‘This is the pup that eat up the strap the woman used, all worn with care, who was wife to the man that toiled all day to fill the mouths of seven hungry children that didn’t get enough.
‘This is the cat that clawed the pup, that eat up the strap, the woman used, all worn with care, who was wife to the man that toiled all day to fill the mouths of seven hungry children that didn’t get enough.
‘This is the tank that drowned the cat, that clawed the pup, that eat up the strap the woman used, all worn with care, who was wife to the man that toiled all day to fill the mouths of seven hungry children that didn’t get enough.’
This melancholy record of the fortunes of the nineteenth-century representative peasant, was doubtless a variation of the legend of the old woman that lived in a shoe. Nevertheless it amused the little tots of twenty-first century time. For the extraordinary picture of seven little children inhabiting one poor little cottage appeared utterly absurd to their advanced minds, which could scarcely comprehend the folly of a poor man possessing more mouths to fill than was possible. ‘What did he want with all those?’ they innocently inquired.
But their nurse could only reply—‘She didn’t quite know: it was a way they had in nineteenth-century times.’
The laws of health were so strictly taught in all schools that no individual could possibly grow up ignorant on those points; and every man, mostly, knew how to take charge of his own body.
Nevertheless professors of medicine still flourished on the face of the earth; but the masculine sex had for generations past lost the monopoly of the profession.
As a rule, however, the lady doctor was in no greater demand than her male rival, men still holding their own to some extent; for the world will ever see those women who prefer men to dance attendance on them.
The profession was, indeed, pretty equally divided between the sexes; most mothers preferring females to prescribe for their children in times of dangerous sickness, believing that they were more successful in their treatment of the troubles of childhood. Besides, it followed as a natural consequence that as the lady accoucheur brought the child into the world, which was the invariable custom, it was only fair that she should have the medical care of the little one afterwards.
The serious infant mortality which prevailed among the lower orders up to the close of the nineteenth century, was now so reduced, that parents, as a rule, succeeded in rearing their families intact.