Budge & Toddie; Or, Helen's Babies at Play

THE MAID’S GENERAL CARE OF THE BOYS
Budge & Toddie or Helen’s Babies at Play
Being an account of the further doings of these marvelously precocious children. By John Habberton Author of Helen’s Babies, etc., etc..
With fifty illustrations by Tod Dwiggins
Grosset and Dunlap New York
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY GROSSET & DUNLAP
BUDGE & TODDIE
The Author of “Helen’s Babies” dedicated that book “To the Parents of the Best Children in the World”; and his commercial hint appended thereunto was so generally taken, that he is impelled by selfishness to seek even a larger class to which to inscribe the present volume. He therefore dedicates it to
Those Who Know How to Manage Other People’s Children .
The many indulgent men and women who liked “Helen’s Babies” so well that they wished they had written it themselves would have changed their minds could they have been compelled to read criticisms of a certain kind that were inflicted upon the author as soon as his name and mail address became known. Some people were in such haste to relieve their minds that they rushed into print with their charges and specifications, all of which were of service to the book, as so much free advertising; at least, the publisher said it was, and his opinion on such a matter was entitled to special respect.
Some of the critics were parents of the earnest, forceful, but matter-of-fact kind that does not doubt its own infallibility in family government and regards all children as scions of one unchanging stock and needing to be treated exactly alike, no matter in what direction their tendencies may be. A larger number were unmarried persons with theories of their own which had not been marred in whole or in part by anything so utterly commonplace and exasperating as experience. These good people, whether uncles or aunts of children over whom they were not allowed to exercise any authority, or mere bachelors and maids unattached to anybody’ babies of any kind, joined in abusing Budge and Toddie as the worst trained children that ever were tossed into print and in declaring the boys’s Uncle Harry incomparably incapable as a disciplinarian, unless, indeed, the parents of Budge and Toddie were still less competent to bring up children in the way they should go.