nd the way it "fills you up." Bread or mush or potato alone is
not enough. Any one of these gives you fuel, to be sure; but it gives
you very little with which to build up your body. For that you must
have milk or meat or eggs or fish.

It is most important that children should eat a good big breakfast.
All the hundred-and-one things that you are going to do during the
day--racing, jumping, shouting, studying--require strength to do; and
that strength can be got only out of the power in your food, which is
really, you remember, the sunlight stored up in it.

Sometimes, when you come down in the morning, especially if you
haven't had the windows of your bedroom well open so as to get plenty
of air during the night, you may feel that you are not very hungry for
breakfast. Or perhaps, if you have risen late, or are in a great hurry
to get to school in time, you just swallow a cup of coffee or tea, and
a cracker or a little piece of bread, or a small saucer of cereal.
This is a very bad thing to do, because coffee and tea, while they
make you feel warm and comfortable inside, have very little
"strength," or food value, in them, and simply warm you up and stir up
your nerves without doing you any real good at all. A cracker or a
single piece of bread or one large saucer of cereal has only about one
fourth of the strength in it that you will need for playing or
studying until noontime. So after you have started to school with a
breakfast like this, about the middle of the morning you begin to feel
tired and empty and cross, and wonder what is the matter with
yourself.

Children of your age are growing so fast that they need plenty of
good, wholesome food. They get so hungry that they want to be eating
all the time. For "grown-ups" three times a day is enough; but for you
children, whose bodies use up the food so fast, it is well to take
also a piece of bread and butter, or two or three cookies, or a glass
of milk with some crackers, in the middle of the morning and again
about the middle of the afternoon. It will not hurt your appetite for
dinner or supper, and you won't be wanting to "pick" at cake and candy
and pickles all day long.

How does eating keep you alive and make you grow? Eating is somewhat
like mending a fire. You put wood or coal on the fire, and it keeps
burning and giving out heat; but if you do not put fresh fuel on, the
fire soon goes out. Just so, putting food into your body feeds the
"body fires" and