I wonder if my boys, when they are grown and begin to realize woman, will care to look into this book of mine, and read in and between the lines of its jumble of scraps and letters what their mother thought of them, and how things appeared to her in the days of their babyhood.  Perhaps; who knows?  At present, being but five years old, they are centred in whatever thing the particular day brings forth, and but that they are leashed fast by an almost prenatal and unconscious affection, they are as unlike in disposition, temperament, and colouring as they are alike in feature.  Richard is dark, like father and me, very quiet, except in the matter of affection, in which he is clingingly demonstrative, slow to receive impressions, but withal tenacious.  He clearly inherits father’s medical instinct of preserving life, and the very thought of suffering on the part of man or beast arouses him to action.  When he was only a little over three years old, I found him carefully mending some windfall robins’ eggs, cracked by their tumble, with bits of rubber sticking-plaster, then putting them hopefully back into the nest, with an admonition to the anxious parents to “sit very still and don’t stwatch.”  While last summer he unfortunately saw a chicken decapitated over at the farm barn, and, in Martha Corkle’s language, “the way he wound a bit o’ paper round its poor neck to stop its bleedin’ went straight to my stummick, so it did, Mrs. Evan;” for be it said here that Martha has fulfilled my wildest expectations, and whereas, as queen of the kitchen, she was a trifle unexpected and uncomfortable, as Mrs. Timothy Saunders, now comfortably settled in the new cottage above the stable at the north corner of the hayland, she is a veritable guardian angel, ready to swoop down with strong wings at a moment’s notice, in sickness or health, day or night, and seize the nursery helm.

It is owing to her that I have never been obliged to have a nursemaid under my feet or tagging after the boys, to the ruin of their independence.  For the first few years Effie, whose fiery locks have not yet found their affinity, helped me, but now merely sees to buttons, strings, and darns.

I found out long ago that those who get the best return from their flower gardens were those who kept no gardeners, and it is the same way with the child garden; those who are too overbusy, irresponsible, ignorant, or rich to do without the orthodox nurse, never can know precisely what they lose.  To watch a baby untrammelled with clothes, dimple, glow, and expand in its bath, is in an intense personal degree like watching, early of a June morning, the first opening bud of a rose that you have coaxed and raised from a mere cutting.  You hoped and believed that it would be fair and beautiful, but ah, what a glorious surprise it is!