MICROBES AND KEEPING CLEAN 35 



the rest of the apple, still it would be rather hard to cut off 

 a piece of a child for the sake of saving the rest of him ! 

 It is easier and pleasanter not to let the microbes get 

 a start in the first place. Children do, however, save 

 themselves from a good deal of danger every day. 



I sometimes wonder what a room full of children 

 would say if I should ask them why they try to keep 

 clean. Perhaps one would answer, " Mother makes 

 me." Another might say, " I hate dirt " ; and another 

 yet, " Nobody likes me when I am dirty." These are 

 pretty good reasons, although the teacher in the same 

 room would probably say, " I keep clean because I want 

 to keep well " ; and this, in fact, is the most important 

 reason of all. 



Hands and faces and clothes that are not clean have 

 more microbes on them than clean hands and faces and 

 clothes. I wash my hands before I eat because, if I do 

 not wash them, the microbes will go from my fingers to 

 my bread or to anything else I touch. They will enter 

 my mouth with my food, and I shall swallow every one 

 of them. If disease microbes are there, they will go 

 down just as easily as the others, and they may give me 

 great trouble afterwards. 



As we go from place to place in the city every day 

 our hands touch things that other people have touched, 

 and we do not know who those people were. We grasp 

 the iron railing of a car to keep ourselves from falling 



