s, such as arsenic or kerosene. This will kill the
maggots. If we keep every kind of waste and scraps from the house, and
all the manure from the barn and the pig-pen and the hen-house
carefully cleaned up, or sprinkled with some poison, we shall get rid
of flies entirely and never need to use screens at the doors and
windows. Until we do this, it is best to put screens at the doors and
windows in the summer time, and particularly to screen carefully any
place where food is kept or cooked; for we know that a great many
cases of typhoid and of other diseases of the stomach and bowels, such
as _summer sickness_, or summer _diarrhea_, and _cholera morbus_, are
carried to our food by the dirty feet of flies.

Many of the germs of "catching" diseases--most of them, in fact--are
carried in the air, in scales that have rubbed off the skin of the
persons sick with them, or in spray that they have coughed into the
air, or in saliva that they have spit upon the floor.

There is one sickness of this kind that I ought to tell you about,
because it kills so many thousand people here in our own country every
year. We sometimes call it the "Great White Plague." Its common name
is _consumption_, and the doctors call it _tuberculosis_. I dare say
you have heard of it and wondered what it meant.

A few years ago people thought it could not be cured. They thought
that children had it because their parents had had it before them. But
now, the cheering thing about it is that we have found that Mother
Nature herself can cure it with fresh air and sunshine and wholesome
food. We have found, too, that people catch it from others who are
sick with it, and need not have it just because their parents did.

[Illustration: FRESH AIR AND SUNLIGHT ARE GOOD DOCTORS]

This means, then, that thousands of people who have it need not die,
but can be cured simply by living and sleeping out of doors and eating
plenty of milk, eggs, and meat, nuts and fruit. There are camps for
them in almost every state in the Union now. The fresh air gives them
such a big appetite that they can eat more than most healthy people,
and they soon get strong and well.

If all the people who now have consumption were taken out into the
country and cured, there would be no one left for the rest of us to
catch it from, and the disease would soon die. Some day our Boards of
Health will decide to do this, and then consumption will become as
rare as smallpox is now, and wil