Out on the porch, by the open door,
Sweet with roses and cool with shade,
Baby is creeping over the floor--
Dear little winsome blue-eyed maid!
All about her the shadows dance,
All above her the roses swing,
Sunbeams in the lattice glance,
Robins up in the branches sing.
Up at the blossoms her fingers reach,
Lisping her pleading in broken words,
Cooing away, in her tender speech,
Songs like the twitter of nestling birds.
Creeping, creeping over the floor,
Soon my birdie will find her wings,
Fluttering out at the open door
Into the wonderful world of things.
Bloom of roses and balm of dew,
Brooks that bubble and winds that call,
All things lovely, and glad, and new,
And the Father watching us over it all!
"Select the best sprouts for transplanting," says the "Old Farmer's
Almanac." And here you have the whole root of the matter in a nut shell;
for sickly-looking sprouts produce only sickly-looking plants. Like begets
like.
Now, how about the babies? Women's rights are advocated. Men take their
rights. But who shall defend the babies' rights? Poor, helpless little
non-combatants! Let me say a few words in their behalf.
Children, from the cradle, are wrongfully treated. Their first rights are
here curtailed. Look at the baby that is permitted to creep out "on the
porch," or over nature's green carpet, and there bask in the sunshine and
frolic in the open air; then look in pity upon the pale weekly house-plant
child. The contrast is as striking as lamentable.
"O, he'll get his death's cold if the air blows upon him," hysterically
screams the ignorant mother. Yes, "ignorant"--that is the adjective I want
to describe her.
The young mother has doubtless been sent to a fashionable boarding-school,
where she was taught algebra, French, (?) the art of adornment, how to
walk fashionably, eat delicately, and dress _à la mode_, and even how to
make a good "catch," but never how to preserve her health or rear an
offspring. O, this would be shockingly immodest, or "counting chickens
before they are hatched," I once heard a lady affirm.
Nine tenths of our American wives are totally ignorant of everything that
pertains to their own health, or that of the healthful rearing of an
infant.