Elmer: It must be that good air is needed more than good food.
Mother: Why, yes; for while we need to eat only two or three times a day, we must take in air more than twenty-five thousand times. If we could not breathe for six or seven minutes, we would die, while we could live without food quite a number of days. How thankful we ought to be for pure, fresh air! And there is so much of it that we can have it without money and without price.
Helen: Which is best, to breathe through the nose or the mouth?
Mother: Through the nose; for that was made for the air to pass through. Serious sickness of the throat and lungs is sometimes caused by breathing through the mouth. When the air goes this way, the person makes a very strange noise when asleep. The air seems to be trying to wake somebody up to shut the folding doors so it can go the right way. We call it snoring.
Percy: I should think when there are so many people and animals, and all must have air to breathe, that it would soon become unfit to use.
Mother: We live in an ocean of air, as fishes live in the sea. The winds sweep it round and round, and everything that grows helps to make it pure.
“As fishes live in the sea.”
Amy: How can that be?
Mother: It may be said that plants breathe, as well as people, only they need the poison gas we breathe out, and they give out the oxygen we need to breathe in. There is no danger but we can get all the air we need if we will let it into our rooms.