Sometimes it brings that awful disease, delirium tremens, and then the poor master thinks his best friends are his enemies, that serpents and horrible creatures are crawling over his body, and he dies a terrible death, and goes into a drunkard’s grave. He ruins the house God gave him to live in, and finds it is true that “at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.” Children, never touch these poison drinks. “Never put them in your mouth, To steal away your brains.” OUR TELEPHONE SYSTEM PERCY: Ting-a-ling! There’s the telephone bell. How strange it seems to talk to people, and hear them talk, when they are miles away! MOTHER: But the most wonderful telephone in the world is found in the house we live in. HELEN: Why, mother, you don’t mean to say we have wires all through our bodies, do you? MOTHER: Not wires, but something that answers the same purpose, only it is far more perfect. You know the brain is the master of the house, and there are hundreds of muscles waiting to do what he bids them. But the brain is upstairs, safe in his own strong little room. How can he tell the fingers how to work, and the feet where to walk? AMY: Please tell us, mother. I’m sure I don’t know. MOTHER: Well, instead of wires we have thousands of little lines called _nerves_, reaching from the brain to every part of the body. They are made of matter like that in the brain, and they are so close together that you can touch no place on your body, even with the point of a pin, without touching a nerve. Messages are sent over them to the brain, and back again to the muscles. With the nerves we _feel_. We call it the sense of touch. We might call the brain the “central office,” from which messages are sent, and where they come back. In the city you have seen many wires stretched on poles. Sometimes they are bound up together and covered over, making a cable like a big rope. You remember I told you there is a spinal cord or marrow running through your backbone. This is made up of many nerves, as the cable is made of many wires. There are sixty-two branch lines coiled up in it. By looking at the bottom part of the picture of the brain you will see where this large cable enters the central office. Really, the top part of the cord is a little brain itself, with a long name, which we will not trouble now to learn. [Illustration: _The nerves._] ELMER: If all the nerves come from the backbone, how do any get to the face?