of emulating the complying conduct of Osric the water-fly, whose early politeness was vouched for by the Lord Hamlet.  Bethink you, moreover, Don, of a wailing infant, full furnished with two rows of teeth—­and nothing to masticate! whereas he must have been more cruel than the “parient” of the Dinah celebrated in song as the young lady who did not marry Mr. Villikins, that does not have something ready for them to do by the time the molars and bicuspids appear.  I know the perils of dentition.  But have we not the whole family of carminatives?  Did the immortal Godfrey live and die in vain?  Did not a kind Providence vouchsafe to us a Daffy?  Are there not corals?  Are there not India-rubber rings?  And is there not the infinite tenderness and pity which we learn for the small, wailing sufferer, as, during the night which is not stilly, while the smouldering wick paints you, an immense, peripatetic silhouette, upon the wall, you pace to and fro the haunted chamber, and sing the song your mother sang while you were yet a child?  What a noble privilege of martyrdom!  What but parental love, deathless and irresistible, could tempt you thus, in drapery more classical than comfortable, to brave all dangers, to aggravate your rheumatism, to defy that celebrated god, Tirednature’ssweetrestorer, and to take your snatches of sleep a pied, a kind of fatherly walking Stewart, as if you were doing your thousand miles in a thousand hours for a thousand dollars, and were sure of winning the money?  Believe me, my friend, the world has many such martyrs, unknown, obscure, suffering men, whose names Rumor never blows through her miserable conch-shell,—­and I am one of them.  As Bully Bertram says, in Maturin’s pimento play,—­“I am a wretch, and proud of wretchedness.”  A child, the offspring of your own loins, is something worth watching for.  Such a father is your true Tapley; —­there is some credit in coming out jolly under such circumstances.  The unnatural parent, as those warning cries break the silence, may counterfeit Death’s counterfeit, and may even be guilty of the surpassing iniquity of simulating a snore. Nunquam dormio; I am like “The Sun” newspaper,—­sleepless, tireless, disturbed, but imperturbable.  I meet my fate, and find the pang a pleasant one.  And so may I ever be, through all febrile, cutaneous, and flatulent vicissitudes,—­careful of chicken-pox, mild with mumps and measles, unwearied during the weaning, growing tenderer with each succeeding rash, kinder with every cold, gentler with every grief, and sweeter-tempered with every sorrow sent to afflict my little woman!  ’Tis a rough world.  We must acclimate her considerately.