Peddler

“ We will suppose, now, that the [19] faithful horse, guided by something which, for want of a better name, people generally call instinct, but which seems to me a good deal like reason, has stopped at the door of a house. The peddler, taking good care to carry along with him the tin trunks before mentioned, leaves the wagon, and goes into the house, the faithful mare, in the meantime, leisurely grazing, if it is summer, and stamping and kicking, just for exercise, in order to keep warm, if it is winter.
"Any tin ware to-day, madam?" the peddler asks. ”

“ Then the genuine peddler is always provided with two tin trunks, I believe—trunks which are large enough to hold about half a bushel each. These trunks are stored full of little knick-knacks, "too numerous to mention," as the dealer in dry goods has it in his advertisement.
The peddler does not often drive his [17] trade in the city. He finds the country the best place for him. So you generally come across him where there are not many stores, and where the houses are not very close together. He stops before the door of a house. ”

“ About midnight he woke up at the sound of voices in the next room, and heard the mother saying:—"I want you to be very careful how you treat the peddler, and not to use any of your coarse language to him. Although he looks only a common man, I am sure he is a gentleman, for he has a refined way with him that shows he must have come from no mean family. ”

“ It seems that everybody there rides in them everywhere they go, and it appears funny to them to see anyone walking the streets. Peddlers are the exceptions, it seems, to this rule. A great many peddlers are seen walking the streets to vend their wares, and they have a great many articles that cannot be bought in America. ”

“ My boy is just two, and such a yell of delight when he finds a 'bow-wow,' as he calls the dog, all to himself, would astonish a Piute Indian. I don't have to keep any 'cramp drops,' 'baby jumpers' or 'patent food,' (?) for the children. I find they never have an ail or grievance, but 'The Nursery' acts as a specific. I wish every mother in the land would give it to her children on trial. And really it makes old people feel quite sunny. ”

“ The baby was quiet now, gnawing the dog-biscuit. The old lady looked at the child, then turned and hid her face against the chambermaid's bosom.
“What is it?” she says, speaking in an awed voice. “The thing in the hamper?”
“It's a baby, Ma'am,” says the maid.
“You're sure it ain't a dog?” says the old lady. “Look again.”
The girl began to feel nervous, and to wish that she wasn't alone with the old lady.
“I ain't likely to mistake a dog for a baby, Ma'am,” says the girl. “It's a child—a human infant.”
The old lady began to cry softly. “It's a judgment on me,” she says. ”

“ The note arriving at maturity, the diddler, with the diddler’s dog, calls upon the friend, and the promise to pay is made the topic of discussion. The friend produces it from his escritoire, and is in the act of reaching it to the diddler, when up jumps the diddler’s dog and devours it forthwith. The diddler is not only surprised but vexed and incensed at the absurd behavior of his dog, and expresses his entire readiness to cancel the obligation at any moment when the evidence of the obligation shall be forthcoming. ”

“ She must, moreover, not only originate, herself, modes of amusing the imagination of her children, but must fall in with and aid those which they originate. If your little daughter is playing with her doll, look up from your work and say a few words to the doll or the child in a grave and serious manner, assuming that the doll is a living and sentient being. If your boy is playing horses in the garden while you are there attending to your flowers, ask him with all gravity what he values his horse at, and whether he wishes to sell him. ”

“ Hence the supreme importance of the doll and the doll's perambulator. The doll will be treated exactly as the child is treated by the nurse. It will be washed, and dressed, and weighed, and put to bed in faithful reproduction of what the child has daily experienced. Dusting, and sweeping, and laying the table will be exactly copied. If a child has no opportunity of being familiar with horses, if he has not seen them fed, and watered, and groomed, and harnessed, he may not find any great satisfaction in a toy horse, or pay much attention to it, no matter how costly or realistic it may be. ”

“ I took it to be a bull-pup of about nine months old, and a fine specimen for its age.
“My child!” he shrieks, with his eyes starting out of his head, “That thing isn't my child. What's happened? Am I going mad?”
“You're on that way,” I says, and so he was. “Calm yourself,” I says; “what did you expect to see?”
“My child,” he shrieks again; “my only child—my baby!”
“Do you mean a real child?” I says, “a human child?” Some folks have such a silly way of talking about their dogs—you never can tell.
“Of course I do,” he says ”

“ And if nature had been niggardly in one respect, she had been generous in others; Toddles, for all his size, possessed the heart of a lion and the strength of a young ox, and he used both, with black and bloody effect, on the eyes and noses of the call-boys and younger element who called him Toddles. ”

“ Toddle, toddle, waddle, waddle,
On her little pinky toes.
Stumble, stumble, pitch and tumble,
That's the way the baby goes.
Prattle, prattle, rattle, rattle,
Little shouts and little shrieks,
Tears, with laughter coming after,
That's the way the baby speaks.
Playing, toying, still enjoying
Every sweet that Nature gives.
Smiling, weeping, waking, sleeping,
That's the way the baby lives. ”

“ Your girl goes wet-footed with a light heart, and you never see a telegraph messenger coming to the house without expecting to hear that your boy at school has broken his arm at football or his neck bird's-nesting. They follow their mischievous devices, and you can't help it; you can only cluck and fuss like a futile hen running round the pond in which her brood of ducklings is splashing. That's worse than baby-rearing, because you can at least do what you like with a baby. ”

“ The baby is fastened on its mother's or its sister's shoulders by a shawl, and that serves it for both cot and cradle. The little girl does not lose a single scrap of her play because of the baby. She runs here and there, striking with her battledore, or racing after her friends, and the baby swings to and fro on her shoulders, its little head wobbling from side to side as if it were going to tumble off. ”

“ We shall see hundreds of small children, not more than five or six years of age, carrying, fast asleep on their shoulders, the baby of the household, its tiny smooth brown head swinging hither and thither with every movement of its small nurse, who walks, runs, sits, or jumps, flies kites, plays hop-scotch, and fishes for frogs in the gutter, totally oblivious of that infantile charge, whether sleeping or waking. If no young sister or brother be available, the husband, the uncle, the father, or grandfather hitches on his back the baby, preternaturally good and contented. ”

“ At one place, where I put up for a day, just to see how I liked it, there was a dog; and at another, which would otherwise have done admirably, they kept a baby. Whatever you do, never stop at a house where they keep a baby. If a child pulls your tail or ties a paper bag round your head, you can give it one for itself and nobody blames you. ”

“ My dear little woman, the child is not going to die every time it sneezes, the house is not bound to get burned down and the nurse run away with a soldier every time you go outside the front door; nor the cat sure to come and sit on the precious child’s chest the moment you leave the bedside. You worry yourself a good deal too much about that solitary chick, and you worry everybody else too. Try and think of your other duties, and your pretty face will not be always puckered into wrinkles, and there will be cheerfulness in the parlor as well as in the nursery. Think of your big baby a little. ”

“ A white-headed baby lay in the old blue cradle that had rocked seven other babies, now and then lifting his head to look out, like a round, full moon, then subsided to kick and crow contentedly, and suck the rosy apple he had no teeth to bite. ”

“ But the dog’s virtue and faithfulness are not told less clearly; the baby evidently uses the creature just as much for a pillow as a playmate;—buries its arm in the rough hair of it with a loving confidence, half already converting itself to protection: and baby will take care of dog, and dog of baby, through all chances of time and fortune. ”

“ What the good little mother found the most trouble from, in the extreme smallness and delicacy of the limbs of her new-born doll baby, was the impossibility of swathing and dressing it. So she was forced to resign herself to doing as the birds do, and bring up her little one on a bed of moss and down. ”

“ The infant is carried by the mother almost continuously during the waking hours of its first year of life; it is generally suspended in a sling made of wood or of basket-work, resembling in shape the baby's swing familiar in our nurseries ”

“ Occasionally Infant received a shock from the growth of young children. It was so astonishing to see a creature who was a baby but a short time ago, shooting aloft, long-armed and long-legged, and announcing itself in the teens. Such phenomena did not astonish Rilla, however. ”

“ I don’t expect to pet and fondle them—I haven’t any of that motherly instinct—and I intend to bring them up to be neat and orderly, but they shall have their plays and fun too, for children need it; they can have their games in the garden in pleasant weather and in their own room when it storms. ”

“ You must not suppose that all the children were able to scamper out. There were ever so many babies, that looked just like little bits of pink pigs. Those from the city had nurses, but those from the country had not. [Pg 122]
"'It is time for my baby's morning nap,' said the city mouse, looking at her watch. 'Dear me! is there no cradle?'
"Then Grandmamma sent to the lumber room, and had one her children once used brought out. It was half of a peach-pit, which, when lined with soft paper, made an excellent bed for the fretful baby mouse. ”

“ Can we help suspecting a period, somewhere in the remote ages, when the baby’s ancestry dwelt amid the treetops, and learned to stand by balancing on one branch while they held by a higher one? when they edged along the branch, holding on above, but dropped to all-fours and crept when they came to the ground now and then to get from tree to tree? The whole history of the baby’s movements points to this: the strong arms and clinging hands, from birth; the intense impulse to pull up, even from the beginning of sitting; the way in which standing always begins, by laying hold above and pulling up ”

“ The child becomes a youth, and the youth becomes man, by virtue of a process not so very different from that which transforms the caterpillar into a butterfly or the tadpole into a frog. As truly as the caterpillar takes on wings, and the tadpole lungs and limbs, of which neither had any trace before, the child and the boy take on not only habits and instincts and ways of getting on in the world, but actual new structure as well. ”

“ In the first year of his life he crawls about without clothes, and I have more than once seen a mother give a child of this age a sharp knife, a foot long, to play with. As soon as he walks his infantine amusements are those which prepare him for the occupations of his future life: with a lasso made of twine he tries to catch little birds or the dogs as they walk in and out of the hut. ”

“ You may be a looker, but you ain't anybody's baby doll. If a feller calls you 'childie' or 'sweet lamb' or tells you you're the peacherino in the peach basket, don't you answer back, but just smile and wend your ways. If he goes so far as to put his arm around your waist or take a nip with his nails out of your arm or hip, why, then you can land him one on the napper if nobody's lookin'. ”

“ Sweet and palatable is it to the other sex, and sweetly can Paddy, with his deluding ways, administer it to them from the top of his mellifluous tongue, as a dove feeds her young, or as a kind mother her babe, shaping with her own pretty mouth every morse of the delicate viands before it goes into that of the infant. ”

“ The baby was blinking happily up at a great fat golden beetle that was making a lazy way up the wattle. It had lost its ‘comforter’ and was sucking its thumb thoughtfully. It had kicked off its white knitted boots, and was curling its pink toes up in the sunshine with great enjoyment.
‘Baby!’ Larrie said. ”

“ Such pains disturb and haunt his fancy, and dishearten him. Courage and serene joy give strength and enterprise to activity.
The nursery and kindergarten education are the preliminary processes which foreshadow all the processes of the Divine Providence. Therefore, even in the nursery we play antagonizing processes. We heighten the child's enjoyment [203] by making him conscious of isolation a moment, to restore, as it were, with a shout, the delightful sense of relation; for the baby likes to have a handkerchief thrown over his head unexpectedly, and suddenly withdrawn again and again. ”

“ I resolved, finally, to "take my life in my hands," brave those unreasoning parents, and place the infant out of the way of cats and boys.
As I reached the doorstep I saw that the youngster had begun to climb the trunk of a locust-tree. I stood in amazement and saw that baby climb six feet straight up the trunk. He did it by flying a few inches, clinging to the bark and resting, then flying a few inches more. I watched, breathless, till he got nearly to the lowest branch, when alas! his strength or his courage gave out, and he fell back to the ground. ”

“ Though the children had been only a little time in the kindergarten, and were not fully baptized into the spirit of play, still the boys were generally willing to personate the father bird, since their delight in the active and manly occupation of flying about the room seeking worms overshadowed their natural repugnance to feeding the young. ”