the batteries, and advanced with steady tread; but when he turned on the terrors of his war-whoop you advanced in the other direction, and mighty glad of the chance, too.  When he called for soothing-syrup, did you venture to throw out any side remarks about certain services being unbecoming an officer and a gentleman?  No.  You got up and got it.  When he ordered his pap-bottle and it was not warm, did you talk back?  Not you.  You went to work and warmed it.  You even descended so far in your menial office as to take a suck at that warm, insipid stuff yourself, to see if it was right—­three parts water to one of milk, a touch of sugar to modify the colic, and a drop of peppermint to kill those hiccoughs.  I can taste that stuff yet.  And how many things you learned as you went along!  Sentimental young folks still take stock in that beautiful old saying that when the baby smiles in his sleep, it is because the angels are whispering to him.  Very pretty, but too thin—­simply wind on the stomach, my friends.  If the baby proposed to take a walk at his usual hour, two o’clock in the morning, didn’t you rise up promptly and remark, with a mental addition which would not improve a Sunday-school book much, that that was the very thing you were about to propose yourself?  Oh! you were under good discipline, and as you went fluttering up and down the room in your undress uniform, you not only prattled undignified baby-talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to sing!  —­“Rock-a-by baby in the treetop,” for instance.  What a spectacle for an Army of the Tennessee!  And what an affliction for the neighbors, too; for it is not everybody within a mile around that likes military music at three in the morning.  And when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or three hours, and your little velvet-head intimated that nothing suited him like exercise and noise, what did you do? ["Go on!”] You simply went on until you dropped in the last ditch.  The idea that a baby doesn’t amount to anything!  Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself.  One baby can furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to.  He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities.  Do what you please, you can’t make him stay on the reservation.  Sufficient unto the day is one baby.  As long as you are in your right mind don’t you ever pray for twins.  Twins amount to a permanent riot.  And there ain’t any real difference between triplets and an insurrection.

Yes, it was high time for a toast-master to recognize the importance of the babies.  Think what is in store for the present crop!  Fifty years from now we shall all be dead, I trust, and then this flag, if it still survive (and let us hope it may), will be floating over a Republic numbering 200,000,000 souls, according to the settled laws of our increase.  Our present schooner of State will have grown into a political leviathan—­a Great Eastern.