Some Japanese Children:
To find other children as well, wisely, and wholesomely treated as children are in Japan, we must come to an English home, with a look in by the way at an American home, where, it is said by many, the child is made somewhat too much of, and therefore spoiled. But it must be sorrowfully admitted that it is only the child of well-to-do or cultured parents in Great Britain that is as well and wisely cared for, and that is as happy as the child of Japan: there is no doubt that the average of childish comfort and happiness is very much greater in Japan than in England. Yet a well-ordered English home is baby's paradise. There he is not swathed in bandages and rolled in a pillow and crowned with a nightcap; he is kept always clean and sweet, he is lightly but sufficiently clothed, and he is allowed to kick, and crow, and grow strong as much as ever he likes. He is no longer put to bed in a deep wooden cradle set on wooden rockers, but in a light and airy bassinette, which either is stationary or swings lightly upon hooks. That question of stationary or moving bassinette has become somewhat vexed among mothers, many doctors favouring the opinion that it is neither necessary nor desirable that infants should be sent to sleep with rocking or swinging. The old rocking cradle had a much more fearsome motion than the swinging bassinette. Rocked by a careless or energetic person it would often make the baby ill; indeed, there used to be a tradition among humble mothers (a tradition which still obtains in Scotland) that if the cradle was rocked when empty the baby would certainly be ill when next put into it. The rocking cradle with its great wooden hood has had its day (and how magnificent the height of its day was may be guessed from the cradle of James I. that was shown in the Stuart Exhibition)—it has had its day, and is now departing into the limbo of things obsolete and forgotten, and thither probably in the course of years the swinging bassinette will follow it.
We have in this article treated of babies only when they are inarticulate, when none but the mother or the constant nurse can understand them. That is commonly reckoned by the stranger or the mere male person the least interesting age of all, but to the mother—and, indeed, to all women and grown girls—it is the most interesting. Then the baby's clinging helplessness, its wide stare of wonder, and its bright, human smile and crow of response to a kind look or tone, suffuse the female heart with an unimaginable delight. What pride is felt in the health and beauty and weight of the baby! ("Here's a leg for a babe of a week!" says the doctor in Tennyson's "Grandmother.") How his active crawling is admired!—and sometimes his singular taste for buttons, and marbles, and cinders! With what wonder and gratulation is the appearance of his first tooth hailed! With what expressions of joy is attention called to his first attempts at walking, and how "dear" he is when he first goes "pattering over the boards!" But beyond and beneath all these common phenomena the earliest infancy has ravishing mysteries which only the mother can patiently watch, and pore over, and understand. Every day, every hour brings to her a new joy, of which she can speak to no one; for that which no else one sees—the waking attention, the dawning reason—the mother sees, and that which no one else hears the mother hears.
"On the Stump for the Pump."
By Sir Wilfrid Lawson.
