“Can you cure a cold?” asked Grandma Sharpless.

A flare from the soft-coal fire flickered across the library, revealing a smile on the Health Master’s face.

“Am I a millionaire?” he countered.

“Not from your salary as Chinese physician to the Clydes,” laughed the head of that family.

“If I could cure a cold, I should be, easily, more than that. I’d be the foremost medical discoverer of the day.”

“Then you can’t cure a cold,” pursued Mrs. Sharpless.

“What is a cold?” countered the Health Master in that insinuating tone of voice which he employed to provoke the old lady into one of those frequent verbal encounters so thoroughly enjoyed by both of them.

“An ordinary common cold in the head. You know what I mean perfectly well, young man. The kind you catch by getting into drafts.”

“Oh, that! Well, you see, there’s no such thing.”

“No such thing as a cold in the head, Dr. Strong?” said Julia, looking up from her book. “Why, we’ve all had ‘em, loads of times.”

“And Bettina is coming down with one now, if I’m any judge,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “She’s had the sniffles all day.”

“Let’s hope it isn’t a cold. Maybe it’s only chicken-pox or mumps.”

“Are you wishing chicken-pox and mumps on my baby?” cried Mrs. Clyde.

In the three years during which Dr. Strong had been the “Chinese physician” of the household, earning his salary by keeping his patients well instead of curing them when ill, Mrs. Clyde had never quite learned to guard against the surprises which so often pointed the Health Master’s truths.

“Not by any means; I’m only hoping for the lesser of evils.”

“But mumps and chicken-pox are real diseases,” protested Clyde.

“And you think that a ‘cold,’ as you call it, isn’t.”

“Why, no,” said Clyde hesitantly. “I wouldn’t call it a disease, any more than I’d call a sprain a broken leg.”

“But it is. A very real, serious disease. Its actual name is coryza.”

“Bogy-talk,” commented Grandma Sharpless scornfully. “Big names for little things.”

“Not a little thing at all, as we should all realize if our official death-records really dealt in facts.”

“Death-records?” said Grandma Sharpless incredulously. “People don’t die of colds, do they?”

“Hundreds every year; all around us.”

“Well, I never hear of it.”

“Are you sure? Think back and recall how many of your friends’ obituary notices include some such sentence as this: ‘Last Thursday evening Mr. Smith caught a severe cold, from which he took to his bed on Saturday, and did not leave it again until his death yesterday morning?’ Doesn’t that sound familiar?”

“So familiar,” cried Mr. Clyde, “that I believe the newspapers keep it set up in type.”

“But the newspaper always goes on to say that Mr. Smith developed pneumonia or grip or bronchitis, and died of that, not of the cold,” objected Mrs. Sharpless.

“Oh, yes. In the mortality records poor Smith usually appears under the heading of one of the well-recognized diseases. It would hardly be respectable to die of a cold, would it?”

“He doesn’t die of the cold,” insisted the old lady. “He catches the cold and dies of something else.”

“If I take a dose of poison,” the Health Master mildly propounded, “and fall down and break my neck, what do I die of?”

“It’s no parallel,” said Grandma Sharpless. “And even if it is,” she added, tacitly abandoning that ground, “we’ve always had colds and we always will have ‘em.”

“Not with my approval, at least,” remarked the Health Master.

“I guess Providence won’t wait for your approval, young man.”

“Then you regard coryza as a dispensation of Providence? The Presbyterian doctrine of foreordination, applied to the human nose,” smiled the physician. “We’re all predestined to the ailment, and therefore might as well get out our handkerchiefs and prepare to sneeze our poor sinful heads off. Is that about it?”

“No, it isn’t! This is a green December and it means a full churchyard. We’re in for a regular cold-breeding season.”

“Nonsense! Weather doesn’t breed colds.”

“What does, then?”

“A very mean and lively little germ. He’s rather more poisonous than the chicken-pox and mumps variety, although he hasn’t as bad a name. In grown-ups he prepares the soil, so to speak, for other germs, by getting all through the system and weakening its resistant powers, thereby laying it open to the attacks of such enemies as the pneumococcus, which is always waiting just around the corner of the tongue to give us pneumonia. Or bronchitis may develop, or tonsillitis, or diphtheria, or kidney trouble, or indeed almost anything. I once heard an eminent lecturer happily describe the coryza bacillus as the bad little boy of the gang who, having once broken into the system, turns around and calls back to the bigger boys: ‘Come on in, fellers. The door’s open.’

“With children the coryza-bug makes various trouble without necessarily inviting the others in. A great proportion of the serious ear-troubles come from colds; all the way from earache to mastoiditis, and the consequent necessity of quick operations to save the patient’s life. Almost any of the organs may be impaired by the activity of the little pest. And yet as intelligent a family as this”—he looked around the circle—“considers it a ‘mere cold.’”

“Why haven’t you told us before?” asked Mr. Clyde bluntly.

“A just reproach,” admitted the Health Master. “Not having been attacked, I haven’t considered defense—a wretched principle in health matters. In fact, I’ve let the little matters of life go, too much, in my interest in the bigger.”

“But what about Bettina?” said the mother anxiously.

“Let’s have her in,” said the Health Master, and the six-year-old presently trotted into the room, announcing through a somewhat reddened nose, “I’m all stobbed ub; and Katie rubbed me with goose-grease, and I don’d wand to take any paregoric.”

“Paregoric?” said the physician. “Opium? I guess not. Off to bed with you, Toots, and we’ll try to exorcise the demon with hot-water bottles and extra blankets.”

Following her usual custom of kissing everybody good-night around the circle, Bettina held up her arms to her sister, who was nearest.

“Stop!” said the Health Master. “No kissing.”

“Not even my mamma?” queried the child. “I’m afraid not. You remember when Charley had scarlet fever he wasn’t allowed even to be very near any of you.”

“But scarlet fever is the most contagious of any of the diseases, isn’t it?” asked Julia.

“Not as contagious as a cold in the head.”

“I don’t know how contagious a cold is,” said Grandma Sharpless; “but I do know this: once it gets into a house, it goes through it like wildfire.”

“Then the house ought to be ashamed of itself. That’s sheer carelessness.”

“Half the kids in our school have got stopped-up noses,” contributed Charley.

“Why hasn’t the Committee on Schools reported the fact?” demanded the Health Master, turning an accusing eye on Julia.

“Why—why, I didn’t think of it,” said she. “I didn’t think it was anything.”

“Oh, you didn’t! Well, if what Charley says is correct, I should think your school ought to be put under epidemic regimen.”

“You’d have a fine row with the Board of Education, trying to persuade them to special action for any such cause as that,” remarked Mr. Clyde.

“There’s the measure of their intelligence, then,” returned the Health Master. “Sickness is sickness, just as surely as a flame is fire; and there is no telling, once it’s well started, how much damage it may do.”

“But a cold is only in the head, or rather, in the nose,” persisted Mrs. Sharpless.

“That’s where you’re wrong. Coryza is a disease of the whole system, and it weakens the whole system. The symptoms are most apparent in the nose and mouth: and it is from the nose and mouth that the disease is spread. But if you’ve got the cold you’ve got it in every corner of your being. You won’t be convinced of its importance, I suppose, until I can produce facts and figures. I only hope they won’t be producible from this house. But by the end of the season I’ll hope to have them. Meantime we’ll isolate Bettykin.”

Bettina was duly isolated. Meanwhile the active little coryza bacillus had got its grip on Mr. Clyde, who for three days attended to his business with streaming eyes, and then retired, in the company of various hot-water bags, bottles, and foot-warmers, to the sanctuary of his own bedroom, where he led a private and morose existence for one week. His general manager succeeded to his desk; likewise, to his contaminated pencils, erasers, and other implements, whereby he alternately sneezed and objurgated himself into the care of a doctor, with the general and unsatisfactory result that the balance-sheet of Clyde & Co., Manufacturers, showed an obvious loss for the month—as it happened, most unfortunately, an unusually busy month—of some three thousand dollars, directly traceable to that unconsidered trifle, a cold in the head.

“At that you got off cheap,” argued the Health Master.

It was three months after the invasion of the Clyde household by Bettina’s coryza germ.

“I’m glad somebody considers it cheap!” observed Mr. Clyde. “Personally I should rather have taken a trip to Europe on my share of that three thousand dollars.”

“Yet you were lucky,” asserted Dr. Strong. “Bettykin got through her earache without any permanent damage. Robin’s attack passed off without complications. Your own onset didn’t involve any organ more vital than your bank account. And the rest of us escaped.”

“Doesn’t it prove what I said,” demanded Grandma Sharpless; “that a cold in the head is only a cold in the head?”

“‘Answer is No,’ as Togo would put it,” replied the Health Master. “In fact, I’ve got proof here of quite the opposite, which I desire to present to this gathering.”

“This meeting of the Household Protective Association is hereby called to order!” announced Mr. Clyde, in the official tones proper to the occasion. The children put aside their various occupations and assumed a solemn and businesslike aspect which was part of the game. “The lone official member will now report,” concluded the chairman.

“Let the Health Officer of the city report for me,” said Dr. Strong, taking a printed leaflet from his pocket. “He is one of those rare officials who aren’t afraid to tell people what they don’t know, and may not want to know. Listen to what Dr. Merritt has to say.” And he read:—

“‘The death-rate of the city for the month of February, like the rate for December and January, is abnormally high, being a shade over ten per cent above the normal for this time of year. While the causes of mortality range through the commoner diseases, with a special rise in pulmonary troubles, it is evident that the increase must be due to some special cause. In the opinion of the Bureau of Health this cause is the despised and infectious “cold,” more properly known as coryza, which has been epidemic this winter in the city. Although the epidemic wave is now receding, its disastrous aftereffects may be looked for in high mortality rates for some months. Should a similar onset occur again, the city will be asked to consider seriously a thorough school campaign, with careful isolation of all suspicious cases.’”

“Did you write that, young man?” asked Mrs. Sharpless suspiciously.

“Why, no; I didn’t write it,” answered the Health Master. “I’ll go as far as to admit, however, that Dr. Merritt listens politely to my humble suggestions when I offer them.”

“Humph! Ten per cent increase. What is that in real figures?”

“Twenty-five extra deaths a month,” said Manny Clyde, a growing expert on local statistics.

“Seventy-five needless deaths for the three months, and more to come,” said the Health Master, “besides all the disability, loss of time and earning power and strength, and all the pain and suffering—which things never get into the vital statistics, worse luck! So much to the account of the busy little coryza-bug.”

“Can’t the Health Bureau do something?” asked the practical Mr. Clyde.

“Not much, until its public is better educated,” said Dr. Strong wearily. “The present business of a health official is to try and beat the fool-killer off from his natural prey with a printed tract. It’s quite a job, when you come to consider it.”

“What he ought to have, is the club of the law!” said Mr. Clyde.

“Precisely. The people won’t give it to him. In this household we’re better off, since we can make our own laws. Since Betty’s attack we’ve tried out the isolation plan pretty effectually; and we’ve followed, as well as might be, the rule of avoiding contact with people having coryza.”

He glanced up at a flamboyant poster which Mrs. Clyde, who had a natural gift of draftsmanship, had made in a spirit of mischief, entitling it “The Red Nose as a Danger Signal.”

“As much truth as fun in that,” he remarked. “But, at the best, we can’t live among people and avoid all danger. In fact, avoidance is only the outer line of defense. The inner line is symbolized by a homely rule, ‘Keep Comfortable.’”

“What’s comfort to do with keeping well?” asked Grandma Sharpless.

“What are your nerves for?” retorted Dr. Strong with his quizzical smile.

“Young man,” said the old lady plaintively, “did I ever ask you a question that you didn’t fire another back at me before it was fairly out of my mouth? My nerves, if I let myself have any, wouldn’t be for anything except to plague me.”

“Oh, those are pampered nerves. Normal nerves are to warn you. They’re to tell you whether the little things of life are right with you.”

“And if they’re not?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“Why, then you’re uncomfortable. Which is to say, there’s something wrong; and something wrong means, in time, a lessening of vitality, and when you let down your body’s vitality you’re simply saying to any germ that may happen along, ‘Come right in and make yourself at home.’

“Perhaps you remember when the house caught cold, how shocked Grandma Sharpless was at my saying that colds aren’t caught in a draft. Well, they’re not. Yet I ought to have qualified that. Now, what is a draft? Air in motion. If there is one thing about air that we thoroughly know, it’s this: that moving air is infinitely better for us than still air. Even bad, stale air, if stirred vigorously into motion, seems to purify itself and become breathable and good. Now, the danger of a draft is that it may mean a sudden change of the body’s temperature. Nobody thinks that wind is unhealthful, because when you’re out in the wind—which is the biggest and freest kind of a draft—you’re prepared for it. If not, your nerves say to you, ‘Move faster; get warm.’ It’s the same indoors. If the draft chills you, your nerves will tell you so. Therefore, mind your nerves. Otherwise, you’ll become specially receptive to the coryza germ and when you’ve caught that, you’ll have caught cold.”

“I wish,” remarked Mr. Clyde, “that my nerves would tell me why I feel so logy every morning. They don’t say anything definite. It isn’t indigestion exactly. But I feel slow and inert after breakfast, as if my stomach hadn’t any enthusiasm in its job.”

“Breakfast is the only meal I don’t have with you, so I don’t know,” replied the Health Master, who was a very early riser. “But I should say you were eating the wrong things, perhaps.”

“How could that be?” said Mrs. Clyde. “Tom has the simplest kind of breakfast, and it’s the same every day.”

“Well, there you are.” The Health Master’s tone assumed that the solution was found.

“Where are we?” queried Mr. Clyde. “I’m up in the air!”

“What is this remarkably regular breakfast?”

“Eggs, rolls, and coffee.”

“Oh! Eggs every morning?”

“Two of them. Medium boiled.”

“Not even the method is varied. Same eggs, same preparation every morning, seven days a week, four weeks a month, twelve months—”

“No. That’s my winter breakfast only.”

“Very well; four or five months in the year. No wonder your poor stomach gets bored.”

“What’s the matter with eggs, Dr. Strong?” inquired Manny. “They let us have ‘em, in training.”

“Nothing is the matter with two eggs, or twenty. But when you come to two hundred, there’s something very obvious the matter—monotony. Your stomach is a machine, it’s true, but it’s a human machine. It demands variety.”

“Then Charles ought to be a model. He wants everything from soup to pie.”

“A thoroughly normal desire for a growing boy.”

“He eats an awful lot of meat,” observed Julia, who was a somewhat fastidious young lady. “My Sunday-school teacher calls meat-eaters human tigers.”

“Oh, that’s too easy a generalization, Junkum,” replied the Health Master. “With equal logic she could say that vegetable-eaters are human cows.”

“But the vegetarians make very strong arguments,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“A lot of pale-eyed, weak-blooded nibblers!” stated Grandma Sharpless. “If meat weren’t good for us, we wouldn’t have been eating it all these generations.”

“True enough. Perhaps we eat a little too much of it, particularly in the warm months. But in winter it’s practically a necessity.”

“Some of the big athletes say they’re vegetarians,” said Manny.

“There are individual cases,” admitted the Health Master; “but in the long run it doesn’t work. A vegetarian race is, generally speaking, small of stature and build, and less efficient than a meat-eating race. The rule of eating is solid food, sound food, plenty of it, and a good variety. Give your stomach a fair chance: don’t overload it, don’t understock it, and don’t let it get bored.”

For some time Miss Bettina had been conducting a quiet and strategic advance upon the Health Master, and now by a sudden onslaught she captured his knee and, perching herself thereon, put a soft and chubby hand under his chin.

“You want something, Miss Toodles,” he accused with a formidable frown. “None of your wheedling ways with me! Out with it!”

“Candy,” said the child, in no way impressed by his severity.

“Candy, indeed! When?”

“Now. Any time. Lots of it. Lots of sugar, too.”

“Betty’s developing such a sweet tooth!” mourned her mother. “I have to limit her rigidly.”

“Why?”

“You wouldn’t let the child stuff herself on sweets all the time,” protested Grandma Sharpless, scandalized.

“Nor on anything else. But if she craves sweets, why not let her have them at the proper time?”

“Well, in my day children ate plain food and were thankful.”

“Hm! I’m a little dubious about the thankfulness. And in your day children died more frequently and more easily than in ours.”

“They weren’t pampered to death on candy, anyway!”

“Possibly they weren’t pampered quite enough. Take the Cherub, here,” he tossed Betty in the air and whisked her to his shoulder. “She’s a perfect little bundle of energy, always in motion. She needs energy-producing food to keep going, coal for that engine. Sugar is almost pure carbon; that is, coal in digestible form. Of course she wants sweets. Her little body is logical.”

“But isn’t it bad for her teeth?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“No; nor for her last year’s overshoes or her tin dog’s left hind leg,” chuckled the Health Master. “Sometimes I marvel that the race has survived all the superstitions surrounding food and drink.”

“In my father’s household,” said Mr. Clyde, “the family principle was never to drink anything with meals. The mixture of solids and liquids was held to be bad. Another superstition, I suppose.”

“At that rate, bread and milk would be rank poison,” said Dr. Strong. “Next to food, water has got the finest incrustation of old-wives’ warnings. Now, there’s some doubt whether a man should eat whenever he wants to. Appetite, in the highly nervous American organization, is sometimes tricky. But thirst is trustworthy. The normal man is perfectly safe in drinking all the water he wants whenever he wants it.”

“I can still remember the agonies that I suffered when, as a boy, I had scarlet fever, and they would allow me almost no water,” said Mr. Clyde.

“One of medicine’s direst errors,” said Dr. Strong. “Nobody will ever know how much that false and cruel system has added to our death-rate in the past. To-day a practitioner who kept water from a fever patient—unless there were unusual complications—would be properly citable for malpractice. By the way,” he continued, “we’re changing our views about feeding in long illnesses. Typhoid patients have always been kept down to the lowest possible diet, nothing but milk. Now, some of the big hospitals are feeding typhoid cases, right through the fever, on foods carefully selected for their heat and energy values, with the result that not only has the patient more strength to fight the disease, but he pulls through practically free from the emaciation which has always been regarded as inevitable.”

“Can I have my candy?” inquired Bettina, holding to her own point.

“If it’s good, sound candy. Now I’m going to utter an awful heresy. Generally speaking, and in moderation, what you want is good for you.”

“Pure anarchy,” laughed Mr. Clyde.

“Not at all; the law of the body, always demanding what is best for its development.”

“Well, I want,” declared Robin, with a sudden energy, “to take off these hot, scratchy flannels.”

“Too late now,” said the Health Master, “until spring. You’ve been wearing them all winter. But another year, if I have my way, you won’t have to put them on.”

“You’d let him tempt pneumonia by going through a winter with light summer underwear?”

“Unless you get out an injunction against me,” smiled the physician. “Bobs had a pretty tough time of it for the first week when he changed to flannels. He’s thin-skinned, and the rough wool irritated him pretty badly. In fact, he had a slight fever for two days. It isn’t worth that suffering. Besides, he’s a full-blooded youngster, and doesn’t need the extra warmth. You can’t dress all children alike in material any more than you can dress them all from the same pattern.”

“Then I want to leave off mine, too,” announced Charles.

“Nonsense! You little ruffian, you could wear sandpaper on that skin of yours. Don’t talk to me, or next time I see you without your overcoat I’ll order a hair shirt for you.”

“I’ve never thought much about the children’s clothes, except to change between the seasons,” confessed Mrs. Clyde. “I supposed that was all there is to it.”

“Not wholly. I once knew a man who died from changing his necktie.”

“Did he put on a red tie with a pink shirt?” interestedly queried Manny, who had reached the age where attire was becoming a vital interest.

“He changed abruptly from the big puff-tie which he had worn all winter, and which was a regular chest-protector, to a skimpy bow, thereby exposing a weak chest and getting pneumonia quite naturally. Yet he was ordinarily a cautious old gentleman, and shifted the weight of his underclothes by the calendar—a rather stupid thing to do, by the way.”

“On the first of November,” began Grandma Sharpless severely—

“Yes, I know,” cut in the Health Master. “Your whole family went into flannels whether the thermometer was twenty or seventy. And we’ve seen it both, more than once on that date.”

“What harm did it ever do them?”

“Bodily discomfort. In other words, lessened vitality. Think how much nervous wear is suffered by a child itching and squirming in a scratchy suit of heavy flannels on a warm day.”

“Children can’t be changing from one weight to another every day, can they?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“No need of that. But in the fall and spring we can regulate that matter a little more by the thermometer, and a little less by the almanac. There is also the consideration of controlling heat. Now, Charley, what would you think of a man who, in June, say, with the mercury at seventy-five, wandered around in a heavy suit and his winter flannels.”

“I’d think he was sick,” said the nine-year-old promptly, “or else foolish. But what makes you ask me?”

“Just by way of calling your attention to the thermometer, which in this room stands at seventy-nine. And here we all sit, dressed twenty-five per cent warmer than if we were out doors in a June temperature several degrees colder. You’re the Committee on Air and Light, Charley. I think this matter of heat ought to come within your province.”

“And it makes you feel so cold when you go out,” said Julia.

“Of course. We Americans live in one of the most trying climates in the world, and we add to its rigors by heating our houses like incubators. No room over seventy, ought to be the rule.”

“It’s hard to work in a cold room,” said Mr. Clyde.

“Not when you’re used to it. The Chicago schools that have started winter roof classes for sickly children, find that the average of learning capacity goes up markedly in the cold, clean air.”

“But they can’t be as comfortable,” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Much more so. As soon as the children get used to it, they love it, and they object strenuously to going back into the close rooms. The body grasps and assimilates the truth; the mind responds.”

“Well, I like to be comfortable as well as anybody,” said Mrs. Sharpless, “but I don’t consider it the chief end of life.”

“Not the chief end,” assented Dr. Strong; “the chief means.”

“Comfort and health,” mused Mrs. Clyde. “It seems a natural combination.”

“The most natural in the world. Let me put it into an allegory. Health is the main line, the broad line, the easy line. It’s the simple line to travel, because comfort keeps pointing it out. Essentially it is the line of the least resistance. The trouble with most of us is we’re always unconsciously taking transfers to the cross-lines. The transfer may be Carelessness, or Slothfulness, or Gluttony, or one of the Dissipations in food, drink, work or play; or it may be even Egotism, which is sometimes a poison: but they all take you to Sick Street. Don’t get a transfer down Sick Street. The road is rough, the scenery dismal, and at the end is the cemetery.”

“That’s the end of all roads,” said Grandma Sharpless.

“Then in Heaven’s name,” said the Health Master, “let us take the longest and sunniest route and sing as we go!”