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CHAPTER VI

SOMETHING ABOUT DRAINS

"HOUSES are something like people, aren't they?" said Ruth.

"How are they?" queried Paul. Paul was not so fond of imagining things as Ruth and often called her fancies silly.

"Well," Ruth replied, "if a house is much good, it has to be strong and straight, and it needs air and sunshine. And it has to have water and light, just as we do and

"And it isn't good for it to have 'wet feet,' " put in Mother, looking up from her sewing. They were all three sitting under the cherry-tree near the playhouse, which really began to look like a house now, though Father said it was only just begun and that finishing a house was the hardest part of it. "Another thing about a house that is very much like a person," continued Mother, "is that, to keep clean, healthy and fit to live in, it needs lots of water, and that means that there must be a way of getting rid of the dirty water."

"Out on Uncle Silas's farm," said Paul, "they used to just pitch the dish-water out onto the ground by the kitchen door."

"That is a very poor way," said Mother. "Of course, in the country, people haven't always what they would like, but any farmer can dig a drain to carry off the sewage from his house. When the cellar

of your play-house was being built, you saw Uncle George lay a pipe, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes," said Paul, "he dug a trench all the way from here over the big house and laid a drainpipe in it. It joins the pipe that belongs to the big house, and he explained to us that every house on the street

has a drain pipe and all the drain pipes run into the big sewer under the street."

"I'm glad you understand," said Mother. "Well, in the country, there is no big sewer for each house drain to empty into, so a farmer who wants his grounds kept clean and sweet-smelling lays a drain and lets it empty into a cesspool some distance from the house."

"What's a cesspool?" asked Ruth.

"A cesspool," replied Mother, "is simply a tank where sewage can decay and do no harmthat is, it does no harm if the tank is well made

and does not let the sewage leak through into the ground and fill it with germs. Sewage may not contain any disease germs, but it is always smelly and unpleasant and it may hold the germs of typhoid fever and other serious diseases. The tank should be made of brick and cemented, so that it is water-tight. In this tank the sewage will decay, and after it is entirely decayed the gas and liquid, though they may not smell quite pleasant, will not cause any disease. If you look at a picture of such a tank, you will see that the sewage comes in through a drain at one side and the gas and liquid go out through a pipe at the other side. This pipe carries them off underground to some distance, but they have no disease germs in them. The germs were killed in the tank."

Paul had been examining some of the pipes which the plumber had left behind on the porch. "Why do they make a bend in the pipe like this?" he asked.

For answer, Mother drew a little sketch with her scissors on the dry ground at their feet. "Here," she said, "the dirty water runs down the pipe, followed by the clean water with which we wash out the tub or sink, or toilet, or whatever the pipe leads from. It flows down and into the drain and so into the sewer or cesspool. But, as you know, sewage smells bad and we want to keep these disagreeable smells out of our house. So just under the tub, or sink, or toilet, there is a bend like this in the pipe and another bend where the pipe joins the drain under the floor. When the water flows down the pipe, some of it always stops at these bends-plumbers call them traps, because

they catch and hold the water. The water in the trap acts as a stopper to keep the bad smell from coming back up the pipe

into the house."

"I should think," said Ruth, "that if any string or rag or anything went down the pipe, it would catch in the trap." "It does," said Mother, "and that is one reason why you should never throw things into any basin or sink or toilet. They sometimes actually stop up the pipe

and sometimes they interfere with the stopper of water that keeps the bad smells from coming up.

"I don't see how just a little piece of string or rag could do that," said Paul.

"Get me an empty tumbler and one with water in it and I'll show you," said Mother..

Paul came running back with the tumblers, and Mother set them side by side. Then she cut a strip of muslin, wet it, put one end into the tumbler of water and the other end into the empty glass. "Now watch," she said. The children bent low over the glasses. Water began to drip from the cloth into the empty tumbler. Very slowly, the water in the full glass began to sink, low and lower, while the glass that had been empty slowly filled.