“TAKE CARE OF HIM.”

“Take care of him!” That sentence has been my ruin; from my cradle upwards it has dogged my steps and proved my bane!  Fatal injunction!  Little did my parents think of the miseries those four small monosyllables have entailed upon their hapless son!

My first assertion of infantine existence, that innocent and feeble wail that claimed the name of life, was met by the command, “Take care of him! take care of him!” said my mother to the doctor; “Take care of him!” said the doctor to the nurse; and “Take care of him!” added my delighted father to every individual of the rejoicing household.

The doctor’s care manifested itself in an over-dose of castor oil; the nurse, in the plenitude of her bounty, nearly parboiled me in an over-heated bath; my mother drugged me with a villanous decoction of soothing syrup, which brought on a slumber so sound that the first had very nearly proved my last; and the entire household dandled me with such uncommon vigour that I was literally tossed and “Catchee-catchee’d” into a fit of most violent convulsions.  As I persisted in surviving, so did I become the heir to fresh torments from the ceaseless care of those by whom I was surrounded.  My future symmetry was superinduced by bandaging my infant limbs until I looked like a miniature mummy.  The summer’s sun was too hot and the winter’s blast too cold; wet was death, and dry weather was attended with easterly winds.  I was “taken care of.”  I never breathed the fresh air of Heaven, but lived in an artificial nursery atmosphere of sea-coal and logs.

Young limbs are soon broken, and young children will fall, if not taken care of; consequently upon any instinctive attempt at a pedestrian performance I was tied round the middle with a broad ribbon, my unhappy little feet see-sawing in the air, and barely brushing the ruffled surface of the Persian carpet, while I appeared like a tempting bait, with which my nurse, after the manner of an experienced angler, was bobbing for some of the strange monsters worked into the gorgeous pattern.

Crooked legs were “taken care of” by a brace of symmetrical iron shackles, and Brobdignag walnut-shells, decorated with flaming bows of crimson ribbon, were attached to each side of my small face, to prevent me from squinting.  When old enough to mount a pony, I was “taken such care of,” by being secured to the saddle, that the restive little brute, feeling inclined for a tumble, deliberately rolled over me some half-dozen times before the astonished stable-boy could effect my deliverance! while the corks with which I was provided to learn to swim in some three feet square of water, slipped accidentally down to my toes, and left me submerged so long that the total consumption of all the salt, and wetting in boiling water of all the blankets, in the house was found absolutely necessary to effect my resuscitation.