“No good fairy had ever bestowed such a gift as this magic lens,” said Dr. Strong, whisking Bettina up from her seat by the window and setting her on his knee. “It was most marvelously and delicately made, and furnished with a lightning-quick intelligence of its own. Everything that went on around it, it reported to its fortunate possessor as swiftly as thought flies through that lively little brain of yours. It earned its owner’s livelihood for him; it gave him three fourths of his enjoyments and amusements; it laid before him the wonderful things done and being done all over the world; it guided all his life. And all that it required was a little reasonable care, and such consideration as a man would show to the horse that worked for him.”

“At the beginning you said it wasn’t a fairytale,” accused Bettina, with the gravity which five years considers befitting such an occasion.

“Wait. Because the owner of the magic lens found that it obeyed all his orders so readily and faithfully, he began to impose on it. He made it work very hard when it was tired. He set tasks for it to perform under very difficult conditions. At times when it should have been resting, he compelled it to minister to his amusements. When it complained, he made light of its trouble.”

“Could it speak?” inquired the little auditor.

“At least it had a way of making known its wants. In everything which concerned itself it was keenly intelligent, and knew what was good and bad for it, as well as what was good and bad for its owner.”

“Couldn’t it stop working for him if he was so bad to it?”

“Only as an extreme measure. But presently, in this case, it threatened to stop. So the owner took it to a cheap and poor repair-shop, where the repairer put a little oil in it to make it go on working. For a time it went on. Then, one morning, the owner woke up and cried out with a terrible fear. For the magic light in the magic lens was gone. So for that foolish man there was no work to do nor play to enjoy. The world was blotted out for him. He could not know what was going on about him, except by hearsay. No more was the sky blue for him, or the trees green, or the flowers bright; and the faces of his friends meant nothing. He had thrown away the most beautiful and wonderful of all gifts. Because it is a gift bestowed on nearly all of us, most of us forgot the wonder and the beauty of it. So, Honorable Miss Twinkles, do you beware how you treat the magic lens which is given to you.”

“To me?” cried the child; and then, with a little squeal of comprehension: “Oh, I know! My eyes. That’s the magic lens. Isn’t it?”

“What’s that about Bettykin’s eyes?” asked Mr. Clyde, who had come in quietly, and had heard the finish of the allegory.

“I’ve been examining them,” explained Dr. Strong, “and the story was reward of merit for her going through with it like a little soldier.”

“Examining her eyes? Any particular reason?” asked the father anxiously.

“Very particular. Mrs. Clyde wishes to send her to kindergarten for a year before she enters the public school. No child ought to begin school without a thorough test of vision.”

“What did the test show in Bettykin’s case?”

“Nothing except the defects of heredity.”

“Heredity? My sight is pretty good; and Mrs. Clyde’s is still better.”

“You two are not the Cherub’s only ancestors, however,” smiled the physician. “And you can hardly expect one or two generations to recast as delicate a bit of mechanism as the eye, which has been built up through millions of years of slow development. However, despite the natural deficiencies, there’s no reason in Betty why she shouldn’t start in at kindergarten next term, provided there isn’t any in the kindergarten itself.”

Mr. Clyde studied the non-committal face of his “Chinese physician,” as he was given to calling Dr. Strong since the latter had undertaken to safeguard the health of his household on the Oriental basis of being paid to keep the family well and sound. “Something is wrong with the school,” he decided.

“Read what it says of itself in that first paragraph,” replied Dr. Strong, handing him a rather pretentious little booklet.

In the prospectus of their “new and scientific kindergarten,” the Misses Sarsfield warmly congratulated themselves and their prospective pupils, primarily, upon the physical advantages of their school building which included a large work-and-play room, “with generous window space on all sides, and finished throughout in pure, glazed white.” This description the head of the Clyde household read over twice; then he stepped to the door to intercept Mrs. Clyde’s mother who was passing by.

“Here, Grandma,” said he. “Our Chinese tyrant had diagnosed something wrong with that first page. Do you discover any kink in it?”

“Not I,” said Mrs. Sharpless, after reading it. “Nor in the place itself. I called there yesterday. It is a beautiful room; everything as shiny and clean as a pin.”

“Yesterday was cloudy,” observed the Health Master.

“It was. Yet there wasn’t a corner of the place that wasn’t flooded with light,” declared Mrs. Sharpless.

“And on a clear day, with the sun pouring in from all sides and being flashed back from those shiny, white walls, the unfortunate inmates would be absolutely dazzled.”

“Do you mean to say that God’s pure sunlight can hurt any one?” challenged Mrs. Sharpless, who was rather given to citing the Deity as support for her own side of any question.

“Did you ever hear of snow-blindness?” countered the physician.

“I’ve seen it in the North,” said Mr. Clyde. “It’s not a pleasant thing to see.”

“Glazed white walls would give a very fair imitation of snow-glare. Too much light is as bad as too little. Those walls should be tinted.”

“Yet it says here,” said Mr. Clyde, referring to his circular, “that the ‘Misses Sarsfield will conduct their institution on the most improved Froebelian principles.”

“Froebel was a great man and a wise one,” said Dr. Strong. “His kindergarten system has revolutionized all teaching. But he lived before the age of hygienic knowledge. I suppose that no other man has wrought so much disaster to the human eye as he.”

“That’s a pretty broad statement, Strong,” objected Air. Clyde.

“Is it? Look at the evidence. North Germany is the place where Froebel first developed his system. Seventy-five per cent of the population are defective of vision. Even the American children of North German immigrants show a distinct excess of eye defects. You’ve seen the comic pictures representing Boston children as wearing huge goggles?”

“Are you making an argument out of a funny-paper joke?” queried Grandma Sharpless.

“Why not? It wouldn’t be a joke if it hadn’t some foundation in fact. The kindergarten system got its start in America in Boston. Boston has the worst eyesight of any American city; impaired vision has even become hereditary there. To return to Germany: if you want a shock, look up the records of suicides among school-children there.”

“But surely that has no connection with the eyes.”

“Surely it has,” controverted Dr. Strong. “The eye is the most nervous of all the organs; and nothing will break down the nervous system in general more swiftly and surely than eye-strain. Even in this country we are raising up a generation of neurasthenic youngsters, largely from neglect of their eyes.”

“Still, we’ve got to educate our children,” said Mr. Clyde.

“And we’ve got to take the utmost precautions lest the education cost more than it is worth, in acquired defects.”

“For my part,” announced Grandma Sharpless, “I believe in early schooling and in children learning to be useful. At the Sarsfield school there were little girls no older that Bettina, who were doing needlework beautifully; fine needlework at that.”

“Fine needlework!” exploded Dr. Strong in a tone which Grandma Sharpless afterwards described as “damnless swearing.”

“That’s enough! See here, Clyde. Betty goes to that kindergarten only over my dead job.”

“Oh, well,” said Mr. Clyde, amazed at the quite unwonted excitement which the other exhibited, “if you’re dealing in ultimatums, I’ll drop out and leave the stricken field to Mrs. Clyde. This kindergarten scheme is hers. Wait. I’ll bring her. I think she just came in.”

“What am I to fight with you about, Dr. Strong?” asked Mrs. Clyde, appearing at the door, a vision of trim prettiness in her furs and veil. “Tom didn’t tell me the casus belli.”

“Nobody in this house,” said Dr. Strong appealing to her, “seems to deem the human eye entitled to the slightest consideration. You’ve never worn glasses; therefore you must have respected your own eyesight enough to—”

He stopped abruptly and scowled into Mrs. Clyde’s smiling face.

“Well! what’s the matter?” she demanded. “You look as if you were going to bite.”

“What are you looking cross-eyed for?” the Health Master shot at her.

“I’m not! Oh, it’s this veil, I suppose.” She lifted the heavy polka-dotted screen and tucked it over her hat. “There, that’s more comfortable!”

“Is it!” said the physician with an emphasis of sardonicism. “You surprise me by admitting that much. How long have you been wearing that instrument of torture?”

“Oh, two hours. Perhaps three. But, Dr. Strong, it doesn’t hurt my eyes at all.”

“Nor your head?”

“I have got a little headache,” she confessed. “To think that a supposedly intelligent woman who has reached the age of—of—”

“Thirty-eight,” said she, laughing. “I’m not ashamed of it.”

“—Thirty-eight, without having to wear glasses, should deliberately abuse her hard-working vision by distorting it! See here,” he interrupted himself, “it’s quite evident that I haven’t been living up to the terms of my employment. One of these evenings we’re going to have in this household a short but sharp lecture and symposium on eyes. I’ll give the lecture; and I suspect that this family will furnish the symposium—of horrible examples. Where’s Julia? As she’s the family Committee on School Conditions, I expect to get some material from her, too. Meantime, Mrs. Clyde, no kindergarten for Betty kin, if you please. Or, in any case, not that kindergarten.”

No further ocular demonstrations were made by Dr. Strong for several days. Then, one evening, he came into the library where the whole family was sitting. Grandma Sharpless, in the old-fashioned rocker, next a stand from which an old-fashioned student-lamp dispensed its benign rays, was holding up, with some degree of effort, a rather heavy book to the line of her vision. Opposite her a soft easychair contained Robin, other-wise Bobs, involuted like a currant-worm after a dose of Paris green, and imaginatively treading, with the feet of enchantment, virgin expanses of forest in the wake of Mr. Stewart White.

Julia, alias “Junkum,” his twin, was struggling against the demon of ill chance as embodied in a game of solitaire, far over in a dim corner. Geography enchained the mind of eight-year-old Charles, also his eyes, and apparently his nose, which was stuck far down into the mapped page. Near him his father, with chin doubled down over a stiff collar, was internally begging leave to differ with the editorial opinions of his favorite paper; while Mrs. Clyde, under the direct glare of a side-wall electric cluster, unshaded, was perusing a glazed-paper magazine, which threw upon her face a strong reflected light. Before the fire Bettykin was retailing to her most intelligent doll the allegory of the Magic Lens.

Enter, upon this scene of domestic peace, the spirit of devastation in the person of the Health Master.

“The horrible examples being now on exhibit,” he remarked from the doorway, “our symposium on eyes will begin.”

“He says we’re a hor’ble example, Susan Nipper,” said Bettina confidentially, to her doll.

“No, I apologize, Bettykin,” returned the doctor. “You’re the only two sensible people in the room.”

Julia promptly rose, lifted the stand with her cards on it, carried it to the center of the library, and planted it so that the central light fell across it from a little behind her.

“One recruit to the side of common sense,” observed the physician. “Next!”

“What’s wrong with me?” demanded Mr. Clyde, looking up. “Newspaper print?”

“Newspaper print is an unavoidable evil, and by no means the worst example of Gutenberg’s art. No; the trouble with you is that your neck is so scrunched down into a tight collar as to shut off a proper blood supply from your head. Don’t your eyes feel bungy?”

“A little. What am I going to do? I can’t sit around after dinner with no collar on.”

“Sit up straight, then; stick your neck up out of your collar and give it play. Emulate the attentive turtle! And you, Bobs, stop imitating an anchovy. Uncurl! Uncurl!!”

With a sigh, Robin straightened himself out. “I was so comfortable,” he complained.

“No, you weren’t. You were only absorbed. The veins on your temples are fairly bulging. You might as well try to read standing on your head. Get a straight-backed chair, and you’re all right. I’m glad to see that you follow Grandma Sharpless’s good example in reading by a student-lamp.”

“That’s my own lamp,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “Seventy years has at least taught me how to read.”

“How, but not what,” answered the Health Master. “That’s a bad book you’re reading.”

Grandma Sharpless achieved the proud athletic feat of bounding from her chair without the perceptible movement of a muscle.

“Young man!” she exclaimed in a shaking voice, “do you know what book that is?”

“I don’t care what book—”

“It is the Bible.”

“Is it? Well, Heaven inspired the writer, but not the printer. Text such as that ought to be prohibited by law. Isn’t there a passage in that Bible, ‘Having eyes, ye see not’?”

“Yes, there is,” snapped Mrs. Sharpless. “And my eyes have been seeing and seeing straight for a good many more years than yours.”

“The more credit to them and the less to you, if you’ve maltreated them with such sight-murdering print as that. Haven’t you another Bible?”

Grandma Sharpless sat down again. “I have another,” she said, “with large print; but it’s so heavy.”

“Prescription: one reading-stand. Now, Mrs. Clyde.”

The mother of the family looked up from her magazine with a smile.

“You can’t say that I haven’t large print or a good light,” she said.

“The print is good, but the paper bad,” said the Health Master. “Bad, that is, as you are holding it under a full, unqualified electric light. In reading from glazed paper, which reflects like a mirror, you should use a very modified light. In fact, I blame myself from not having had all the electric globes frosted long since. Now, I’ve kept the worst offender for the last.”

Charley detached his nose from his geography and looked up. “That’s me, I suppose,” he remarked pessimistically and ungrammatically. “I’m always coming in for something special. But I can’t make anything out of these old maps without digging my face down into ‘em.”

“That’s a true bill against the book concern which turns out such a book, and the school board which permits its use. Charley, do you know why Manny isn’t playing football this year?”

“Manny” was the oldest son of the family, then away at school.

“Mother wanted him not to, I suppose,” said the boy.

“No,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Dr. Strong persuaded me that the development he would get out of the game would be worth the risk.”

“It was his eyes,” said the Health Master. “He is wearing glasses this year and will probably wear them next. After that I hope he can stop them. But his trouble is that he—or rather his teachers—abused his eyes with just such outrageous demands as that geography of yours. And while the eye responded then, it is demanding payment now.”

“But a kid’s got to study, hasn’t he? Else he won’t keep up,” put in Bobs, much interested.

“Not at the expense of the most important of his senses,” returned the Health Master. “And never at night, at Charley’s age, or even yours, Bobs.”

“Then he gets dropped from his classes,” objected Bobs.

“The more blame to his classes. Early learning is much too expensive at the cost of eye-strain and consequent nerve-strain. If we force a student in the early years to make too great demands on his eyes, the chances are that he will develop some eye or nervous trouble at sixteen or seventeen and lose far more time than he has gained before, not reckoning the disastrous physical effects.”

“But if other children go ahead, ours must,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Perhaps the others who go ahead now won’t keep ahead later. There is a sentence in Wood and Woodruff’s textbook on the eye * which every public-school teacher and every parent should learn by heart. It runs like this: ‘That child will be happier and a better citizen as well as a more successful man of affairs, who develops into a fairly healthy, though imperfectly schooled animal at twenty, than if he becomes a learned, neurasthenic asthenope at the same age.’”

“Antelope?” put in Bettina, who was getting weary of her exclusion from the topic. “I’ve got a picture of that. It’s a little deer.”

“So are you, Toddles,” cried the doctor, seizing upon her with one hand and Susan Nipper with the other, and setting one on each shoulder, “and we’re going to keep those very bright twinklers of yours just as fit’as possible, both to see and be seen.”

“But what of Charley and the twins?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“Everything right, so far. They’re healthy young animals and can meet the ordinary demands of school life. But no more study at night, for some years, for Charley; and no more, ever, of fine-printed maps. Some day, Charley, you may go to the Orinoco. It’s a good deal more desirable that you should be able to see what there is to be seen there, then, than that you should learn, now, the name of every infinitesimally designated town on its banks.”

“In my childhood,” observed Mrs. Sharpless, with the finality proper to that classic introductory phrase, “we thought more of our brains than our eyes.”

“An inverted principle. The brain can think for itself. The eye can only complain, and not always very clearly in the case of a child. Moreover, Mrs. Sharpless, in your school-days the eye wasn’t under half the strain that it is in our modern, print-crowded world. The fact is, we’ve made a tremendous leap forward, and radically changed a habit and practice built up through hundreds and thousands of years, and Nature is struggling against great difficulties to catch up with us.”

“I don’t understand what you are getting at,” said Mrs. Clyde, letting her magazine drop.

“Have you tried walking on all fours lately?” inquired the physician.

“Not for a number of years.”

“Presumably you would find it awkward. Yet if, through some pressure of necessity, the human race should have to return to the quadrupedal method, the alteration in life would be less radical than we have imposed upon our vision in the last few generations.”

“Sounds like flat nonsense to me,” said the downright Clyde. “We see just as all our ancestors saw.”

“Think again. Our ancestors, back a very few generations, were an outdoor race living in a world of wide horizons. Their eyes could range over far distances, unchecked, instead of being hemmed in most of the time by four walls. They were farsighted. Indeed, their survival depended upon their being far-sighted; like the animals which they killed or which killed them, according as the human or the beast had the best eyes. Nowadays, in order to live we must read and write. That is, the primal demand upon the eye is that it shall see keenly near at hand instead of far off. The whole hereditary training of the organ has been inverted, as if a mountaineer should be set to diving for pearls; and the poor thing hasn’t had time to adjust itself yet. We employ our vision for close work ten times as much as we did a hundred years ago and ten thousand times as much as we did ten thousand years ago. But the influence of those ten thousand years is still strong upon us, and the human child is born with the eye of a savage or an animal.”

“What kind of an animal’s eyes have I got?” demanded Bettina. “A antelope’s?”

“Almost as far-sighted,” returned the Health Master, wriggling out from under her and catching her expertly as she fell. “And how do you think an antelope would be doing fine needlework in a kindergarten?”

“But, Strong, few of us go blind,” said Mr. Clyde. “And of those who do, nearly half are needlessly so. That we aren’t all groping, sightless, about the earth is due to the marvelous adaptability of our eyes. And it is exactly upon that adaptability that we are so prone to impose; working a willing horse to death. In the young the muscles of accommodation, whereby the vision is focused, are almost incredibly powerful; far more so than in the adult. The Cherub, here, could force her vision to almost any kind of work and the eye would not complain much—at this time. But later on the effects would be manifest. Therefore we have to watch the eye very closely until it begins to grow old, which is at about twelve years or so. In the adult the eye very readily lets its owner know if anything is wrong. Only fools disregard that warning. But in the developing years we must see to it that those muscles, set to the task of overcoming generations of custom, do not overwork and upset the whole nervous organization. Sometimes glasses are necessary; usually, only care.”

“In a few generations we’ll all have four eyes, won’t we?” asked Bobs, making a pair of mock spectacles with his circled fingers and thumbs.

“Oh, let’s hope not. The cartoonists of prophecy always give the future man spectacles. But I believe that the tendency will be the other way, and that, by evolution to meet new conditions, the eye will fit itself for its work, unaided, in time. Meantime, we have to pay the penalty of the change. That’s a small price for living in this wonderful century.”

“You say that half the blind are needlessly so,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Is that from preventable disease?”

“About forty per cent, of the wholly blind. But the half-blind and the nervously wrecked victims of eye-strain owe their woes generally to sheer carelessness and neglect. By the way, eye-strain itself may cause very serious forms of disease, such as obstinate and dangerous forms of indigestion, insomnia, or even St. Vitus’s dance and epilepsy.”

“But you’re not telling us anything about eye diseases, Dr. Strong,” said Julia.

“There speaks our Committee on School Conditions, filled full of information,” said the Health Master with a smile. “Junkum has made an important discovery, and made it in time. She has found that two children recently transferred from Number 14 have red eyes.”

“Maybe they’ve been crying,” suggested Bettykin.

“They were when I saw them, acute Miss Twinkles, although they didn’t mean it at all. One was crying out of one eye, and one out of the other, which gave them a very curious, absurd, and interesting appearance. They had each a developing case of pink-eye.”

“Horses have pink-eye, not people,” remarked Grandma Sharpless.

“To be more accurate, then, conjunctivitis. People have that; a great many people, once it gets started. It looks very bad and dangerous; but it isn’t if properly cared for. Only, it’s quite contagious. Therefore the Committee on Schools, with myself as acting executive, accomplished the temporary removal of those children from school.”

“And then,” the Committee joyously took up the tale, “we went out and trailed the pink-eye.”

“We did. We trailed it to its lair in School Number 14, and there we found one of the most dangerous creatures which civilization still allows to exist.”

“In the school?” said Bettykin. “Oo-oo! What was it?”

“It was a Rollertowl,” replied the doctor impressively and in a sonorous voice.

“I never heard of it,” said the Cherub, awestruck. “What is it like?”

“He means a roller-towel, goosie,” explained Julia. “A towel on a roller, that everybody wipes their hands and faces on.”

“Exactly. And because everybody uses it, any contagious disease that anybody has, everybody is liable to catch. I’d as soon put a rattlesnake in a school as a roller-towel. In this case, half the grade where it was had conjunctivitis. But that isn’t the worst. There was one case of trachoma in the grade; a poor little Italian whose parents ignorantly sent her to an optician instead of an oculist. The optician treated her for an ordinary inflammation, and now she will lose the sight of one eye. Meantime, if any of the others have been infected by her, through that roller-towel, there will be trouble, for trachoma is a serious disease.”

“Did you throw out the roller-towel?” asked Charley with a hopeful eye to a fray.

“No. We got thrown out ourselves, didn’t we, Junkum?”

“Pretty near,” corroborated Julia. “The principal told Dr. Strong that he guessed he could run his school himself and he didn’t need any interference by—by—what did he call us, Dr. Strong?”

“Interlopers. No, Cherub, an interloper is no relation to an antelope. It was four days ago that we left that principal and went out and whistled for the Fool-killer. Yesterday, the principal came down with a rose-pink eye of his own; the Health Officer met him and ordered him into quarantine, and the terrible and ferocious Rollertowl is now writhing in its death-agonies on the ash-heap.”

“What about other diseases?” asked Mrs. Clyde after a pause.

“Nothing from me. The eye will report them itself quick enough. And as soon as your eye tells you that anything is the matter with it, you tell the oculist, and you’ll probably get along all right, as far as diseases go. It is not diseases that I have to worry about, as your Chinese-plan physician, so much as it is to see that you give your vision a fair chance. Let’s see. Charley, you’re the Committee on Air, aren’t you? Could you take on a little more work?”

“Try me,” said the boy promptly.

“All right; we’ll make you the Committee on Air and Light, hereafter, with power of protest and report whenever you see your mother going out in a polka-dotted, cross-eyed veil, or your grandmother reading a Bible that needs burning worse than any heretic ever did, or any of the others working or playing without sufficient illumination. Here endeth this lecture, with a final word. This is it:—

“The eye is the most nervous of all the body’s organs. Except in early childhood, when it has the recklessness and overconfidence of unbounded strength, it complains promptly and sharply of ill-usage. Now, there are a few hundred rules about when and how to use the eyes and when and how not to use them. I’m not going to burden you with those. All I’m going to advise you is that when your eyes burn, smart, itch, or feel strained, there’s some reason for it, and you should obey the warning and stop urging them to work against their protest. In fact, I might sum it all up in a motto which I think I’ll hang here in the library—a terse old English slang phrase.”

“What is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“‘Mind your eye,’” replied the Health Master.