“Medicine would be the ideal profession if it did not involve giving pain,” said Dr. Strong, setting a paper-weight upon some school reports which had just come in.

“You’ve been here three months and you haven’t hurt any one yet,” said Mr. Clyde easily.

“No. I’ve been cautious, and perhaps a little cowardly. My place as Chinese doctor has been such a sinecure that I’ve let things go. Moreover, I’ve wanted to gain Mrs. Clyde’s confidence as much as possible, before coming to the point.”

The expression of Mr. Clyde’s keen, good-humored face altered and focused sharply. He scrutinized the doctor in silence. “Well, let’s have it,” he said at length. “Is it my wife?”

“No. It’s Bettina.”

The father winced. “That baby!” he said. “Serious?”

“On the contrary, quite simple. If it is handled wisely. But it means—pain. Not a great deal; but still, pain.”

“An operation?”

Dr. Strong nodded. “Merely a minor one. I’ve sounded Mrs. Clyde, without her knowing it, and she will oppose it. Mrs. Sharpless, too, I fear. You know how women dread suffering for the children they love.”

Again Mr. Clyde winced. “It’s—it’s necessary, of course,” he said.

“Not to do it would be both stupid and cruel. Shall we call in the women and have it out with them?”

For reply, Mr. Clyde pressed a button and sent the servant who responded, for Mrs. Clyde and her mother. Grandma Sharpless arrived first, took stock of the men’s grave faces, and sat down silently, folding her strong, competent hands in her lap. But no sooner had Mrs. Clyde caught sight of her husband’s face than her hand went to her throat.

“What is it?” she said. “The children—”

“Nothing to be alarmed about, Mrs. Clyde,” said Dr. Strong quickly. He pushed a chair toward her. “Sit down. It’s a question of—of what I might call carpenter-work”—the mother laughed a nervous relief—“on Betty.”

“Betty?” Her fears fluttered in her voice. “What about Betty?”

“She needs repairing; that’s all.”

“I don’t know what you mean! Is she hurt?”

“Not at all. She is breathing wrong. She breathes through her mouth.”

“Oh!” There was reassurance and a measure even of contempt in Mrs. Clyde’s voice. “Lots of children do that. Perhaps she’s got a little cold.”

“It isn’t that. This is no new thing with her. She is a mouth-breather.”

“I’ll see that it’s corrected,” promised the mother.

“Only one thing can correct it,” said Dr. Strong gravely. “There’s a difficulty that must be removed.”

“You mean an operation? On that baby? Do you know that she isn’t five yet? And you want to cut her with a knife—”

“Steady, Myra,” came Mr. Clyde’s full, even speech. “Dr. Strong doesn’t want to do anything except what he considers necessary.”

“Necessary! Supposing she does breathe through her mouth! What excuse is that for torturing her—my baby!”

“I’ll answer that, Mrs. Clyde,” said the doctor, with patient politeness. Walking over to the window he threw it up and called, “Oh, Tootles! Twinkles! Honorable Miss Cherub, come up here. I’ve got something to show you.” And presently in came the child, dragging a huge and dilapidated doll.

She was a picture of rosy health, but, for the first time, the mother noted the drooping of the lower jaw, and the slight lift of the upper lip, revealing the edges of two pearly teeth. Dr. Strong took from a drawer a little wooden box, adjusted a lever and, placing the ear pieces in Betty’s ears, bade her listen. But the child shook her head. Again he adjusted the indicator. This time, too, she said that she heard nothing. Not until the fourth change did she announce delightedly that she heard a pretty bell, but that it sounded very far away.

“Now we’ll try it on mother,” said the experimenter, and added in a low tone as he handed it to Mrs. Clyde, “I’ve set it two points less loud than Betty’s mark. Can you hear it?”

Mrs. Clyde nodded. A look of dread came into her eyes.

“Now, Tootles, open your mouth,” directed the doctor, producing a little oblong metal contrivance.

“I haven’t got any sore froat,” objected the young lady.

“No, but I want to look at the thoughts inside your head,” he explained mysteriously.

With entire confidence the child opened her mouth as wide as possible, and Dr. Strong, setting the instrument far back against her tongue, applied his eye to the other end.

“All right, Toots,” he said, after a moment. “Get your breath, and then let mother look.”

He showed Mrs. Clyde how to press the tiny button setting aglow an electric lamp and lighting up the nasal passages above the throat, which were reflected on a mirror within the contrivance and thus made clear to the eye. Following his instructions, she set her eye to the miniature telescope as the physician pressed it against the little tongue.

“Well, Betty,” said Dr. Strong, as the implement was again withdrawn, “you’ve got very nice thoughts inside that wise little head of yours. Now you can continue bringing up your doll in the way she should go.”

As the door closed behind her the mother turned to Dr. Strong.

“Is she going to be deaf?” she asked breathlessly.

“Of course not,” he reassured her. “That will be taken care of. What did you see above the back of the throat?”

“Little things like tiny stalactites hanging down.”

“Adenoids.”

“Where could she have gotten adenoids?” cried Mrs. Clyde.

“From her remotest imaginable ancestor, probably.”

“Why, aren’t they a disease?”

“No. An inheritance. The race has always had them. Probably they’re vestigial salivary glands, the use of which we’ve outgrown. Unfortunately they may overdevelop and block up the air-passages. Then they have to come out.”

For the first time in the conference Grandma Sharpless gathered force and speech.

“Young man,” she said solemnly—rather accusingly, in fact—“if the Lord put adenoids in the human nose he put ‘em there for some purpose.”

“Doubtless. But that purpose, whatever it may have been, no longer exists.”

“Everything in the human body has some use,” she persisted.

“Had,” corrected Dr. Strong. “Not has. How about your appendix?”

Mrs. Sharpless’s appendix, like the wicked, had long since ceased from troubling, and was now at rest in alcohol in a doctor’s office, having, previous to the change of location, given its original proprietress the one bad scare of her life. Therefore, she blinked, not being provided with a ready answer.

“The ancestors of man,” said Dr. Strong, “were endowed with sundry organs, like the appendix and the adenoids, which civilized man is better off without. And, as civilized man possesses a God-given intelligence to tell him how to get rid of them, he wisely does so when it’s necessary.”

“What have the adenoids to do with Betty’s deafness?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“Everything. They divert the air-currents, thicken the tubes connecting throat and ear, and interfere with the hearing. Don’t let that little deficiency in keenness of ear bother you, though. Most likely it will pass with the removal of the adenoids. Even if it shouldn’t, it is too slight to be a handicap. But I want the child to be repaired before any of the familiar and more serious adenoid difficulties are fixed on her for life.”

“Are there others?” asked Mrs. Clyde apprehensively.

“Oh, every imaginable kind. How could it be otherwise? Here’s the very first principle of life, the breath, being diverted from its proper course, in the mouth-breather; isn’t a general derangement of functions the inevitable result? The hearing is affected, as I’ve shown you already. The body doesn’t get its proper amount of oxygen, and the digestion suffers. The lungs draw their air-supply in the wrong way, and the lung capacity is diminished. The open mouth admits all kinds of dust particles which inflame the throat and make it hospitable to infection. By incorrect breathing the facial aspect of the mouth-breather is variously modified and always for the worse; since the soft facial bones of youth are altered by the continual striking of an air-current on the roof of the mouth, which is pushed upward, distorting the whole face.”

“None of our children are distorted. You won’t find a better-looking lot anywhere,” challenged Mrs. Sharpless, the grandmother’s pride up in arms.

“True. None of them has had overdeveloped adenoids, except Betty. The others all breathe through their noses. See how different their mouths are from Betty’s lifting upper lip—very fascinating now, but later—Well, I’ve gone so far as to prepare an object-lesson for you. Three extreme types of the mouth-breathers are here from school by my invitation to have some lemonade and cakes. They are outside now. When they come in, I want each of you to make an analysis of one of them, without their seeing it, of course. Talk with them about their work in school. You may get ideas from that. Mrs. Sharpless, you take the taller of the girls; Mrs. Clyde, you study the shorter. The boy goes to you, Mr. Clyde.”

The trio of visitors entered, somewhat mystified, but delighted to be the guests of their friend, Dr. Strong, who had a faculty of interesting children. So shrewdly did he divert and hold their attention that they concluded their visit and left without having suspected the scrutiny which they had undergone.

“Now, Mrs. Clyde,” said Dr. Strong, after the good-byes were said, “what about your girl?”

“Nothing in particular except that she’s mortally homely and doesn’t seem very bright.”

“Homely in what respect?”

“Well, hatchet-faced, to use a slang term.”

“It’s not a slang term any more; it’s a medical term to describe a typical result of mouth-breathing. The diversion of the breath destroys the even arch of the teeth, pushes the central teeth up, giving that squirrel-like expression that is so unpleasantly familiar, lengthens the mouth from the lower jaw’s hanging down, and sharpens the whole profile to an edge, and an ugly one. Adenoids!”

“My tall girl I thought at first was dull, but I found the poor thing was a little deaf,” said Grandma Sharpless. “She’s got a horrid skin; so sallow and rough and pimply. I don’t think her digestion is good. In fact, she said she had trouble with her stomach.”

“Naturally. Her teeth are all out of place from facial malformation caused by mouth-breathing. That means that she can’t properly chew her food. That means in turn that her digestion must suffer. That, again, means a bad complexion and a debilitated constitution. Adenoids! What’s your analysis, Mr. Clyde?”

“That boy? He’s two grades behind where he should be in school. It takes him some time to get the drift of anything that’s said to him. I should judge his brain is weak. Anyway, I don’t see where he keeps it, for the upper part of his face is all wrong, the roof of the mouth is so pushed up. The poor little chap’s brain-pan must be contracted.”

“Perfectly correct, and all the result of adenoids again. The boy is the worst example I’ve been able to find. But all three of the children are terribly handicapped; one by a painful homeliness, one by a ruined digestion, and the boy by a mental deficiency—and all simply and solely because they were neglected by ignorant parents and still more ignorant school authorities.”

“Would you have the public schools deal with such details?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“Certainly. Have you ever heard what Goler, the Health Officer of Rochester, asked that city? ‘Oughtn’t we to close the schools and repair the children?’ he asked, and he kept on asking, until now Rochester has a regular system of looking after the noses, mouths, and eyes of its young. They want their children, in that city, to start the battle of life in fighting trim.”

“But you don’t see many misshapen children about,” objected Mrs. Sharpless.

“Then it’s because you don’t look. Call to your mind Hogarth’s caricatures. Do you remember that in his crowds there are always clubfooted, or humpbacked, or deformed people? In those days such deformities were very common because medical science didn’t know how to correct them in the young. To-day facial deformities, to the scientific eye, are quite as common, though not as obvious. We’re just learning how to correct them, and to know that the hatchet-face is a far more serious clog on a human being’s career than is the clubfoot.”

“If Betty had a clubfoot, of course—” began Mrs. Clyde.

“Of course, you’d have it repaired at whatever cost of suffering. You’d submit her to a long and serious operation; and probably to the constant pain of a rigid iron frame upon her leg for months, perhaps years. To obviate the deformity you’d consider that not too high a price to pay, and rightly. Well, here is the case of a more far-reaching malformation, curable by a minor operation, without danger, mercifully quick, with only the briefest after-effects of pain, and you draw back from it. Why?”

“The thought of the knife on that little face. Is—is that all there is to be done?”

“No, there are the teeth. They should be looked to.”

“Nonsense! They’re only first teeth,” said

Grandma Sharpless vigorously. “What does a doctor know about teeth?”

“Lots, if he knows his business. There would be fewer dyspeptics if physicians in general sent their patients to the dentist more promptly, and kept them in condition to chew their food.”

“That’s all very well, when people have their real, lasting teeth,” returned the grandmother. “But Betty’s first set will be gone in a few years. Then it will be time enough to bother the poor child.”

“Apparently, Mrs. Sharpless,” said Dr. Strong mildly, “you consider that teeth come in crops, like berries; one crop now, a second and distinct crop later. That isn’t the way growth takes place in the human mouth. The first teeth are to the second almost what the blossom is to the fruit. I shall want immediately to take Betty to the dentist, and have him keep watch over her mouth with the understanding that he may charge a bonus on every tooth he keeps in after its time. The longer the first lot lasts, the better the second lot are. But there is no use making the minor repairs unless the main structure is put right first.”

“I must see Betty,” said Mrs. Clyde abruptly, and left the room. Mrs. Sharpless followed. “Now comes the first real split.” Dr. Strong turned to Mr. Clyde. “They’re going to vote me down.”

“If it comes to a pinch,” said Mr. Clyde quietly, “my wife will accept my decision.”

“That is what I want to avoid. Where would my influence with her be, if I were obliged to appeal to you on the very first test of professional authority? No, I shall try to carry this through myself, even at the risk of having to seem a little brutal.”

Mr. Clyde lifted his eyebrows, but he only nodded, as the door opened and the two women reentered.

“Doctor,” said Mrs. Clyde, “if, in a year from now, Betty hasn’t outgrown the mouth-breathing, I—I—you may take what measures you think best.”

“In a year from now, the danger will be more advanced. There is not the faintest chance of correction of the fault without an operation.”

“I can’t help it! I can’t stand the thought of it, now,” said Mrs. Clyde brokenly. “You should see her, poor baby, as she looks now, asleep on the lounge in the library, and even you, Doctor” (the doctor smiled a little awry at that), “couldn’t bear to think of the blood and the pain.” She was silent, shuddering.

“My dear Mrs. Clyde, the blood will be no more than a nosebleed, and the pain won’t amount to much, thanks to anaesthesia. Let me see.” He stepped to the door and, opening it softly, looked in, then beckoned to the others to join him.

The child lay asleep on her side, one cupped pink hand hanging, the other back of her head. Her jaw had dropped and the corner of the mouth had slackened down in an unnatural droop. The breath hissed a little between the soft lips. Dr. Strong closed the door again.

“Well?” he said, and there was a suggestion of the sternness of judgment in the monosyllable.

“I am her mother.” Mrs. Clyde faced him, a spot of color in each cheek. “A mother is a better judge of her children than any doctor can be!”

“You think so?” said Dr. Strong deliberately. “Then I must set you right. Do you recall sending Charley away from the table for clumsiness, two days ago?”

“Why, yes.” Mrs. Clyde’s expressive eyes widened. “He overturned his glass, after my warning him.”

“And once last week for the same thing?”

“Yes, but what—”

“Pardon me, do you think your mother-judgment was wise then?”

“Well, really, Dr. Strong,” said Mrs. Clyde, flushing, “you will hardly assume the right of control of the children’s manners—”

“This is not a question of manners. There is where your error lies,” interrupted the doctor. “Against your mother-judgment I set my doctor-judgment, and I tell you now”—his voice rose a little from its accustomed polished smoothness, and took on authority—“I tell you that the boy is no more responsible for his clumsiness than Betty is for bad breathing. It’s a disease, very faint but unmistakable.”

“Not Charley!” said his father incredulously, “Why, he’s as husky as a colt.”

“He will be, please God, in a few years, but just now he has—don’t be alarmed; it’s nothing like so important as it sounds—he has a slight heart trouble, probably the sequel to that light and perhaps mismanaged diphtheria attack. It’s quite a common result and is nearly always outgrown, and it shows in almost unnoticeable lack of control of hands and feet. I observed Charley’s clumsiness long ago; listened at his heart, and heard the murmur there.”

“And you never told us!” reproached the grandmother.

“What was the use? There’s nothing to be done; nothing that needs to be done, except watch, and that I’ve been doing. And I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Then I’ve been punishing him for what wasn’t his fault,” said Mrs. Clyde in a choked voice.

“You have. Don’t punish Betty for what isn’t hers,” countered the physician, swiftly taking advantage of the opening. “Give her her chance. Mrs. Clyde, if Betty were my own, she could hardly have wound herself more closely around my heartstrings. I want to see her grow from a strong and beautiful child to a strong and beautiful girl, and finally to a strong and beautiful woman. It rests with you. Watch her breathing to-night, as she sleeps—and tell me to-morrow.”

He rose and left the room. Mr. Clyde walked over and put a hand softly on his wife’s soft hair; then brushed her cheek with his lips.

“It’s up to you, dearest,” he said gently.

Three days later, Betty, overhanging the side fence, was heard, by her shamelessly eavesdropping father, imparting information to her next-door neighbor and friend.

“You’d ought to get a new nothe, Thally. It don’t hurt much, an’ breathin’ ith heapth more fun!”

Pondering a chain of suggestions induced by this advice, Mr. Clyde walked slowly to the house. As was his habit in thought, he proceeded to rub the idea into his chin, which was quite pink from friction by the time he reached the library. There he found Dr. Strong and Mrs. Sharpless in consultation.

“What are you two conspiring about?” he asked, ceasing to rub the troubled spot.

“Matter of school reports,” answered the doctor. He glanced at the other’s chin and smiled. “And what is worrying you?” he asked.

“I’m wondering whether I haven’t made a mistake.”

“Quite possibly. It’s done by some of our best people,” remarked the physician dryly.

“Not a pleasant possibility in this case. You remember quoting Rochester as to closing the schools and repairing the children. To-day, as I heard Betty commenting on her new nose, it suddenly came to me that I was obstructing that very system of repairs by which she is benefiting, for less fortunate youngsters in our schools.”

“You!” said Dr. Strong in surprise.

“As president of the Public Health League. The Superintendent of Schools came to me with a complaint against Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer, who, he claimed, was usurping authority in his scheme for a special inspection system to examine all schoolchildren at regular intervals.”

“Ought to have been established long ago,” declared Dr. Strong.

“The Superintendent thinks otherwise. He claims that it would interfere with school routine. It’s the duty of the health officials, he says, to control epidemics from without, to keep sickness out of the schools, not to hunt around among the children, scaring them to death about diseases that probably aren’t there.”

Dr. Strong muttered something which Grandma Sharpless pretended not to hear. “And you’ve agreed to support him in that attitude?” he queried.

“Well, I’m afraid I’ve half committed myself.”

“Heaven forgive you! Why, see here, Clyde, your dodo of a superintendent talks of keeping sickness out of the schools. Doesn’t that mean keeping sickness out of the pupils? There’s just one way to do that: get every child into the best possible condition of repair—eyes, ears, nose, throat, teeth, stomach, everything, and maintain them in that state. Then disease will have a hard time breaking down the natural resistance of the system. Damaged organs in a child are like flaws in a ship’s armor-plate; a vital weakening of the defenses. And remember, the child is always battling against one besieging germ or another.”

“Why can’t medical science wipe out the germs?” demanded Mrs. Sharpless. “It’s always claiming to do such wonders.”

“In a few instances it can. In typhoid we fight and win the battle from the outside by doing that very thing. In smallpox, and to a lesser extent in diphtheria, we can build up an effective artificial barrier by inoculation. But, as medical men are now coming to realize, in the other important contagions of childhood, measles, whooping-cough, and scarlet fever, we must fight the disease from inside the individual; that is, make as nearly impregnable as possible the natural fortifications of the body to resist and repel the invasion. That is what school medical inspection aims at.”

“You wouldn’t rank whooping-cough and measles with scarlet fever, would you?” said Mrs. Sharpless incredulously.

“Why not? Although scarlet fever has the worst after-effects,—though not much more serious than those of measles,—the three are almost equal so far as the death-rate is concerned.”

“Surely not!” protested the old lady. “Why, I’d rather have measles in the house ten times, or whooping-cough either, than scarlet fever once.”

“You’re about ten times as likely to have.”

She looked puzzled. “But what did you mean by saying that one of ‘em is as bad as the other?”

“That it’s as dangerous to the community, though not to the individual.”

“Just a little deep for me, too,” confessed Mr. Clyde.

“Yet it’s perfectly simple. Here, take an example. Would you rather be bitten by a rattlesnake or a mosquito?”

“A mosquito, of course.”

“Naturally. Yet a rattlesnake country is a good deal safer than a mosquito country. You wouldn’t hesitate, on account of your health, to move to Arizona, where rattlesnakes live?”

“I suppose not.”

“But you would be afraid to establish your family in the malarious swamps of the South?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, people who die of malaria die of mosquito bite, since the mosquito is the only agency of infection. Thus, it reduces to this: that while the individual rattler is more dangerous than the individual mosquito, the mosquito, in general, kills her thousands where the snake kills one. Now—with considerable modification of the ratio—scarlet fever is the rattlesnake; whooping-cough and measles are the mosquitoes. It is just as important to keep measles out of a community as it is to shut out scarlet fever. In fact, if you will study the records of this city, you will find that in two out of the last three years, measles has killed more people than scarlet fever, and whooping-cough more than either of them.”

“What are we going to do about it?” asked the practical-minded Mr. Clyde.

“Ah, if some one would only tell us that! In measles the worst of the harm is done before the disease announces itself definitely. The most contagious stage is previous to the appearance of the telltale rash. There’s nothing but a snuffling nose, and perhaps a very little fever to give advance notice that the sufferer is a firebrand.”

“Well, you can’t shut a child out of school for every little sore throat,” observed Mrs. Sharpless.

“As to that I’m not so sure,” replied the physician slowly and thoughtfully. “A recent writer on school epidemics has suggested educating the public to believe that every sore throat is contagious.”

“That isn’t true, is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“No. Personally I believe that, while a physician is often justified in deceiving his patient, he is never justified in fooling the public. In the long run they find him out and his influence for good is lessened. Yet that sore-throat theory is near enough true to be a strong temptation. Every sore throat is suspicious; that isn’t too much to say. And, with a thorough school-inspection system, it is quite possible that epidemics could be headed off by isolating the early-discovered cases of sore throat. But, an epidemic of the common contagions, once well under way, seems to be quite beyond any certainty of control.”

“Do you mean to say that quarantine and disinfection and isolation are all useless?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“No. I won’t go as far as that. They may exercise a check in some cases. But I will say this: that all our cumbersome and expensive and often harassing hygienic measures in the contagious diseases haven’t made good. Obviously, if they had, we should see a diminution of the ills which they are supposed to limit. There is no diminution. No, we’re on the wrong tack. Until we know what the right tack is, we perhaps ought to keep on doing what we can in the present line. It’s a big, complicated subject, and one that won’t be settled until we find out what scarlet fever, measles, and whooping-cough really are, and what causes them. While we’re waiting for the bacteriologist to tell us that, the soundest principle of defense that we have is to keep the body up to its highest pitch of resistance. That is why I support medical inspection for schools as an essential measure.”

“To repair the children without closing the schools, if I may modify Dr. Goler’s epigram,” suggested Mr. Clyde.

“Exactly. Eventually we shall have to build as well as repair. A very curious thing is happening to Young America in the Eastern States. The growing generation is shrinking in weight and height.”

“Which is almost contradictory enough for a paradox,” remarked Mr. Clyde.

“It’s a melancholy and literal fact. You know, there’s a height and weight basis for age upon which our school grading system rests. The authorities have been obliged to reconstruct it because the children are continuously growing smaller for their years. There’s work for the inspection force!”

“You’d put the children on pulleys and stretch ‘em out, I suppose!” gibed Grandma Sharpless.

“That might work, too,” replied the doctor, unruffled. “The Procrustean system isn’t so bad, if old Procrustes had only sent his victims to the gymnasium instead of putting them to bed. Yes, a quarter of an hour with the weight-pulleys every day would help undersized kiddies a good deal. But principally I should want the school-inspectors to keep the youngsters playing.”

“You don’t have to teach a child to play,” sniffed Grandma Sharpless, with womanly scorn of mere man’s views concerning children.

“Pardon me, Mrs. Sharpless, you taught your children to play.”

“I! Whatever makes you think that?”

“The simple fact that they didn’t die in babyhood.”

Mrs. Sharpless looked at him with a severity not unmingled with suspicion. “Sometimes, young man,” she observed, “you talk like a—a—a gump!”

“Take that, Strong!” said Mr. Clyde, joining in the doctor’s laugh against himself.

“Facts may sometimes sound foolish,” admitted Dr. Strong. “If they do, that’s the fault of the speaker. And it is a fact that every mother teaches her baby to play. Watch the cat if you don’t believe me. The wisest woman in America points out in her recent book that it is the mother’s playing with her baby which rouses in it the will to live. Without that will to live none of us would survive.”

“I don’t know who your wisest woman in America may be, but I don’t believe she knows what she is talking about,” declared Grandma Sharpless flatly.

“I’ve never known her when she didn’t,” retorted the doctor. “If Jane Addams of Hull House isn’t an expert in life, mental, moral, and physical, then there’s no such person! Why, see here, Mrs. Sharpless; do you know why a baby’s chance of survival is less in the very best possible institution without its mother, than in the very worst imaginable tenement with its mother, even though the mother is unable to nurse it?”

“It isn’t as well tended, I expect.”

“All its physical surroundings are a thousand times more advantageous: better air, better food, better temperature, better safeguarding against disease; yet babies in these surroundings just pine away and die. It’s almost impossible to bring up an infant on an institutional system. The infant death-rate of these well-meaning places is so appalling that nobody dares tell it publicly. And it is so, simply because there is no one to play with the babies. The nurses haven’t the time, though they have the instinct. I tell you, the most wonderful, mystic, profound thing in all the world, to me, is the sight of a young girl’s intuitive yearning to dandle every baby she may see. That’s the universal world-old, world-wide, deep-rooted genius of motherhood, which antedates the humankind, stirring within her and impelling her to help keep the race alive—by playing with the baby.”

“H’m! I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” confessed Grandma Sharpless. “There may be something in what you say, young man. But by the time children reach school age I guess they’ve learned that lesson.”

“Not always. At least, not properly, always. Let’s consult the Committee on School of our household organization.”

He sent for eight-year-old Julia.

“Question to lay before you, Miss Chairwoman,” said Dr. Strong. “How many of the girls in your grade hang around the hall or doorways during recess?”

“Oh, lots!” said Julia promptly.

“Are they the bigger girls? or the smaller ones?” The Committee on School considered the matter gravely. “Mary Hinks, she’s tall, but she’s awful thin and sickly,” she pronounced. “Dot Griswold and Cora Smith and Tiny Warley—why, I guess they’re most all the littlest girls in the class.”

Dr. Strong nodded. “Sure to be the undernourished, anaemic, lethargic ones,” said he. “They’re forgetting the lessons of their babyhood. Insensibly they are losing the will to live. But there’s nobody to tell them so. A thorough medical inspection service would correct that. It would include school-nurses who would go to the homes of the children and tell the parents what was the matter. Such a system might not be warranted to keep epidemics out of our schools, but it would stretch out and fill out those meager youngsters’ brains as well as bodies, and fit them to combat illness if it did come. The whole theory of the school’s attitude toward the child seems to me misconceived by those who have charge of the system. It assumes too much in authority and avoids too much in responsibility.

“Take the case of John Smith, who has two children to bring up under our enlightened system of government. Government says to John Smith, ‘Send your children to school!’ ‘Suppose I don’t wish to?’ says John Smith. ‘You’ve got to,’ says Government. ‘It isn’t safe for me to have them left uneducated.’ ‘Will you take care of them while they’re at school?’ says John Smith. ‘I’ll train their minds,’ says Government. ‘What about their bodies?’ says John Smith. ‘Hm!’ says Government; ‘that’s a horse of another color.’ ‘Then I’ll come with them and see that they’re looked after physically,’ says John Smith. ‘You will not!’ says Government. ‘I’m in loco ‘parentis, while they’re in school.’ ‘Then you take the entire loco of the parentis,’ says John Smith. ‘If you take my children away on the ground that you’re better fitted to care for their minds than I am, you ought to be at least as ready to look after their health. Otherwise,’ says John Smith, ‘go and teach yourself to stand on your head. You can’t teach my children.’ Now,” concluded Dr. Strong, “do you see any flaws in the Smith point of view?”

“Just plain common sense,” approved Grandma Sharpless.

“Clyde,” said Dr. Strong, with a twinkle, “if you don’t stop rubbing a hole in your chin, I’ll have to repair you. What’s preying on your mind?”

“I am trying,” replied Mr. Clyde deliberately, “to figure out, with reference to the School Superintendent and myself, just how a man who has made a fool of himself can write a letter to another man who has helped the first man make a fool of himself, admitting that he’s made a fool of himself, and yet avoid embarrassment, either to the man who has made a fool of himself or to the other man who aided the man in making a fool of himself. Do you get that?”

Dr. Strong rose. “I’m a Chinese doctor,” he observed, “not a Chinese puzzle-solver. That’s a matter between you and your ink-well. Meantime, having attained the point for which I’ve been climbing, I now declare this session adjourned.”