Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 July 1891 — A MARKED DIFFERENCE. [ARTICLE]

A MARKED DIFFERENCE.

Between the Way a Man Carries a Baby and the Way of » Woman. Did any one ever notice with what exquisite ease and grace a mother carries a child? There’s no poetry of motion in all the Delsarte system equal to it. A big, strong man lugs a baby along as If it were a bundel of pig iron. A slight, frail little woman swings it up on her shoulder and poises it like a nosegay, or, better still, a veritable part of herself. A woman isn’t suppose to be mindful of the charms, of her sisters, but the heart of a man somehow gives a leap of the cleanest, purest kind of admiration when one of those slight, frail little women trips alongside with a baby balanced on her shoulder in that comfortable way a real womanly woman manages it. In a little country meeting house the other day there was a military funeral. The drum major of the village band sat in a post of honor surrounded by his resplendant corps, and in his lap held two little whitecapped mites of humanity that hadn't been here very long. Up ln the choir loft a little woman smiled down upon them encouragingly with eyes exactly like the eyes beneath the little white caps. Directly the closing hymn was finished and the muffled beat of the drum sounded the signal for the band to follow the flag draped casket, that little woman, with a swift tide of color sweeping over her face, fluttered down the steps, in and out among the horny handed “bearers” across the church to where the father sat with both infants sound asleep. Without waking either, she tossed the one up on one shoulder just where its little sleepy head fell in the hollow of her shoulder against her neck, tucked the other one underone arm, but somehow so comfortably it never wakened. Then she tripped smilingly down the aisle so swiftly and lighted and gracefully that, though she wasn’t exactly a pretty woman,and hqd had both babies since she had bought a new bonnet, and the seams in her dress bodice weren’t the right shape at all, any painter or poet or man with an ounce of blood in his veins would have envied the fellow in the bearskin, who seemed a little bit ashamed.