There was a wooden canopy at the head of the old cradle that somehow got loose and was taken off.  But your infantile mind was most impressed with the face which much of the time hovered over you.  Other women sometimes looked in at the child, and said:  “That child’s hair will be red!” or, “What a peculiar chin!” or, “Do you think that child will live to grow up?” and although you were not old enough to understand their talk, by instinct you knew it was something disagreeable, and began to cry till the dear, sweet, familiar face again hovered and the rainbow arched the sky.  Oh, we never get away from the benediction of such a face!  It looks at us through storm and night.  It smiles all to pieces the world’s frown.  After thirty-five years of rough, tumbling on the world’s couch, it puts us in the cradle again, and hushes us as with the very lullaby of heaven.

Let the old cradle rest in the garret.  It has earned its quiet.  The hands that shook up its pillow have quit work.  The foot that kept the rocker in motion is through with its journey.  The face that hovered has been veiled from mortal sight.  Cradle of blessed memories!  Cradle that soothed so many little griefs!  Cradle that kindled so many hopes!  Cradle that rested so many fatigues!  Sleep now thyself, after so many years of putting others to sleep!

One of the great wants of the age is the right kind of a cradle and the right kind of a foot to rock it.  We are opposed to the usurpation of “patented self-rockers.”  When I hear a boy calling his grandfather “old daddy,” and see the youngster whacking his mother across the face because she will not let him have ice-cream and lemonade in the same stomach, and at some refusal holding his breath till he gets black in the face, so that to save the child from fits the mother is compelled to give him another dumpling, and he afterward goes out into the world stubborn, willful, selfish and intractable,—­I say that boy was brought up in a “patented self-rocker.”  The old-time mother would have put him down in the old-fashioned cradle, and sung to him,

  “Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,
  Holy angels guard thy bed;”

and if that did not take the spunk put of him would have laid him in an inverted position across her lap, with his face downward, and with a rousing spank made him more susceptible to the music.

When a mother, who ought to be most interested in training her children for usefulness and heaven, gives her chief time to fixing up her back hair, and is worried to death because the curls she bought are not of the same shade as the sparsely-settled locks of her own raising; and culturing the dromedarian hump of dry-goods on her back till, as she comes into church, a good old elder bursts into laughter behind his pocket-handkerchief, making the merriment sound as much like a sneeze as possible; her waking moments employed with discussions about polonaise, and vert-de-gris velvets, and ecru percale, and fringed guipure, and poufs, and sashes, and rose-de-chene silks, and scalloped flounces; her happiness in being admired at balls and parties and receptions,—­you may know that she has thrown off the care of her children, that they are looking after themselves, that they are being brought up by machinery instead of loving hands—­in a word, that there is in her home a “patented self-rocker!”