the bright, warm, golden sunlight; for
it is one of the very best friends that you have--indeed, you couldn't
possibly live without it.

In one sense, in fact, though this may be a little harder for you to
understand, you are sunlight yourselves; for the power in your muscles
and nerves that makes you able to jump and dance and sing and laugh
and breathe is the sunlight which you have eaten in bread and apples
and potatoes, and which the plants had drunk in through their leaves
in the long, sunny days of spring and summer.

So throw up your blinds and open your windows wide to the sunlight
every morning; and let the sunlight pour in all day long, except only
while you are reading or studying--when the dazzling light may hurt
your eyes--and for six or seven of the hottest hours of the day in
summer time. Perhaps your mothers will object that the sunlight will
fade the carpets, or spoil the furniture; but it will put far more
color into your faces than it will take out of the carpets. If you are
given the choice of a bedroom, choose a room that faces south or
southeast or southwest, never toward the north.

II. A GOOD START

When you are really awake and have had a good look to see what kind of
morning it is, you will feel like yawning and stretching, and rubbing
your eyes four or five times, before you jump out of bed; and it is a
good plan to take plenty of time to do this, unless you are already
late for breakfast or school. It starts your heart to beating and your
lungs to breathing faster; and it limbers your muscles, so that you
are ready for the harder work they must do as soon as you jump out of
bed and begin to walk about and bathe and dress and run and play.

When you jump out of bed, throw back the covers and turn them over the
foot of the bed, so that the air and the sunlight can get at every
part of them and make them clean and fresh and sweet to cover you at
night again. Though you may not know it, all night long, while you
have been asleep, your skin has been at work cleaning and purifying
your blood, pouring out gases and a watery vapor that we call
_perspiration_, or _sweat_; and these impurities have been caught by
the sheets and blankets. So after a bed has been slept in for four or
five nights, if it has not been thrown well open in the morning, it
begins to have a stuffy, foul, sourish smell. You can see from this
why it is a bad thing to sleep with your head under the bedclothes, as
people s