So she bandaged the child every morning, and I as regularly took it off.  It has been fully proved since to be as useless an appendage as the vermiform.  She had several cups with various concoctions of herbs standing on the chimney-corner, ready for insomnia, colic, indigestion, etc., etc., all of which were spirited away when she was at her dinner.  In vain I told her we were homeopathists, and afraid of everything in the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms lower than the two-hundredth dilution.  I tried to explain the Hahnemann system of therapeutics, the philosophy of the principle similia similibus curantur, but she had no capacity for first principles, and did not understand my discourse.  I told her that, if she would wash the baby’s mouth with pure cold water morning and night and give it a teaspoonful to drink occasionally during the day, there would be no danger of red gum; that if she would keep the blinds open and let in the air and sunshine, keep the temperature of the room at sixty-five degrees, leave the child’s head uncovered so that it could breathe freely, stop rocking and trotting it and singing such melancholy hymns as “Hark, from the tombs a doleful sound!” the baby and I would both be able to weather the cape without a bandage.  I told her I should nurse the child once in two hours, and that she must not feed it any of her nostrums in the meantime; that a child’s stomach, being made on the same general plan as our own, needed intervals of rest as well as ours.  She said it would be racked with colic if the stomach was empty any length of time, and that it would surely have rickets if it were kept too still.  I told her if the child had no anodynes, nature would regulate its sleep and motions.  She said she could not stay in a room with the thermometer at sixty-five degrees, so I told her to sit in the next room and regulate the heat to suit herself; that I would ring a bell when her services were needed.

The reader will wonder, no doubt, that I kept such a cantankerous servant.  I could get no other.  Dear “Mother Monroe,” as wise as she was good, and as tender as she was strong, who had nursed two generations of mothers in our village, was engaged at that time, and I was compelled to take an exotic.  I had often watched “Mother Monroe” with admiration, as she turned and twisted my sister’s baby.  It lay as peacefully in her hands as if they were lined with eider down.  She bathed and dressed it by easy stages, turning the child over and over like a pancake.  But she was so full of the magnetism of human love, giving the child, all the time, the most consoling assurance that the operation was to be a short one, that the whole proceeding was quite entertaining to the observer and seemingly agreeable to the child, though it had a rather surprised look as it took a bird’s-eye view, in quick succession, of the ceiling and the floor.  Still my nurse had her good points.  She was very pleasant when