Now we come to the treatments; and here again the parallelism is so close as to be ludicrous.  The lancet and the rubber ring fail.  We are still restless, and scream and cry.  Then our self-sacrificing nurses walk with us; they rock us, they swing us, they toss us up and down, they jounce us from top to bottom, till the wonder is that every organ in our bodies is not displaced.  They beat on glass and tin and iron to distract our attention and drown out our noise by a bigger one; they shake back and forth before our eyes all things that glitter and blaze; they shout and sing songs; the house and the neighborhood are searched and racked for something which will “amuse” the baby.  Then, when we will no longer be “amused,” and when all this restlessness outside and around us, added to the restlessness inside us, has driven us more than frantic, and the day or the night of their well-meant clamor is nearly over, their strength worn out, and their wits at end,—­then comes the “soothing syrup,” deadliest weapon of all.  This we cannot resist.  If there be they who are mighty enough to pour it down our throats, physically or spiritually, to sleep we must go, and asleep we must stay so long as the effect of the dose lasts.

It is of this, we oftenest die,—­not in a day or a year, but after many days and many years; when in some sharp crisis we need for our salvation the force which should have been developing in our infancy, the muscle or the nerve which should have been steadily growing strong till that moment.  But the force is not there; the muscle is weak; the nerve paralyzed; and we die at twenty of a light fever, we fall down at twenty, under sudden grief or temptation, because of our long sleeps under soothing syrups when we were babies.

Oh, good nurses and doctors of souls, let them cut their own teeth, in the natural ways.  Let them scream if they must, but keep you still on one side; give them no false helps; let them alone so far as it is possible for love and sympathy to do so.  Man is the only animal that has trouble from the growing of the teeth in his body.  It must be his own fault somehow that he has that; and he has evidently been always conscious of a likeness between this difficulty and perversion of a process natural to his body, and the difficulty and perversion of his getting sensible and just opinions; for it has passed into the immortality of a proverb that a shrewd man is a man who has “cut his eye-teeth;” and the four last teeth, which we get late in life, and which cost many people days of real illness, are called in all tongues, all countries, “wisdom teeth!”

Glass Houses.

Who would live in one, if he could help it?  And who wants to throw stones?

But who lives in any thing else, nowadays?  And how much better off are they who never threw a stone in their lives than the rude mob who throw them all the time?

Really, the proverb might as well be blotted out from our books and dropped from our speech.  It has no longer use or meaning.