Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 May 1889 — GOD BLESS THE BABIES. [ARTICLE]

GOD BLESS THE BABIES.

They Are the Light and Joy of Oar Hearts and Homes. ■ g Detr it Free Press. , God bless the babies! What a] world this would be without them. What a souring and curdling up there would be of the milk of human kindneesdor want of an outlet if there were no little chernhs to caress and be foolish over. Often and often when entering, with some misgivings, the great hall of a new * plffca* ®y -heart has leaped np at the I sight of a tiny woolen bootee, a very rainbow oi hope, lying on the waxed floor, while the sight of a wrecked tin train, with to engine without funnel or wheels, has been as welcome as a card of invitation to a ball is to a young lady. Some girls are said to object to take work in-a family where there are children. They must be exceptional, as most people would prefer to live where there are one or two, as ‘♦where there are children theieis aye a roughness,” is a common saying, a “roughness,’ being north Irish for a liberal supply of provisions, and an absence of that economy which is styled “cheese paring.” In many houses the supply of babies seems rather in excess of the demand, though I have never met a mother who admitted it; in others the baby is sadly wanted. I lived once with a young couple who seemed to have everything in this World to make them happy—youth, good health,"good looks, plenty of money and a luxurious home. Yet one thing was missing in that grand house; there was .no.cradle thtwer—- — : —— wtf aai-vet y-sure that the sound of an mmfazit crying in the night, and with no language but a cry,” and the rocking of a cradle would have sounded sweeter than the warbling of a Patti. There is another place I know where the baby is of use. It is where grandpa and grandma sit together at the' hearth and watch the blazing fire while the shadows gather around them and peep at them from far corners. In that house the clock tick

very louilty and the cat purs with a volume of sound that has something of the effect produced by the endless rising and falling of the big wooden beaters in an Irish linen bleaching mill. The house is very quiet, and when grandpa wakes up with a little snore he lookß over at grandma apologetically but the good old lady has been taking forty winks herself, and never notices it. There is not much to talk about. Grandpa is not so warm on politics how as he used to be, and grandma does not follow up the fashions with the same eagerness as formerly. The favorite novels are no longer read; there is little romance in life at 77. The Bible is more thumbed than it was in the busy times thirty years ago, and the world is slipping away from these two old people.

There is not much to look forward to b*it a green mound under the elms, and: so the old people sit and perhaps pic- - ture to themselves a time when the quiet home will have a still deeper quietness upon it; when the day comes when one shall be taken and the other left. 1 But all this is changed when the baby grandchild comes and the busy feet trot and patter about the old passages and rooms. The clock is never heard ticking, for the shrill baby voice chatters and laughs incessantly, and the old cat flies around after a ball and string as if it were a kitten again. Grandma’s cap is all awry, for baby likes to “do up” grandma’s silvery curls in her own iashion, and grandpa must leave his cozy armchair to see all the “annamills” in baby’s Noah’s ark, and name them one by one like an elderly Adam, and by and by he geets interested over the yellow canary and spotted pig, and tells stories about them from Peter Parley and other writers of his youth, and forgets that he is 77 and has the asthma off and on.

God bless the baby! he is a better tonic than all the bitters over advertised. In another house I know where there is a little girls of nine years old, a spoiled only child, who is overdressed and underbred, and is rapidly developing a selfish and vain disposition fatal to her future happiness. I should like to see a baby brother there. He would put her “nose out of” joint” and improve her wonderfully. In six months’ time she would be pulling off her prettiest ribbons to deck the baby’s tiny sleeves and her bangles to hang on his chubby arms, aud would learn rnorp from the baby of the great lessons of human life, of the beauty of self sacrifice and the blessedness of giving than she ever would do from the nice professor who charges so many guineas a quarter for hia instructions. " Y oTpSTselngpin its last days as an illuminator,” said a well known Sew Yorker yesterday, “I reeard it aa having but joat been bora. For years the gas men made so much money, and bo easily, that their attitude toward reformers and inventors was one of hostility. Now electricity has aioused the torpid gasmen, and they are trying new materials for prodneing gas, new burners for saving it and increasing its illuminating power, and whatever else will improve it and increase their profits. The science of lighting by gas is on its own threshold. In a few years we will all be using it not only for lighting, bat for fuel. You rfhd I, and even people in tenements, will have pipes leading to oar kitchen stoves, just as they now lead to our parlors.”—N. Y. Son.