THE EATING ROOM
OTHER While waiting for the door to open to let the food pass from the stomach kitchen, let me tell you that the walls of the kitchen are covered with hundreds of little mouths; for you must remember this room is like no other that was ever made. These tiny mouths keep drinking the food which is digested, and it is taken into the blood through the tiny blood-vessels which cover the stomach.
At last comes the food which could not pass the door again, and this time it passes through into a long, narrow room, with walls quite like those of the kitchen. Sometimes a plum pit gets into the kitchen; the cook is unable to use it, and when it goes up to the door, it closes quickly, so it must stay where it is. Sometime after the door will open and let it through.
Helen: That is the same as though you should tell me I should not do a thing, and then, because I teased or coaxed, you should let me do what you had before said I should not.
Mother: Yes, that is the way with this door-keeper. But sometimes the door closes very tightly, and then there is trouble, for that which can not get through the second door must find its way back through the first. We should be very careful about swallowing large seeds of fruit, buttons, or anything that is hard and can not be digested. People are sometimes made very ill in this way. But now we will learn what is done in the second room.
Perhaps it might be called the “serving room;” for it is here the food is made ready for the eating room. Here we find two assistant cooks. The name of one is Pan-cre-at´ic Juice, and the other is called Bile. Each one has a room of his own. Pan-cre-at´ic Juice has his home in a room back of the kitchen, which is called the pancreas. Bile lives in the largest room in the body-house, which is called the liver.
The liver might be called a factory; for it has hundreds of little rooms in which Bile is made. It has a waiting room, called the gall, where Bile stays when he is not wanted. This tiny room is close to the liver, and from that Bile goes to the serving room. On the way he meets Pan-cre-at´ic Juice, and they go on to their work together.
Bile, like some other servants, is hard to please, and he will do only one kind of work. It is the duty of these cooks to finish up the work that Gastric Juice has begun. Bile will work with hardly anything but fats, and it is his work to make them into such tiny drops that they can be used in the body. He must also furnish part of the fuel to keep the body warm. He sometimes gets lazy or angry if the master of the house gives him too much work, or if he sends too much fat or sugar into the serving room. The master of the house tells his friends he is “bilious,” which means that Bile is out of temper and wants less hard work and more rest.
Percy: Is Pan-cre-at´ic Juice so particular as Bile?