He did go to the woods and pray; but he went so far that he doubted himself if the Lord heard him when he went by.
THE BABIES.
From a speech of Mark Twain at the banquet given in honor of Gen. Grant, by the Army of the Tennessee, at the Palmer House, Chicago, Nov. 14, 1879.
OAST:—“The Babies—As they comfort us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities.”
I like that. We haven’t all had the good fortune to be ladies; we haven’t all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground, for we have all been babies. It is a shame that for a thousand years the world’s banquets have utterly ignored the baby—as if he didn’t amount to anything! If you gentlemen will stop and think a minute,—if you will go back fifty or a hundred years, to your early married life, and recontemplate your first baby, you will remember that he amounted to a good deal, and even something over. You soldiers all know that when that little fellow arrived at family head-quarters you had to hand in your resignation. He took entire command. You became his lackey, his mere body-servant, and you had to stand around, too. He was not a commander who made allowances for time, distance, weather, or anything else. You had to execute his order whether it was possible or not. And there was only one form of marching in his manual of tactics, and that was the double-quick. He treated you with every sort of insolence and disrespect, and the bravest of you didn’t dare to say a word. You could face the death-storm of Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for blow; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted your nose, you had to take it. When the thunders of war were sounding in your ears, you set your faces toward the batteries and advanced with steady tread; but when he turned on the terrors of his war-whoop, you advanced in the other direction—and mighty glad of the chance, too. When he called for soothing syrup, did you venture to throw out any side remarks about certain services unbecoming an officer and a gentleman? No,—you got up and got it. If he ordered his bottle, and it wasn’t warm, did you talk back? Not you,—you went to work and warmed it. You even descended so far in your menial office as to take a suck at that warm, insipid stuff yourself, to see if it was right,—three parts water to one of milk, a touch of sugar to modify the colic, and a drop of peppermint to kill those immortal hiccups. I can taste that stuff yet. And how many things you learned as you went along; sentimental young folks still took stock in that beautiful old saying that when the baby smiles in his sleep, it is because the angels are whispering to him. Very pretty, but “too thin,”—simply wind on the stomach, my friends! If the baby proposed to take a walk at his usual hour, 2:30 in the morning, didn’t you rise up promptly and remark—with a mental addition which wouldn’t improve a Sunday-school book much—that that was the very thing you were about to propose yourself! Oh, you were under good discipline! And as you went fluttering up and down the room in your “undress uniform” you not only prattled undignified baby-talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to sing “Rockaby baby in a tree-top,” for instance. What a spectacle for an Army of the Tennessee! And what an affliction for the neighbors, too,—for it isn’t everybody within a mile around that likes military music at three in the morning. And when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or three hours, and your little velvet-head intimated that nothing suited him like exercise and noise,—“Go on!”—what did you do? You simply went on, till you disappeared in the last ditch.
