prepared for him. I pulled away the blan¬ 
kets and looked him over. The large joints 
and undue proportion of bone reminded me 
of a remark I once heard a stock man make 
when looking at an awkward young colt: 
“He’ll be a very strong horse when he 
gets his growth. Just look at his joints!” 
Otherwise, to my surprise, he looked 
very much as mother s little girls used to 
look, and nurse had one of my little girl’s 
(that was to be) dresses on him. 1 touched 
his little hand with one linger and it closed 
tightly on it. He opened great dark eyes 
and looked at me and it seemed as if he was 
going to say, “Well, what are you going 
to do about it?” 
Of course I drew the precious gift to my 
bosom with a rush of tenderness that never 
again failed. 
I defy any woman to take the entire 
charge of an infant in its early years and 
not love it. The darling will win its own 
way to the most obdurate heart. 
The new breaking had mellowed down 
to smooth cultivation, two nice crops had 
been safely garnered into rail pens lined 
with straw, when “another boy” greeted 
my expectant ear; I knew what to do with 
this one. He was to wear his brother’s out¬ 
grown clothing, play with his broken toys, 
watch all his motions, catch all his bad 
habits, and tag along close behind at every 
step. “Another boy” and “another boy,” 
kept greeting our waiting ears as the years 
passed on, until the little house was filled 
with boys and boots and jackets. 
But was the mother satisfied? As she 
cooked and scrubbed and made and mended, 
what had she to show for all the years of 
hard labor? Not much, I fear, unless she 
bid her boys get upon the scales and give 
the figures in avoirdupois. She had tried 
to train them to gentleness, but were they 
gentle? She had tried to train them to 
tidiness, but were they neat? She thought 
of the lovely “six” who occupied her time 
in earlier years, and could not answer to 
her satisfaction. Sometimes four of them 
would be in the stable at work before break¬ 
fast, and the straw and litter would fly 
from their four-tined stable forks. They 
would rush in at the call to breakfast with 
soiled straw hanging to their caps, their 
ears, their collars, their boots reeking with 
unrectified ammonia, but their faces rosy 
and happy. I believe the hardest thing to 
learn which came to me in those days, was 
the uselessness of the Saturday evening 
bath, to prepare a boy for going to Sunday 
school next day. I learned that with boys 
upon a farm “you can’t calculate with any 
degree of certainty upon what is going to 
happen.” Perhaps just as you think they 
are all ready, shoes blackened and neck¬ 
ties on, the calves break out of their pen. 
Of course, they must not be allowed to go 
to the cows, but away they run in all 
directions, through wet grass and over 
muddy roads, a small regiment of boys 
after them. Over hedges and ditches for 
an hour or two, until all are completely 
wearied out, then it is too late for church, 
and it will take all next week to repair the 
damages to the clothing. Sometimes it is a 
sudden prairie fire sweeping in, sometimes 
a sick animal, or a cast one, or a sudden 
change in the weather, necessitating an 
entire change in the chorus. 
Well, here were bo} T s to plow and boys to 
plant, boys to sow and boys to reap, and 
boys left in the house to tease for mother’s 
shoe-strings to play horse, when one De¬ 
cember morning, the thermometer twenty- 
eight degrees below zero, a paper and 
envelope were brought to me. I took a 
pencil and feebly wrote, to dear friends in 
the east: 
“It’s a girl!—it’s a girl!!—it’s a girl!!!— 
and it is raw.” 
If there was an inner “holy of holies” in 
my heart that my boys had never reached, 
I did not know it. But this dainty blossom, 
with her blue eyes and golden curls, was 
an expression most exquisite. Her brothers 
eyed her from a distance, in fact, “passed 
by on the other side.” They seemed to fear 
that if they touched her she would bite or 
break, which, was uncertain. This only at 
first. A dear friend in the east, the wife 
of a minister of an important city church, 
hearing of the fruition of my long deferred 
hopes, sent to my little one a large package 
by express. Oh, the dainty garments! 
Everything a little lady could possibly re¬ 
quire for outside adornment. That dear, 
thoughtful friend very well knew that the 
