Now, the “patented self-rockers,” no doubt, have their proper use; but go up with me into the garret of your old homestead, and exhume the cradle that you, a good while ago, slept in.  The rockers are somewhat rough, as though a farmer’s plane had fashioned them, and the sides just high enough for a child to learn to walk by.  What a homely thing, take it all in all!  You say:  Stop your depreciation!  We were all rocked in that.  For about fifteen years that cradle was going much of the time.  When the older child was taken out, a smaller child was put in.  The crackle of the rockers is pleasant yet in my ears.  There I took my first lessons in music as mother sang to me.  Have heard what you would call far better singing since then, but none that so thoroughly touched me.  She never got five hundred dollars per night for singing three songs at the Academy, with two or three encores grudgefully thrown in; but without pay she sometimes sang all night, and came out whenever encored, though she had only two little ears for an audience.  It was a low, subdued tone that sings to me yet across thirty-five years.

You see the edge of that rocker worn quite deep?  That is where her foot was placed while she sat with her knitting or sewing, on summer afternoons, while the bees hummed at the door and the shout of the boy at the oxen was heard afield.  From the way the rocker is worn, I think that sometimes the foot must have been very tired and the ankle very sore; but I do not think she stopped for that.  When such a cradle as that got a-going, it kept on for years.

Scarlet-fever came in the door, and we all had it; and oh, how the cradle did go!  We contended as to who should lie in it, for sickness, you know, makes babies of us all.  But after a while we surrendered it to Charlie.  He was too old to lie in it, but he seemed so very, very sick; and with him in the cradle it was “Rock!” “Rock!” “Rock!” But one day, just as long ago as you can remember, the cradle stopped.  When a child is asleep, there is no need of rocking.  Charlie was asleep.  He was sound asleep.  Nothing would wake him.  He needed taking up.  Mother was too weak to do it.  The neighbors came in to do that, and put a flower, fresh out of the garden-dew, between the two still hands.  The fever had gone out of the cheek, and left it white, very white—­the rose exchanged for the lily.  There was one less to contend for the cradle.  It soon started again, and with a voice not quite so firm as before, but more tender, the old song came back:  “Bye! bye! bye!” which meant more to you than “Il Trovatore,” rendered by opera troupe in the presence of an American audience, all leaning forward and nodding to show how well they understood Italian.