I was quite surprised at the way these servants treated me, though I suppose they knew best what to do. Some of them cut me in two. Others tore me into pieces and ground me till I thought I was passing through another mill. As I had a chance, I looked around, and then I saw the room I was in had a beautiful arched ceiling of a pale pink color. There was a large servant behind those dressed in white, and he wore a pink uniform. You should have seen the way he rolled me over and over in that room. The servants in white dresses never stirred from where they were standing, but the one wearing the pink uniform jumped from one side of the room to the other, and seemed to be a very lively fellow. I don’t know what he would have done had he not been fastened to the floor. Sometimes, I am told, he peeps out between the folding doors to see what is going on outside, or to tell what kind of work is being done inside. I have heard that sometimes his dress becomes a dirty yellow or brown, and a man with a wise look comes and asks this servant to step outside a moment, till he can see how his uniform looks. HELEN: How funny to think of our teeth and tongue as our servants! MOTHER: But that is what they are. There is another group of servants in this passage, called _glands_. They have little rooms opening into the passage near the floor, and also in the back part of the room. If you ever visited a cave, you remember the walls were wet, and water was dropping from them. You know the skin on the outside of your body feels dry. Some parts of the body have skin inside, but it is _wet_ instead of dry. It is that way in this hall. That which makes it so is called _saliva_, and it is the duty of the servants called glands to pour saliva over the food as soon as it comes through the front doors, while the tongue rolls it about, and the teeth grind it. ELMER: But what good does that do? MOTHER: It moistens the food and makes it slippery, so it can pass on to the kitchen. Perhaps you know bread is partly made of starch. Another thing the saliva does is to turn starch into sugar, and this makes less work in the kitchen downstairs, as the cook down there has but little to do with starch. AMY: How may we know when the starch in bread or biscuit is changed to sugar? MOTHER: If you let the teeth chew your food a long time, until it becomes well mixed with saliva, you will find that it tastes sweet. This is because the starch has become sugar, though you must not think this kind of sugar is as sweet as the sugar which you buy. HELEN: If the walls in this room moisten the food, why should we drink while eating? MOTHER: It is not best to drink much when you eat, and not at all unless your food is very dry. The glands furnish from one to three pints of saliva a day. If you drink much, the saliva is not well mixed with the food, and it is hurried down to the kitchen before the servants have finished their work. This makes extra work for the cook downstairs.