Next in number to the horse come the dog and cat. These creatures are not healthy and not happy in a city. They cannot be kept there without injury to them; and the injury is more than revenged upon their keepers. The dog furnishes his quota of deaths from hydrophobia, as well as plain "assault and battery;" he defiles our sidewalks, and the fruits and vegetables exposed upon our sidewalks; he keeps us awake by his forlorn howling; he has diseases of his own which we may receive from him; and he has fleas.
The flea, as well as the fly, is a valiant and industrious purveyor of disease. From beast to beast they hop, carrying their toxic germs with them: and the dog, displeased with his persecutors, scratches them off upon our carpets.
The same applies to cats. A cat in the country is clean and safe; a cat in the city is neither—if it has any freedom. If a young kitten, cleansed and flealess, were reared in a lofty apartment, it would be clean, doubtless; but the usual cat is free on intersecting fences; and in the contact of warfare, or of gentler feelings, the flea is free to travel and exchange.
The rat and mouse come under the same condemnation; they have fleas. They make dirt. They tend to increase and maintain our insect pests and terrors. They penetrate to all unsavory places. They acquire disease themselves, or carry the germs of it in their blood or on their fur. Their parasites gather them up and give them to us. The rats will leave a sinking ship, the fleas will leave a sinking rat, and among their millions some of them come to us.
When we build cities clean and tight from basement to roof,—all concrete, brick, stone, metal, and plaster; when the holes for pipes of all sorts are scaled as they enter the home; when the kitchen is eliminated by 90 per cent. and replaced by the food laboratories; when no animal but man is allowed within city limits—and he is taught to keep clean; we can then compare, for antiseptic cleanliness with a fine hospital—and have few hospitals to compare with!
WHAT DIANTHA DID
XI.
THE POWER OF THE SCREW.
Your car is too big for one person to stir—
Your chauffeur is a little man, too;
Yet he lifts that machine, does the little chauffeur,
By the power of a gentle jackscrew.
Diantha worked.