The washing of the air.
Did you ever think that the air every once in a while needs a washing? It does, just as much as you do and every thing else in the world. Even when it seems clean as you look up through it, there are some things in it that would be very bad for us if they remained there. They would produce disease in us. They would be injurious also to other animals, and even to plants. The air, therefore, must every now and then have a washing to purify it; and every time that it rains you can think of the air as taking a shower-bath for this purpose. You see, then, how true it is that water is the world’s cleanser. It washes every thing, even the air.
How plants drink.
But, besides being the world’s cleanser, water is the world’s drink. It is the drink of plants as well as of man and animals. The plants drink it from the ground by the mouths in their roots. A great part of the sap, as I have told you in Part I., is water.
Water in fever.
We use water so constantly as a drink that we do not think how good and refreshing it is. We think of this once in a while when we happen to be very thirsty. When one is parched with fever, he thinks of cold water as the very best thing on the earth; and when he is asleep, he dreams of the well or spring from which he drank so often in his childhood. A lady who was sick with yellow fever, far away from home, in her delirium talked continually about a pump that was behind a house she had long lived in, some time before this, and kept calling for water from that pump.
Sea water.
The salt water of the sea, you know, is not fit for drinking. And you have heard of persons in a shipwreck escaping in a boat from a sinking ship, and then living almost without food and water for many days. How careful are they not to waste any of the water which they happen to have! Each drinks but little, though they are suffering greatly with thirst. And when it is all gone, they would give any thing for the smallest draught of fresh water. So dreadful is the suffering from thirst that water is almost the only thing which they think of. They wish that it would rain, so that they might catch some water. There is water all around them, but it seems to mock them with its briny waves. It is not the water which they want; they know that it would do no good to drink it.
Feeling of the shipwrecked man about water.
One who had been in a boat for some days without water said that it seemed to him always after as if it was wrong to waste pure fresh water, and he never could use it as freely as he did before his shipwreck. How thankful should we be that God has given it to us so abundantly that we can commonly use it without stint or measure. It is one of his most precious gifts, and yet it is so common that, when we want to speak of any thing as being very free and abundant, we say that it is as free as water.