takes less hot air to fill anything than it does cold, so it grows lighter. The balloon floated around the sky until the candle burned out.
Warm air is always going up and cold coming down. Out of doors Mother Nature attends to this pushing, but in houses we have to help, by letting the warm air out at the top and cold air in at the bottom. Air is always in motion unless it is in prison, and prisoned air is very bad to breathe. Still air is dead; live air is always in motion.
Sometimes air rivers flow up and down so rapidly, pushing each other out of place that they make—what? See the leaves blowing on the trees. Wind! Wind is air that is in a hurry. You can feel it. Draw a quick breath. You felt a tiny wind in your nose, didn't you? You cannot feel air, but you can feel wind, or air in motion. You can feel the temperature of air, too. Your skin tells you if air is hot or cold. You can feel if it is damp or dry. You cannot smell air, but you can smell odors in it—the perfume of flowers, the freshness of rain, bad odors of decay, or smoke. You can train yourself to tell if the air in a room is fresh or stale. Doctors always come into a sick room with suspicious noses in the air. As we have to pay doctors for telling us when the air is bad, let us see if we can find out for ourselves.
When you were up on the step ladder, Robert, did you notice anything beside the heat? You felt smothered, then dizzy? You don't feel that way on the hottest summer day out of doors, do you? Let us see what was the matter with that air.
Put half an inch of water in a pie pan. Twist a bit of soft newspaper, light it with a match and drop it into a drinking glass. Let the glass fill with smoke, but while the paper is still burning turn the glass upside down in the pan of water. The flame goes out, leaving some paper unburned. The water rises in the glass, much higher than in the pan outside, and stays there. Something was burned out of the air, making room for the water to rise. The part that is gone is oxygen. If you had shut a live fly in the glass it would have died as quickly as the flame. Animals and fire cannot live without oxygen. By breathing air in you burn up oxygen. It would not take you very long to use up all the oxygen in a small room. Then, if you couldn't get any fresh air at all you would "go out" like the burning paper, and the fly in the glass.
Beside using up the oxygen in the air, when you breathe in, you make a poisonous gas when you breathe out. Fire does the
