plumbing, the basement, the gas fixtures, the water supply and the heating plant are the really important things. A leak in a roof is a slight matter beside a leak in the plumbing.
Stale food should not be allowed in pantries and ice boxes. Kitchen waste—garbage—should be destroyed every day, or carried away. There should not be a crumb of bread or sugar to coax flies in. Cut bread and other food on newspapers and roll them up. Flies forget to wipe their little feet, and they bring typhoid fever and other diseases into the house. So doors and windows should be screened. Food should be fresh. Flour and many dry foods may be kept for months in dry storerooms. If unfit for use they smell moldy. Meat, butter, eggs and milk warn us of decay through our noses, too. Wilted green vegetables should be crisped in cold water. Fruit that cannot be eaten fresh, should be preserved by cooking.
A family should be sure the drinking water is pure. Spring water is the best and purest of all. In cities, water is supplied to all the people from reservoirs fed by springs or rivers, or from a lake. Sometimes it is necessary to filter or boil the water. Boiled water should be cooled and air put back into it by pouring it from one vessel to another several times. This must be done because boiled water tastes "flat." It is not unhealthful, but people care so little for it that they will not drink enough. Air in water makes it sparkle. Spring water, in gushing out of the ground, takes up a great deal of air.
Heat is the next important thing. You do not want a hot-house. Hot-houses are useful for growing delicate plants. Hot dwelling houses grow delicate people. The temperature of a house should be 68 or yo degrees by a thermometer hung in the middle of the room. And it should be an even temperature, not 85 for a little while and then 60. So the fireman of the family should study the heating plant. The house may be heated by stoves, or by a hot-air, steam, or hot-water furnace. Different stoves and furnaces take different kinds of fuel, and different ways of managing them to get the best work from them at the least cost. Sometimes badly managed furnaces give off a poisonous gas that makes people ill. If the drafts are used properly, coal gases will go up the chimney.
Once in awhile you read about people being killed while asleep, with gas that escaped from a stove, a furnace, or a gas jet. This could not happen to people who sleep with the windows open, for the gas would go out of doors, but enough might collect in a well-
