If you are writing for a periodical, and are desirous of ascertaining beforehand how many pages your manuscript will make when printed, take, at random, any printed page of the work, and copy it in your usual hand, and on a sheet of the same paper you intend using throughout. You will thus, by comparison, be able to judge with tolerable accuracy, how much of your writing will make a page when printed.
Keep a memorandum-book for the express purpose of setting down whatever relates to your literary affairs. Insert the day when you commenced a manuscript, the day when you finished it, and the day on which it went to the publisher. Also, the whole number of its pages. When you see it in print, put down the number of its printed pages. In this book, set down, immediately on receiving them, whatever sums are paid to you for your writings.
If you are a writer of fiction, have a large book for memorandums, of any amusing or remarkable things you may chance to hear, and which you may turn to account afterward. If you write truth only, keep a book for the reception of useful or interesting facts. A written book of names, alphabetically arranged, (surnames and christian names,) will be of great advantage in selecting appellations for your characters. Do not give elegant names to your common people; or to your patrician characters names that are coarse and vulgar. A fault in Dickens is that nearly all his names are rugged, uncouth, and ill-sounding, and seldom characteristic. Why should a very excellent and generous brother and sister be called Tom Pinch and Ruth Pinch. What did they pinch?
There is a proof-reader in every printing-office, but after he has done, the proofs are generally sent to the author for farther revisal.
In correcting proof-sheets, first see that they are quite dry. Draw your pen through any word you desire to change, and then write the new word on the margin, placing it even with the line of the rejected word. When you alter the punctuation, converting a comma into a semicolon, or a period into a note of admiration, make a slight mark on the margin of that line, that the printer may not overlook it. If you have occasion to change a whole sentence, cross it out, and put the new sentence on the margin at the bottom of the page.
If the printer’s boy can wait, you had best correct the proofs while he stays.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHILDREN.
Miss Edgworth says that the education of a child begins at three months old. It is true that both bad and good habits may seem to commence at this early age; but we do not believe that in so slight a soil they take a very deep root, or that what is called a cross baby is sure to grow up an ill-tempered adult. Infants, when they are not really sick, frequently cry from some incidental annoyance, and not from a fretful disposition. If they feel comfortably they will usually be good humoured and pleasant. Much of their comfort is sacrificed to the vanity of the mother in dressing them fashionably and expensively. We knew a baby that was very good in the morning, but very cross in the afternoon, or when dressed for show. And no wonder, for in her show-costume she was tortured with necklace, sleeve-loops, and bracelets of fine branchy, or rather briary coral, scratching and irritating her delicate skin, and leaving the print in red marks. On our representing this to the mother as the probable cause of the baby’s fretfulness, the thorny ornaments were left off, and the child became amiable. Gold chains are also very irritating to the neck and arms of an infant. Coral beads of a smooth round form, strung evenly on a simple thread of silk, without any intermingling of gold chain, are, perhaps, the most comfortable necklaces for children, and are also very becoming; but as they are not expensive, they are of course not fashionable.
Fortunately, the days of worked caps are over. Young ladies are no longer expected to cover pieces of cambric with elaborate cotton embroidery for the babies of their married friends, and the tender heads of the babies are no longer chafed with rough needle-work rubbing incessantly upon them, or heated with a silk lining to the cambric already thickened all over with close, heavy patterns. We wish also that mothers, generally, were less proud of seeing their babies with “luxuriant heads of hair,” which if it has no natural tendency to curl, disfigures the child and gives it a wild, ungenteel look. If it does curl, it still heats the head and neck, and is said to draw away much strength from the system. The most healthy infants we have seen, had very little hair, or it was judiciously kept closely cut. To curl children’s hair in papers is barbarous. They pay dearly for the glory of appearing in ringlets during the day, if they are made to pass their nights lying upon a mass of hard, rough bobs, about as pleasant as if they had their heads in a bag of hickory-nuts. But then the mother has the gratification of hearing their curls admired!
Among other sufferings inflicted on babies is that of sending them out in bleak winter days with brimless hats, that, so far from screening their faces from the cold wind, do not even afford the slightest shade to their eyes, which are winking and watering all the time from the glare of the sun and snow. We have seen false curls pinned to these babies’ hats, and dangling in their eyes.