burned or fed to pigs. The ashes and tin cans are carted
away, also, and used in making new land or filling up hollow places.

Besides taking away the dirt, cities are careful to get clear, pure
drinking water. They are very, very careful about this; and they
usually have the water tested often, because, as you have learned,
even water that looks perfectly pure may give people typhoid fever.
That is why, when you are out in the country, on a picnic perhaps, you
must not drink from the streams. They may receive the drainage from a
farmer's barnyard, or the sewage from some house.

The more we all learn about these things, the more careful will the
city be to protect her people. To be sure, most cities now have Boards
of Health who employ men and women to go about and see that the food
in the stores is clean--no flies, no dust, and no tobacco smoke on it.
They have laws, too, about keeping milk clean; and in New York alone
these laws have saved the lives of thousands of babies. And they have
laws about the care of streets and buildings and cars and parks and a
great many other things.

In all these things we have been talking about, I want you to be
thinking how you can help. For a city is made up of people--boys and
girls and men and women. The city is what its people make it; and
everyone must help, even the smallest children, no older than little
Claude.

The first and most important thing for you to do is to keep yourself
clean and tidy. And the next thing is for you to keep your back yard
as well as your front yard and the school yard and the street free
from papers and sticks and cans and old playthings. You can put away
your things when you are through playing; or, if you are making a
railroad or a town or a playhouse, you can leave it looking nice and
tidy. You can help chiefly by putting away your own things. You know
the old saying, "A workman is known by his chips"; and a good workman
always works in an orderly way.

When you eat apples or bananas or oranges, don't throw the skins or
peelings about, but put them in a garbage can or swill bucket or cover
them with soft dirt in the garden or stable yard; and don't throw
peanut shells, or scraps of paper and the like, about the streets or
parks. You should begin to notice all these things and talk about
them, and that will make other people begin to think about them, too.

Then you can make gardens instead of leaving bare, untidy back yards.
I think that n