These are some of the answers of the folk to the question of
Shakespeare:—
"What's the matter,
That this distempered messenger of wet,
The many-coloured Iris, rounds thine eye?"
And many more are there that run along the lines of Scott's epigrammatic summation:—
"A child will weep a bramble's smart,
A maid to see her sparrow part,
A stripling for a woman's heart:
But woe betide a country, when
She sees the tears of bearded men."
Cradles.
According to Mr. Powers: "The conspicuous painstaking which the Modok squaw expends upon her baby-basket is an index of her maternal love. And indeed the Modok are strongly attached to their offspring,—a fact abundantly attested by many sad and mournful spectacles witnessed in the closing scenes of the war of 1873. On the other hand, a California squaw often carelessly sets her baby in a deep, conical basket, the same in which she carries her household effects, leaving him loose and liable to fall out. If she makes a baby-basket, it is totally devoid of ornament; and one tribe, the Miwok, contemptuously call it 'the dog's nest.' It is among Indians like these that we hear of infanticide" (519. 257).
The subject of children's cradles, baby-baskets, baby-boards, and the methods of manipulating and carrying the infant in connection therewith, have been treated of in great detail by Ploss (325), Pokrovski, and Mason (306), the second of whom has written especially of the cradles in use among the various peoples of European and Asiatic Eussia, with a general view of those employed by other races, the last with particular reference to the American aborigines. The work is illustrated, as is also that of Ploss, with many engravings. Professor Mason thus briefly sums up the various purposes which the different species of cradle subserve (306. 161-162):—
"(1) It is a mere nest for the helpless infant.
"(2) It is a bed so constructed and manipulated as to enable the child to sleep either in a vertical or a horizontal position.
"(3) It is a vehicle in which the child is to be transported, chiefly on the mother's back by means of a strap over the forehead, but frequently dangling like a bundle at the saddle-bow. This function, of course, always modifies the structure of the cradle, and, indeed, may have determined its very existence among nomadic tribes.