"Just seven times a week, my dear," said Dove, triumphantly.
"And besides," Letitia continued, undismayed, "they will ruin the shape of the child's mouth."
"But how?" cried Dove. "Pray tell me how, my love, when they are made in the very identical im—"
"And modern doctors," Letitia stated with some severity, "are doing away with so many foolish notions of our grandmothers."
"Yet our fathers and mothers," Dove replied, "were very fair specimens of the race, my dear. Shakespeare, doubtless, was rocked in a cradle, and his brains survived. They were quite intact, I think you will admit. He wasn't joggled into—"
"Yet who knows what he might have written, dear love," answered Letitia, "if he had been permitted to lie quite—"
"You try to make a child go to sleep, my darling, without something!" my wife suggested. "Just try it once, my dear."
"Cradles," said Letitia—but at this juncture I stepped in, authoritatively, as the father of my child. It is due to Dove, I confess gladly, and partly to Letitia also, that this fatherhood has been so pleasant to look back upon. Robin's mouth is very normal, as even Letitia will admit, I know, as she would be the last person in the world to say that his brains had suffered any in the joggling. Somehow, by dint of boiling the consolation I suppose, and by what-not formulæ, we got him up at last on two of the sturdiest, little, round, brown legs that ever splashed in mud-puddle—Dove's Darling, my Old Fellow, and Letitia's Love.
Love she called him in their private moments, and other names as fond, I have no doubt; publicly he was her Archer, her Bowman, her Robin Hood. She, it was, who purchased him bow-and-arrows, and replaced for him without a murmur, three panes in the library windows and a precious little wedding vase. The latter cost her a pretty penny, but she reminded us that a boy, after all, will be a boy! She took great pride in his better marksmanship and sought a suit for him, a costume that should be traditional of archers bold.
"Have you cloth," she asked, "of the shade called Lincoln green?"