The Health bulletin [serial] - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

196 THE HEALTH BULLETIN.THE OLD ROLLER TOWEL.How dear to our hearts are the thingsof our childhood,When fond recollections presentthem to view;The old district schoolhouse, the pailand the dipper,The same cud of gum which in turnwe would chew.No fear of a microbe forever beset us,No state board of health interferedthen at all;We bathed dirty faces in one commonIxasin,And turned to the towel that hungon the wall.The old roller towel, the stiff rollertowel.The germ-laden towel that hung onthe wall.Of crash was this towel, in gen'rousproportion.And never was changed more thanonce in a week;We turned it around and used it allover.And for a dry spot it was idle toseek,With use and abuse it grew grayishin color,Acquiring an odor exceedingly rank;By Saturday night it presented a surfaceAs hard and unyielding as any inchplank.The old roller towel, the stiff rollertowel,From which the fastidious foolishlyshrank.•But now it is gone, vanished out of existence.By vir.tue of power which the Boardof*Health holds;No more can we bury our streamingwet facesWithin its bacterial, dangerous folds,No longer we meet with the discoloredbanner.Which hung from a roller nailed upon the wall;On clean huckabuck, initial embroidered.We wipe away tears which intrusivelyfallFor old roller towels, the stiff rollertowels,The germ laden towels that hung onthe wall.— George White, in the RnndophHerald.THE WOMAN WITH THE HOE.Last spring the press of the Statecarried the following news item,which is here changed only enoughtoconceal the name and locality"Mrs. B. I. Avey, who lived about onemile north of Axeton, was found deadnear her home yesterday afternoon atabout 4 o'clock. She had been plantingcorn and had fallen into a ditch inthe field. She leaves a large family,all of whom are grown and living inthis community. She was about seventy-fiveyears old and a consistentmember of the Blank church of thisplace. She was buried at Sunrise cemeterytoday."They have told how she diedthis woman with the hoe. But noone has thought it worth while toexplain why she died as she didwhy an old woman who has passedher three-score years and ten, andwho had often trod the perilous pathof motherhood, should be digging inthe field for bread, as women didthousands of years ago. We havedoubled the yield of corn, but awithered old woman must still answerthe call of seedtime and go outinto the field with the hoe. Tenthousand automobiles go back andforth in this State, lifting the burdensfrom the beasts of the field,but no way was found to lift theburden of the hoe from her bentfigure as it tottered over the brokenground to a tragic death.The burden of labor, like all otherburdens, follows the line of weakestresistance, and it is resting heavierand heavier on the shoulders leastable to bear it because least able toresist it. Yet men marvel that wo-mad-men in England are moved toness and women the world over areprotesting against the old order oflife—aa:ainst the woman with thehoc. In this highly Christianizedcommonwealth many can tell of thechild widows of India and the footboundwomen of China, but they