Then I felt the gentle pressure
Of a loving mother's arms.
"Go to sleep my little baby,
Go to sleep," mamma would say;
"O, will not my little baby
Go to sleep for ma to-day?"
When I read this little thing the other day it broke me alf up. It took me back to my childhood days when I lay in my little trundle bed, and was wakeful, and had a raging thirst, insomuch that I used to want a drink of water every fifteen seconds. Mamma didn't ask if I would "go to sleep for ma, to-day." She used to turn the bed-clothes back over the footboard, so that she could have plenty of sea room, and then she would take an old sewing-machine belt, and it would sigh through the agitated air for a few moments pretty plenty, till the writer of these lines would conclude to sob himself to sleep, and anon through the night he would dream that he had backed up against the Hill Smeltingg works. That's the kind of "Go to sleep for ma to-day," that comes up vividly to my mind.
But I must give another stanza or two from Julia's collection—as showing how this gifted writer can with a word dispel the chilling temperature of December, and run the thermometer up to 100 degrees in the shade. I will quote from the death of "Little Henry:"
It was on the eleventh of December,
On a cold and windy day,