Arrived at home, their impatience knew no restraint; and when the nurse appeared with a wee bundle, topped with a little face, and lying on a big pillow, both boys pounced upon it at once, Budge trying to crowd several pennies into the baby’s rose-leaves of hands, while Toddie held to its nose a bottle labeled “Liquid Bluing.” At the same time the baby sneezed alarmingly and a strong odor of camphor pervaded the room.
“Where can that camphor be?” asked the nurse. “There is nothing that Mrs. Lawrence hates so intensely!”
The baby stopped sneezing and began a pitiful wail, while Toddie hastened to pick up the bluing-bottle; then the nurse saw that upon the baby’s hitherto immaculate wraps there was a large stain of a light-blue tint and emitting a strong odor of camphor. Meanwhile, Toddie had dragged upon his aunt’s sack, held his precious bottle up to his aunt’s nose, and exclaimed:
“Izhn’t dat too baddy! Baby gropped it, and spilled mosht every bit of it on her c’ozhes an’ on de floor!”
“Where did you get that camphor, Toddie?” asked Mrs. Burton, “and why did you bring it here?”
“Tizhn’t campiffer,” said Toddie. “It’ pyfume; I got it out of a big bottle on your bureau, where you makes your hankafusses smell sweet at. Budgie an’ me done dzust what dem sheepmen did when dey came to Beflehem to see de dear little Jesus-baby: we brought our baby money an’ fings dat smelled sweet.”
Mrs. Burton kissed Toddie; then the nurse fell on the floor and displayed the baby’s face, and then the face was shadowed from the light, and baby opened two little eyes and regarded her brothers with a stare of queenly gravity and gentleness, and the adoration expressed by the faces of the two boys was such as no old master ever put into the faces in an “Adoration of the Magi,” and above them bent a face more mature but none the less suffused with tender awe. The silence seemed too holy and delightful to be broken, but Toddie soon looked up inquiringly into his aunt’s face and asked:
“Aunt Alice, why don’t dere be a lovely sun around her head like dere is in pictures of dear little Jesus-babies?”
The quartet became human again, and the nurse offered each of the party a five-minute interview with the mother. Mrs. Burton emerged from the sick-chamber with a face which her nephews could not help scrutinizing curiously; Budge came out with the remark that he would never worry his sweet mamma again while he lived, but Toddie exclaimed:
“If I had a little new baby I wouldn’t stay in bed in dark roomsh all day long. I dzust get up an’ dansh awound.”