610. Sometimes neither wine nor malt liquor agrees; then, either new milk and water, or equal parts of fresh milk and barley-water, will generally be found the best beverage. If milk should also disagree, either barley-water, or toast and water, ought to be substituted.
CHANGE OF ROOM.
611. The period at which a lying-in woman should leave her room will, of course, depend upon the season, and upon the state of her health. She may, after the first fourteen days, usually change the chamber for the drawing-room, provided it be close at hand; if it be not, she ought, during the day, to remove—be either wheeled or carried in a chair—from one bedroom to another, as change of apartment will then be desirable. The windows, during her absence from the room, ought to be thrown wide open; and the bedclothes, in order that they may be well ventilated, should be thrown back. She should, at the end of three weeks, take her meals with the family; but even then she ought occasionally, during the day, to lie on the sofa to rest her back.
EXERCISE IN THE OPEN AIR.
612. The period at which a lady, after her confinement, ought to take exercise in the open air, will, of course, depend upon the season, and upon the state of the wind and weather. In the winter, not until the expiration of a month, and not even then unless the weather be fine for the season. Carriage exercise will at first be the most suitable. In the summer she may, at the end of three weeks, take an airing in a carriage, provided the weather be fine, and the wind be neither in an easterly nor in a northeasterly direction. At the expiration of the month she may, provided the season and weather will allow, go out of doors regularly, and gradually resume her household duties and employments.
PART IV.
SUCKLING.
THE DUTIES OF A NURSING MOTHER
613. A mother ought not, unless she intend to devote herself to her baby, to undertake to suckle him. She must make up her mind to forego the so-called pleasures of fashionable life. There ought, in a case of this kind, to be no half-and-half measures; she should either give up her helpless babe to the tender mercies of a wet-nurse, or she must devote her whole time and energy to his welfare—to the greatest treasure that God hath given her.
614. If a mother be blessed with health and strength, it is most unnatural and very cruel for her not to suckle her child—
“Connubial fair! whom no fond transport warms