Katie Robertson : $b A girls story of factory lifeWinslow, Margaret E.
General
Katie Robertson : $b A girls story of factory life
Winslow, Margaret E.
Factories -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"Boys think it manly to smoke, but it isn't. It's very dirty and very
unhealthy. I heard of a little boy only twelve years old, who died very
suddenly, and when the doctors examined him after his death they found
the coats of his stomach all eaten up with tobacco, and yet he had only
smoked cigarettes. Cigarettes are made of a little tobacco, a great deal
of cabbage-leaves, old leather, and dirty paper, with snuff and ginger
and _strychnine_, a deadly poison, to flavor them. The oil of
tobacco itself is rank poison. Two or three drops of it put on the
tongue of a dog or a cat will kill it in a few minutes. Besides, the
smell of tobacco lingering in a boy's clothes or breath is very foul and
disgusting. And worse than all, the effect of smoking is to create a
thirst which pure, cool water does not satisfy, and those who begin by
smoking or chewing tobacco are very likely to end by drinking beer and
whiskey, and finally becoming drunkards."
Then questions to be answered at the next meeting were called for, and
the following were given:--
1. Is it wrong to wear pretty clothes?
2. Why shouldn't people be selfish?
3. Is it swearing to say "good gracious!" and "mercy on us!"?
Miss Etta did not answer these, but wrote them down in her note-book,
saying she would look up the subjects by the next meeting, and she
wanted the members of the "Do Good Society" all to do the same, and then
they could compare their answers.
The last part of the programme to-day was the reading of a story by the
president. She half-read and half-told about a young man named Harry
Wadsworth, who, although he was only a clerk in a railroad company,
managed, by giving all his spare time and thought, to do so many kind
things for other people, that when he died they all set about to honor
his memory by each doing kind things for others, and others again
followed their example, till thousands of people were all busy in
hundreds of different places, doing just as much as they could to help
other people and to discountenance everything evil, and to throw their
influence on the side of everything good.
Harry Wadsworth had four mottoes, which they all adopted. They were:--
"Look out and not in.
"Look forward and not back.
"Look up and not down.
"Lend a hand."
Miss Etta also told them that all sorts of clubs and societies, chiefly
composed of children, had grown out of this story, and that they were
called by different names; such as, "Wadsworth Clubs," "Lend a Hand
Societies," "Look Out Guards," and "Look Up Legions."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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