Percy: Whew! I should think this was a powerful little force-pump, sure.
Mother: But what would you think of a man who made his heart beat six thousand times more in twenty-four hours, which means that it must lift seven tons more than it should?
Amy: But I thought the heart kept working of itself. Then how could any one make it do more?
Mother: By taking only two ounces of alcohol in a day the heart would be overworked as I have said. It would not only have its regular work to do, but it would do that amount extra to throw out the poison it finds in the blood; for it knows it is an enemy. See, I have taken the pendulum off the clock for a minute. Now what has happened?
Elmer: It ticks much faster, and will soon run down.
Mother: It is much the same way with the heart of a person who takes drink with alcohol in it. His heart beats faster; his face gets red, and he can think and talk fast. It is like an engineer putting on steam and sending his train at lightning speed down a steep grade. If nothing worse happens, he will find when he comes where the track is up-grade that his power is gone and he has wasted his steam. The clock runs fast with the pendulum off, but it soon “runs down,” we say, and it is the same with the boy or the man who drinks. There are nerves which act on the heart as brakes do on the train. They keep it steadily at work and do not let it beat too fast. There is another way that alcohol hurts the heart.
Helen: Please tell us how.
Mother: It changes the strong muscle walls into fat. The heart grows larger than it should be, and becomes so weak that it can not send the blood over the body as it should. The man has hard work to breathe. He gets the dropsy and other ailments, and perhaps dies of “heart failure.”
Percy: Does tobacco affect the heart, mother?
Mother: Yes; it makes its beat unsteady, and sometimes causes an illness which doctors call “tobacco heart.” It also makes it work harder than it ought.