THE NURSE’S DAY OUT.
We all know that “nobody is to blame” when a railroad accident occurs. The same is true of waking up a baby. Mothers know what delicate management is often required to lull baby to sleep. How many tunes have sometimes to be hummed, how many walkings up and down the floor, how many trottings, how many rockings, how many feedings, before this desirable event comes off. At last the little lids give promise of drooping, the little waxen paws fall helpless, the little kicking toes are quiescent, mamma draws a breath of relief, as she pushes her hair off her heated face, and baby looks as if nothing on earth could ever disturb its serenity. Won’t there? Tramp, tramp, tramp, comes the baby’s papa up stairs with a pair of creaking boots. Mamma rushes to the nursery door, with warning forefinger on her lips and an imploring “John, dear, the baby! it is the nurse’s day out—pray don’t wake her up.” “John, dear,” true to his sex, creaks on, and argues this wise, “My dear, I’ve often noticed that it isn’t that kind of noise that ever wakes baby.” Of course, mamma is too much of a woman not to know that a man is never mistaken even with regard to a subject he knows nothing about; but it strikes her that sometimes strategy is a good thing; so the next day she places his slippers below stairs in a very conspicuous and tempting position, trusting that his tired feet may naturally seek that relief. I say naturally, because she knows that he would as soon thrust his feet into two pots of boiling water as put them in those slippers, if he thought the idea came from a female mind, so naturally does the male creature hedge about his godlike dignity. Well, the baby is quieted and patted down again; when in comes its aunty, and begins to brush the lint off her dress with a stiff scraping sound. To a remonstrance she replies, “Just as if that noise could wake up baby;” and while she yet speaks, up go the little fat hands in the air, and the eyelids struggle to unclose, and mamma begins humming again “Yankee Doodle” or “Old Hundred,” saucy or sacerdotal, no matter which, it is all the same to Morpheus. This accomplished she creeps on tiptoe away from the bed, congratulating herself that now certainly she can get a breathing spell and time to change her morning dress. Just then “dear John” appears again, and wants something; a bit of string, or a bottle, maybe, but whatever it is, he is sure it is on the top shelf in the closet of that room; and though he is not going to use it immediately, he wants it found immediately because—he wants it! and because, though “impatient woman can never wait an instant for anything,” man is very like her in that respect, though he don’t see it. So the search is instituted, and down tumbles one thing and then another off the shelves, rattling and rustling and bumping, and finally it is discovered that “the pesky thing” isn’t there, but is down in the kitchen cupboard; this piece of information dear John conveys to his wife in a shrill “sissing” whisper, “because a whisper,” he says, how loud soever, “never yet woke up a baby!”
Just then the large violet eyes unclose and the little mouth dimples into a pretty smile of recognition, and “dear John,” whose attention is called to it, exclaims, peeping into the crib, “Well now, who’d have thought it?” and creaks off down stairs after his bottle or ball of string as calm as a philosopher; and then asks his wife at dinner “if she has mended that lining in his coat-sleeve that he spoke about at breakfast time.”