Tommy; “I never tasted anything worse in my life. I don’t see how in the world people can get fond of such stuff.”
“That’s just it,” said the teacher; “they should do as your little deer did this afternoon, and never meddle with a drink that tastes very bad the first time they try it, unless they should be sick and need a bitter medicine for particular purposes. If a healthy person should try to drink big glasses full of ugly medicine just for fun every day he would soon be sick, and few medicines taste as bad as some of the drinks so many people get drunk on.”