When you are washed, it doesn’t take you long to dress; and before you have finished brushing your hair, you begin to feel as if you were ready for breakfast. You know just where the feeling is—an empty sensation near the pit of your stomach, and you don’t have to look at the clock to know that it is breakfast time.

About this time something begins to smell very good downstairs; and down you go, two steps at a time, and out into the dining-room, or kitchen. You could do it with your eyes shut, just following your nose; and it is a pretty good guide to follow, too. If you will just go toward the things that smell good, and keep away from, or refuse to eat, those that smell bad, you will avoid a great many dangers, not only to your stomach, but to your general health; for a bad smell is one of Nature’s “black marks,” and you know what they are.

How nice and fresh and appetizing everything looks—the white cloth, the clean cups and saucers, and the shining spoons and forks. You are sure that a good breakfast is one of the best things in the world. You sit down and begin to eat, and everything tastes as good as it looks.

A good breakfast would be an egg, or a slice of bacon or ham, with a glass of milk,—or two, if you can drink another,—and two or three slices of bread, or toast, with plenty of butter; and then some cereal with plenty of cream and sugar, or some fruit, to finish with. A breakfast like this will give you just about the right amount of strength for the morning’s work. Don’t begin with a cereal or breakfast food; for this will spoil your appetite for your real breakfast. Cereal has very little nourishment in proportion to its bulk and the way it “fills you up.” Bread or mush or potato alone is not enough. Any one of these gives you fuel, to be sure; but it gives you very little with which to build up your body. For that you must have milk or meat or eggs or fish.

It is most important that children should eat a good big breakfast. All the hundred-and-one things that you are going to do during the day—racing, jumping, shouting, studying—require strength to do; and that strength can be got only out of the power in your food, which is really, you remember, the sunlight stored up in it.

Sometimes, when you come down in the morning, especially if you haven’t had the windows of your bedroom well open so as to get plenty of air during the night, you may feel that you are not very hungry for breakfast. Or perhaps, if you have risen late, or are in a great hurry to get to school in time, you just swallow a cup of coffee or tea, and a cracker or a little piece of bread, or a small saucer of cereal. This is a very bad thing to do, because coffee and tea, while they make you feel warm and comfortable inside, have very little “strength,” or food value, in them, and simply warm you up and stir up your nerves without doing you any real good at all. A cracker or a single piece of bread or one large saucer of cereal has only about one fourth of the strength in it that you will need for playing or studying until noontime. So after you have started to school with a breakfast like this, about the middle of the morning you begin to feel tired and empty and cross, and wonder what is the matter with yourself.Children of your age are growing so fast that they need plenty of good, wholesome food. They get so hungry that they want to be eating all the time. For “grown-ups” three times a day is enough; but for you children, whose bodies use up the food so fast, it is well to take also a piece of bread and butter, or two or three cookies, or a glass of milk with some crackers, in the middle of the morning and again about the middle of the afternoon. It will not hurt your appetite for dinner or supper, and you won’t be wanting to “pick” at cake and candy and pickles all day long.

How does eating keep you alive and make you grow? Eating is somewhat like mending a fire. You put wood or coal on the fire, and it keeps burning and giving out heat; but if you do not put fresh fuel on, the fire soon goes out. Just so, putting food into your body feeds the “body fires” and keeps you warm, and at the same time makes you grow. Of course the “body fires” are not just like those you see burning in the stove: there are no flames. But there is burning going on, just the same.

The food you put into your body must be made soft and pulpy before it can burn in your muscles. Now you can guess what your teeth are for. They chop, crush, and grind the food; and the tongue rolls it over and over and mixes it with the moisture in your mouth, until it is almost like very thick soup. Then you make a little motion with your tongue and throat, and down it goes.

Where does it go? It is passed down a tube that we call the food tube. While I tell you about it, you can look at the picture and then try to draw it yourself.

The food goes quickly down the first part of the tube until it comes to a part much larger than the rest, which we call the stomach. Here it is churned about for a long time, and the meat you have eaten is melted, or dissolved. Then the food goes on into the next part of the tube, which has become narrow again. This lower part, which is about twenty-five feet long, is coiled up just below the waist, between the large bones that you can feel on each side of your body. These coils of the food tube, we call the bowels.

Winding all around the stomach and bowels are tiny branching pipes full of blood. They look somewhat like the creepers on ivy, or the tendrils on grapevines. These suck out the melted food from the bowels. They take what the body can use, and carry it away in the blood to all parts of the body. This is the fuel that keeps the “body fires” going. The tougher parts of the food, which the body cannot use, are carried down to the lower end of the bowels and pushed out by strong muscles.

This waste should be passed out from the body once every day and at the same time each day. In the morning after breakfast is perhaps the best time. If you do not get rid of it every day, it makes poisons, which go into your blood and soon make you very sick indeed. You must keep clean inside as well as outside.