How the little man crows and gurgles in glee! Then he grows demonstrative and he wants to take off my cap. He makes a grab at my game bag. As I put him down gently he tries to disarm me and possess himself of the gun.
I say, what an awful bother about the house of the sportsman is the toddling tot of a baby! He is always getting hold of your gun swab for a fish pole or to bang the dog about. Putting holes in your fish basket with a big nail or a table knife is a supreme source of delight to him. He has a mania for planting carpet tacks in your hunting boots. Making smokestacks for mud houses with your brass shells is a passion with him. If he can get hold of your ammunition to make paste of the powder, and pulp of the wads, and a hopeless mixture of the shot, he is simply in his element. Give him possession of your lines and access to your fly book and he enjoys an hour of what is, to him, immense fun, but to you pronounced and positive destruction.
And yet—you wouldn't be without, that self-same baby if to keep him cost you every shooting iron and foot of tackle you ever owned or hoped to own, and at the same time destroyed the prospect of you ever again having a “day out” on this rare old earth of ours.
It is quite safe to say that the article for which you would exchange that merry, mischievous toddler of yours, who clasps your brown neck with little white, soft arms and presses a sweet baby kiss to your bristled lips, as he sees you off on an outing, has not now an existence—and you do not seem to exactly remember when it had. And you do not care whether he destroys your possessions; they can be replaced.
Yes, indeed! Even you, most inveterate and selfish and calloused votary of the chase—you have a tender spot in your hard old heart for the baby boy. He may not be all that is orderly, obedient, non-combatable, non-destructive, but still we all love him! Not one of us, at all events, but will frankly admit that we respect him—for his father's sake. Need anything more be said?
And do not we also respect those who depict him in tenderness and affection?
Don't we think all the more of Scanlon the actor for his inimitable “Peek-a-boo?” and of Charles Mackay for his “Baby Mine?” and of Bret Harte for his “Luck of Roaring Camp?” and of Dickens—wasn't it Dickens who wrote:
When the lessons and tasks all are ended,
And the school for the day is dismissed,
And the little ones gather around me