When you breathe well through your nose, you can smell and taste better, too. In fact, when your nose is clogged, you cannot smell at all.
How does this sense of smell help us? You say we can smell the flowers and the fresh air after the rain, and cookies baking, and all the things that we like so well. Yes, and these give us pleasure; but how about the bad smells? The bad smells are warnings. If there is a dead mouse or rat about, we smell it; and that leads us to look for it and take it away. We smell the dirt and get rid of it, and thus keep away sickness. When we walk into a room, if the air is bad we smell it at once and open a window or a door, and so save ourselves from being poisoned.
Some people hurt their noses by smoking tobacco. The inside skin of the nose is very delicate, and the smoke going back and forth through the nose and the throat keeps them from doing their work properly. It is very bad for little children even to smell tobacco smoke. It seems in some way to keep them from growing as they would in clear fresh air. What a silly habit smoking is! It does no one any good. It hurts not only the people who make the smoke, but the people who have to smell it. Most of the people who smoke tobacco have to learn to like it. It almost always makes them very sick when they first begin.
Sir Walter Raleigh, or the men he sent to America, first taught our great-great-great-grandfathers to smoke. His men bought tobacco of the Indians here and took it back to England; and Sir Walter himself learned to smoke and made smoking fashionable. The first time that Sir Walter’s servant saw him smoking, he thought his master was on fire; so what did he do but bring a big bucket of water and throw it all over him! I wish that that bucket of water had settled the matter, so that Sir Walter had stopped smoking and had never taught anyone else to smoke. If it had, think how much money might have been put to better use, for smoking is a very costly habit. And it is not only wasteful of money, but, worse still, of health; for it is the cause of a great deal of poor health and disease.
Remember that you want the air you breathe perfectly fresh and clean and not spoiled and poisoned by tobacco smoke.
VII. TALKING AND RECITING
When I was little and playing with my brothers, I did not always do what they wanted. So they’d sometimes say, “We’ll put him in Coventry, then he’ll do it.” They did not really put me anywhere. They simply would not speak to me or answer anything I said. It was just as if I were entirely alone. Of course it was a quick way to make me ready to take my part in the game again.
How do you think you would feel if you never, never could speak to anyone, and no one could speak to you? What a quiet world we’d have! Almost every day I meet a boy who can’t hear and can’t speak. How does he ask for things? He makes letters and spells words with his fingers, and his friends watch his fingers and read what he says. Is that the way you do? “No, indeed,” you say, “I talk.” “What do you talk with?” “I talk with my mouth.” Yes, that’s true enough; but if you did not use something besides your mouth, you’d never make a sound.
Where does the sound come from? Feel gently with your finger and thumb along the front of your neck. Do you find something harder than the rest of your throat? That is the large tube called your windpipe. Do you feel a ridge sticking out from this? Now sing or talk a little. You can feel the ridge move up and down, and the sound thrill in it. That is where the sound comes from. That is your voice-and-music box, or larynx.
You have seen the little red rubber balloons, haven’t you? You blow into them until they are big and round; and then, when you take your mouth away, out comes the air, making a squawking or whistling sound. Now, if you look closely at the mouthpiece, you see a tiny piece of rubber tied across it. The air rushing past this rubber is what makes your balloon sing.