As each person has to live in his own little body house, so we all have to live with other people, in houses that have been built of wood or stone or brick. Some of these houses are very old, and were built before people knew as much about health rules as we do today. Some are newer, but were badly built. Still, we have to use them. Very few of us will ever be able to build a new house. Few of us have a very wide choice of the house we must live in. It seems more sensible for us to learn how to make the best of whatever house shelters the family.

A family has the best chance to escape sickness when every member of it has good habits of eating, bathing, sleeping, working and playing. Then the house must be kept clean from cellar to roof. The basement should be light and dry and airy. No decaying vegetables or fruits should be left in it, for these poison the air of the living rooms above. It should be built of stone and cement. Once a year the walls should be cleaned and whitewashed. The living rooms should be cleaned twice a year, and the walls calcimined or painted once. If the walls are papered, the paper should be cleaned. New paper should not be put on over old. Hard wood floors, with small rugs, are the best floor covering. Rugs can be taken out of doors often, and the floors washed. Iron or brass beds are cleaner than wood. Window draperies and all bedding should be washable. Carpet sweepers and soft cloths should be used. Brooms and feather dusters scatter dust.

You know you need to drink water to wash out the waste pipes of your body. The waste pipes of houses become foul with decaying matter. They must be flushed every week with enough boiling water and washing soda, or even chloride of lime, to cut all dirt out. This must be done in kitchen sinks, laundry tubs, bath room plumbing and ice boxes. Plumbing should be open, so you can see the pipes. Sunlight and soap are great purifiers, so plumbing should never be boxed in. People are often poisoned by sewer gas or foul air from old, dirty, boxed-in plumbing, or even from new, cheap plumbing. You cannot smell sewer gas and that makes it all the more dangerous. Sometimes the plumbing in a house cannot be made safe. It has to be taken out altogether. In renting a house the plumbing, the basement, the gas fixtures, the water supply and the heating plant are the really important things. A leak in a roof is a slight matter beside a leak in the plumbing.

Stale food should not be allowed in pantries and ice boxes. Kitchen waste—garbage—should be destroyed every day, or carried away. There should not be a crumb of bread or sugar to coax flies in. Cut bread and other food on newspapers and roll them up. Flies forget to wipe their little ,feet, and they bring typhoid fever and other diseases into the house. So doors and windows should be screened. Food should be fresh. Flour and many dry foods may be kept for months in dry storerooms. If unfit for use they smell moldy. Meat, butter, eggs and milk warn us of decay through our noses, too. Wilted green vegetables should be crisped in cold water. Fruit that cannot be eaten fresh, should be preserved by cooking.

A family should be sure the drinking water is pure. Spring water is the best and purest of all. In cities, water is supplied to all the people from reservoirs fed by springs or rivers, or from a lake. Sometimes it is necessary to filter or boil the water. Boiled water should be cooled and air put back into it by pouring it from one vessel to another several times. This must be done because boiled water tastes "flat." It is not unhealthful, but people care so little for it that they will not drink enough. Air in water makes it sparkle. Spring water, in gushing out of the ground, takes up a great deal of air.