forgot.  With that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men’s first children,—­frost-flowers of the early winter season,—­the old tutor’s students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and crying with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the plain crib in which his alter ego, as he used to say, was swinging, to hang over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working lips,—­in that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant’s life the character of a first old age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by.  The boys had remembered the old man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life.  There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical figures, and bearing on a shield the graven words, Ex dono pupillorum.  The handle on its side showed what use the boys had meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its destination.  Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate, strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the realities of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence and partiality of Nature,—­who has mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother’s heart, as compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine race.

But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rain-water.  An air-plant will grow by feeding on the winds.  Nay, those huge forests that overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the air-currents with which they are always battling.  The oak is but a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds the future vegetable world in solution.  The storm that tears its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred hurricanes.

Poor little Iris!  What had she in common with the great oak in the shadow of which we are losing sight of her?—­She lived and grew like that,—­this was all.  The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them with thin, pure blood.  Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as the white rosebud shows before it opens.  The doctor who had attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to “raise” her,—­“delicate child,”—­hoped she was not consumptive,—­thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.