Baby, baby in your cot,
Are you there?—or are you not?
If you’re not, then what of me!
Baby, what and where are we?

For all practical purposes, however, Baby is sufficiently real—substantial enough, indeed, as “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide” shows in Exercise 24, to be lifted by his little feet and stood on his little head; but, mercifully adds the “Guide,” “do not hold Baby on his head very long.” For all practical purposes we must, and do, assume our own existence. “Here we are,” as I have imagined Dr. Johnson saying to his innocent new-born comrade, “and we’ll have to make the best of it.” Nobody has thought of a better way, or any other way at all, for us to get here; and the familiar Biblical phrase, ‘born again,’ may perhaps be more literal than we are wont to imagine, and apply to this world as well as the next. Baby himself may just have been born again. That innocent-seeming and rather silly-sounding monologue, which we flatter ourselves is an earnest attempt to imitate our own speech,—“Nja njan dada atta mama papaï attaï na-na-na hatta meenĕ-meenĕ-meeneĕ mŏmm mŏmma ao-u,”—may it not be the soliloquy of a gentle philosopher, or, again, the confession of an out-and-out rascal, talking to himself of his misdeeds, chuckling and cooing over them, indeed, before he forgets them in this new state of being? May not Papa, waggishly shaking his forefinger and saying, “You little rascal, you,” be speaking with a truthfulness which, if known, would make him sick?

Meanwhile, as says “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” “Don’t jerk Baby round. Never rush through his exercises, but talk to him in a happy, encouraging way. When he is able to talk he will be glad to tell you what great, good fun he has been having.”

So speaks, I think, a mother’s imagination; in sober reality, even the great good fun of Exercise 24 will be forgotten. Which is perhaps why, although I have heard men wish they could again be children, I have never heard any man say he would like to be a baby.

II
TO BE A BOY

I love dearly to watch the boys at their play. How gayly they pitch and catch their baseball with their strong little hands! How blithely they run from base to base! How merrily their voices come to me across the green; for, although I cannot hear what they say, I know it expresses a young, innocent joy in this big, good world. Yet even in this Garden there is a Serpent, and one day two of the little innocents quarreled and came to blows. A real fight! I soon hurried out and stopped that, but the sight of their little faces distorted with rage, and one poor boy bleeding at the nose, upset me for quite a time.—An Old Maid’s Window.

IN “The Boyhood of Great Men,” published by Harper and Brothers, in 1853, but now, I fear, very little read, it is told of Sir Isaac Newton that “An accident first fired him to strive for distinction in the school-room. The boy who was immediately above him in the class, after treating him with a tyranny hard to bear, was cruel enough to kick him in the stomach, with a severity that caused great pain. Newton resolved to have his revenge, but of such a kind as was natural to his reasoning mind, even at that immature age. He determined to excel his oppressor in their studies and lessons; and, setting himself to the task with zeal and diligence, he never halted in his course till he had found his way to the top of the class; thus exhibiting and leaving a noble example to others of his years similarly situated. Doubtless, after this, he would heartily forgive his crestfallen persecutor, who could not but henceforth feel ashamed of his unmanly conduct, while Newton would feel the proud consciousness of having done his duty after the bravest and noblest fashion which it is in the power of man to adopt.”

We cannot all be Sir Isaac Newtons, and, although I may wish for a passing moment that some sturdy little school-fellow had kicked me too in the stomach, the resulting sequence of events would probably have been different, and the world would have gained little or nothing by my natural indignation. Having an impartial mind, I should like to know also why Sir Isaac was kicked in the stomach, and what became afterward of the boy who kicked him. As his fame grew in the world, the reflected glory of having thus kicked Sir Isaac Newton in the stomach would presumably have brightened in proportion, but, lacking other distinction, the kicker served his evolutionary purpose and has now vanished.

But this much remains of him—that his little foot kicks also in the stomach the widely accepted fallacy that boyhood is an age of unalloyed gold, to which every man now and then looks back and vainly yearns to be a boy again. “Oh! happy years!”—so sighed the poet Byron,—“once more, who would not be a boy?” And so to-day, as one may at least deduce from his general newspaper reading, sigh all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States. Not, indeed, for a boyhood like Sir Isaac Newton’s, but for the standard American boyhood, to which, in theory, every ageing American looks back with tender reminiscence—that happy time when he went barefooted, played “hookey” from school, fished in the running brook with a bent pin for a hook, and swam, with other future bankers, merchants, clerks, clergymen, physicians and surgeons, confidence-men, pickpockets, authors, actors, burglars, etc., etc., in an old swimming-hole. The democracy of the old swimming-hole is, in fact, the democracy of the United States, naked and unashamed; and even in the midst of a wave of crime (one might almost imagine), if the victim should say suddenly to the hold-up man,—

“Oh, do you remember the ole swimmin’ hole,
And the hours we spent there together;
Where the oak and the chestnut o’ershadowed the bowl,
And tempered the hot summer weather?