that only the poor, the slum child, the refractory, or the
unclean have defects in breathing. This very afternoon a friend has
told me of her year abroad with a girl of nine, whose parents are very
wealthy. The girl is anaemic. Her backwardness humiliates her parents,
especially because she gave great promise until two years ago.
High-priced physicians have prescribed for her. It happens that they
are too eminent to give attention to such simple troubles as adenoids
that can be felt and seen. They are looking for complications of the
liver or inflammation of muscles at the base of the brain. One
celebrated French savant found the adenoids, assured the mother that
the child would outgrow them, and advised merely that she be compelled
to breathe through the nose. The mother and nursemaids nag the child
all day. The poor unwise mother sits up nights to hold the child's jaws
tight in the hope that air coming through the nose will absorb the
adenoids. The mother is made nervous. Of course this makes the child
more nervous and adds to the evil effects of adenoids. If the mother
had the good fortune to be very poor, she could not sit up nights, and
would long ago have decided either to let the child alone or else to
have the trouble removed.

Adenoids are not a city specialty. Country earache is largely due to
adenoids or to inflammation that quickly leads to adenoids. In 415
villages of New York state twelve per cent were found to be mouth
breathers. For two summers I have known a lad named Fred. He lives at
the seashore. Throughout his twelve years he has lived in a veritable
El Dorado of health and nature beauty. Groves and dunes and flora vie
with the blues of ocean and sky in resting the eye and in filling the
soul with that harmony which is said to make for sound living. Yet to a
child, Fred's schoolmates are experts on patent medicines and on the
heredity that is alleged to be responsible for bad temper, running
sores, tuberculosis, anaemia, and weak eyes. Freddie is particularly
favored. His well-to-do parents have supplied him with ponies, games,
and bicycles. Nothing prevents his breathing salt air fresh from the
north pole but hermetically sealed windows. The father thinks it absurd
to make a fuss over adenoids. Didn't he have them when a boy, and
doesn't he weigh two hundred pounds and "make good money"? The mother
never knew of operations for such trifles when she taught school; she
supposes her boy needs an oper