“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.”