Lydie promptly produced her jumping rope. And then there was another from the same house, and we discovered, to our joy, that the children of the horny-handed city editor had also had the whooping cough. We didn't need an introduction there, but the play privilege was pie for the baby. First thing I knew baby was on this porch and that porch, and on the way home in the evening I whistled for her and nodded to the grownups who were entertaining her.
But we've lost our intermediary. The other night baby whooped and I whooped. Mine was nervous indigestion, combined with a lot of imagination that makes the patent medicine business profitable. Between us, baby and I kept up a merry circus all night. She was really sick, and we sent her home to her mother.
What a wonderful thing it is to have a baby in the house!
Every morning Catherine and Eleanor go out and pick buttercups and forget-me-nots, and bring them to my wife; and she puts them in a vase with the greatest show of gratitude you ever saw, and then proceeds to stuff the children with cakes until they choke, and sends them home full.
Every day the little auburn-haired boy king in the House Next Door trots out with his tiny red wagon and laboriously drags that treasure of childhood up and down the pavement—sometimes prancing like a race horse, sometimes plodding along like a mule that curses his ancestry, sometimes ambling by like a good-natured family horse, guaranteed not to run away or scare at an automobile!
And the little one—the baby in the go-cart. What a time the baby has watching Big Brother, and admiring his strength as he performs miracles, not only pulling and backing the tiny red wagon all by himself, but actually turning it around and running the other way, without so much as getting caught in the cracks or stuck in the sod! You can see admiration fairly oozing from baby's eyes; and when he runs at her and pretends to kick his heels into the dashboard, what a laugh she has!
Up the street, where the apartments are with the shiny sets of bells on the front by the door, and the big rocking chairs and air of solid comfort, there are some other children, but I haven't learned their names. They play around the porch and front yard, and run across the street, scampering up the hill to pick flowers from the lots that soon will feel the plow; and their mothers keep an eye on them—not that any accident could happen, for vehicles are scarce out our way and the street car doesn't enter the quiet of our lives; but just because—well, mothers are a bit peculiar that way—I mean that way of keeping an eye on the young ones.
A fellow never knows what a remarkable head a child has, if he has none of his own, until he begins borrowing babies from the neighbors.
There's Catherine, for instance. Catherine and Eleanor and I were looking for the little pale anemones that hide around the roots of trees. I picked some four-petaled blue flowers and instructed the children.
"These," I said, "are forget-me-nots."