Elmer: The furnace would be choked up so the fire would go out, or else it would burn very slowly.
Mother: That is just what takes place in this wonderful sugar factory. Since the liver makes sugar out of starch which is found in our foods, if we swallow a big piece of cake, a lot of jam, some syrup, and some candy, such treatment makes the liver cross. When all those little, living kettles are full of sugar already, how can they hold any more?
Percy: How does the liver show it is cross, mother?
“He has a sorry time.”
Mother: It goes to work to punish the master of the house. It gives him a nasty taste in his mouth, and he feels so sick that he thinks he wants nothing to eat. Perhaps the liver sends word to the stomach that it has “struck work,” and it will have nothing to do with such messes as are sent it to work over. Then the stomach, not knowing what else to do, sends all there is in it back upstairs out through the passage, and the master of the house tells his friends who come to visit him, that he is “bilious,” or that he has a “bilious attack,” and you may be sure he has a sorry time. There may be a dreadful aching up in the cupola; perhaps there is pain all over the house, all because the right kind of food and the right amount were not sent in to build up the body. The same thing is likely to happen if the master of the house sends a lot of pastry, fat meat, and fried or greasy foods into the kitchen. Bile is the one to care for them all, and he will bear such treatment awhile without complaining; but when once his temper is up, he will not be kind to anything the master may send him. Like other good servants, he makes a bad master. Perhaps he will try to do some work in a lazy sort of way; but he keeps grumbling all the time, till he makes the other servants as cross as himself.
Percy: I think I will try to keep Bile good-natured, and send the right things and the right amount down to the sugar factory.
Mother: You may be sure you will not be happy unless you do; for, though strange, yet ’tis true that when things go wrong in the stomach and liver, it makes the master of the house very cross and unhappy.
Not long ago I visited a lady who has a pleasant home and all she could wish to make her comfortable. I found her face gloomy, and she was crying. She said she was not well; that a skin disease was troubling her; that her children did not do right; and that she was very miserable.
“I think it is my liver,” she added; “for when my blood is right and my liver works well I am not troubled this way.”