Amy: How may we know when the starch in bread or biscuit is changed to sugar?
Mother: If you let the teeth chew your food a long time, until it becomes well mixed with saliva, you will find that it tastes sweet. This is because the starch has become sugar, though you must not think this kind of sugar is as sweet as the sugar which you buy.
Helen: If the walls in this room moisten the food, why should we drink while eating?
Mother: It is not best to drink much when you eat, and not at all unless your food is very dry. The glands furnish from one to three pints of saliva a day. If you drink much, the saliva is not well mixed with the food, and it is hurried down to the kitchen before the servants have finished their work. This makes extra work for the cook downstairs.
OUR KITCHEN
OUR KITCHEN
OTHER We will now let Bread proceed with its story. Remember I am telling you what it would say if it could talk. Now listen. While I was in the passage and the servants were making me ready to go to the kitchen, I saw a small pink curtain in the back end of the room, and I wondered what was behind it. I soon found out. After the tongue had pulled and pushed me around and rolled me over as long as he wished, he pushed me back toward the curtain, and I found myself in a room with no floor. I saw a passage which opens into the nose, but as soon as I came in sight, a curtain fell back and closed it, so I knew I was not wanted there. Then I saw another door, which I afterward learned led to the bath-room in the lungs, but as I was about to go in, a little trap door closed tightly, and so I found that was not the way to the kitchen. There was still another passage, for this room seemed to be filled with doors, even though it was so small, but that led to the ear. I began to think I was not wanted at all, for every door I came to was shut in my face, as it were.
Helen: I don’t wonder Bread didn’t know which way to go, do you, mother? and it was a stranger in the house, too.