So I went on my mission of mercy and found the child bandaged as tight as a drum.  When I took out the pins and unrolled it, it fairly popped like the cork out of a champagne bottle.  I rubbed its breast and its back and soon soothed it to sleep.  I remained a long time, telling them how to take care of the child and the mother, too.  I told them everything I could think of in regard to clothes, diet, and pure air.  I asked the mother why she bandaged her child as she did.  She said her nurse told her that there was danger of hernia unless the abdomen was well bandaged.  I told her that the only object of a bandage was to protect the navel, for a few days, until it was healed, and for that purpose all that was necessary was a piece of linen four inches square, well oiled, folded four times double, with a hole in the center, laid over it.  I remembered, next day, that I forgot to tell them to give the child water, and so I telegraphed them, “Give the baby water six times a day.”  I heard of that baby afterward.  It lived and flourished, and the parents knew how to administer to the wants of the next one.  The father was a telegraph operator and had many friends—­knights of the key—­throughout Iowa.  For many years afterward, in leisure moments, these knights would “call up” this parent and say, over the wire, “Give the baby water six times a day.”  Thus did they “repeat the story, and spread the truth from pole to pole.”

CHAPTER VIII.

BOSTON AND CHELSEA.

In the autumn of 1843 my husband was admitted to the bar and commenced the practice of law in Boston with Mr. Bowles, brother-in-law of the late General John A. Dix.  This gave me the opportunity to make many pleasant acquaintances among the lawyers in Boston, and to meet, intimately, many of the noble men and women among reformers, whom I had long worshiped at a distance.  Here, for the first time, I met Lydia Maria Child, Abby Kelly, Paulina Wright, Elizabeth Peabody, Maria Chapman and her beautiful sisters, the Misses Weston, Oliver and Marianna Johnson, Joseph and Thankful Southwick and their three bright daughters.  The home of the Southwicks was always a harbor of rest for the weary, where the anti-slavery hosts were wont to congregate, and where one was always sure to meet someone worth knowing.  Their hospitality was generous to an extreme, and so boundless that they were, at last, fairly eaten out of house and home.  Here, too, for the first time, I met Theodore Parker, John Pierpont, John G. Whittier, Emerson, Alcott, Lowell, Hawthorne, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel E. Sewall, Sidney Howard Gay, Pillsbury, Foster, Frederick Douglass, and last though not least, those noble men, Charles Hovey and Francis Jackson, the only men who ever left any money to the cause of woman suffrage.  I also met Miss Jackson, afterward Mrs. Eddy, who left half her fortune, fifty thousand dollars, for the same purpose.