In reply to the question, "Why do we cook our food?" one child replied:
"There are five ways of cooking potatoes. We should die if we eat our
food raw." A second pupil wrote: "Food digested is when we put it into
our mouths, our teeth chews it, and our mouth drops it down into our
body. We should not eat so much bone-making food as flesh-making and
warmth-giving foods, for, if we did, we should have too many bones, and
that would make us look funny."
In answer to the question, "Mention any occupations that are injurious
to health?" one child's reply was: "Occupations which are injurious to
health are carbonic acid gas, which is impure blood." Another responded:
"A stone-mason's work is injurious, because when he is chipping, he
breathes in all the little chips, and they are taken into the lungs." A
third advanced the theory that "A boot-maker's trade is very injurious,
because they press the boots against the thorax, and therefore it
presses the thorax in, and it touches the heart, and if they do not die,
they are cripples for life."
Finally, here is an extract from an essay on "The Moon," which--in
defiance of its title--affords some very interesting glimpses of
sublunary home life:--"To look at the white moon shinin threw your
winder at night, sitting on the edge of the bed, and lissin to your
father and mothers knives and forks rattlin on their plates while they
are getting their nice suppers, is the prittist site you ever seed. When
its liver and hunyens there a having, you can smell it all the way
upstairs. It looks very brite and nearly all white. Once when they was a
having fried fish and potaters I crept out of my bed-room to the top of
the stairs all in the dark, just so as to have a better lissen and a
nearer smell. I forget whether there was a moon that night. I don't
think as there was, cose I got to the top of the stares afore I knew I
was there, and I tumbled right down to the bottom of the stares, a
bursting open the door at the bottom, and rolling into the room nearly
as far as the supper table. My father thote of giving me the stick for
it, but he let my mother give me a bit of fish on some bread, and told
me to skittle off to bed again. I am sure there was not no moon, else I
should have seed there wasn't a top stare when I put my foot out so
slow. I only skratted my left eye and ear a bit with that last bump at
the bottom, witch was a hard one, Stares are steeper than girls think,
speshilly where the corner is."
CHILDREN'S STORIES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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