People of the Whirlpool | Page 3

detest, and to their own chubby
selves no less, in that neither one has been handicapped for a single day
by the disadvantage of being an only child!
It doubtless seems very odd for me to feel this last to be a disadvantage,
being myself an only child, and always a happy one, sharing with
mother all the space in father's big heart. But this is because God has
been very good to me, leaving me safe in the shelter of the home nest.
Suppose it had been otherwise and I had been forced to face the world,
how it would have hurt, for individual love is cruelly precious
sometimes, and an "onliest" cannot in the very nature of things be as
unselfish and adaptable as one of many.
I was selfish even when the twins came. I was so glad that they were
men-children. I could not bear to think of other woman hands

ministering to father and Evan, and I rejoiced in the promise of two
more champions. I often wonder how mother felt when I was born and
what she thought. Was she glad or disappointed? I wish that she had
left written words to guide me, if ever so few,--they would mean so
much now; and let me know if in her day social things surprised and
troubled her as for the first time they now stir me, and therefore belong
to all awakening motherhood. Her diaries were a blending of simple
household happenings and garden lore, nothing more; for when I was
five years old and her son came, he stayed but a few short hours and
then stole her away with him.
I wonder if my boys, when they are grown and begin to realize woman,
will care to look into this book of mine, and read in and between the
lines of its jumble of scraps and letters what their mother thought of
them, and how things appeared to her in the days of their babyhood.
Perhaps; who knows? At present, being but five years old, they are
centred in whatever thing the particular day brings forth, and but that
they are leashed fast by an almost prenatal and unconscious affection,
they are as unlike in disposition, temperament, and colouring as they
are alike in feature. Richard is dark, like father and me, very quiet,
except in the matter of affection, in which he is clingingly
demonstrative, slow to receive impressions, but withal tenacious. He
clearly inherits father's medical instinct of preserving life, and the very
thought of suffering on the part of man or beast arouses him to action.
When he was only a little over three years old, I found him carefully
mending some windfall robins' eggs, cracked by their tumble, with bits
of rubber sticking-plaster, then putting them hopefully back into the
nest, with an admonition to the anxious parents to "sit very still and
don't stwatch." While last summer he unfortunately saw a chicken
decapitated over at the farm barn, and, in Martha Corkle's language,
"the way he wound a bit o' paper round its poor neck to stop its bleedin'
went straight to my stummick, so it did, Mrs. Evan;" for be it said here
that Martha has fulfilled my wildest expectations, and whereas, as
queen of the kitchen, she was a trifle unexpected and uncomfortable, as
Mrs. Timothy Saunders, now comfortably settled in the new cottage
above the stable at the north corner of the hayland, she is a veritable
guardian angel, ready to swoop down with strong wings at a moment's
notice, in sickness or health, day or night, and seize the nursery helm.

It is owing to her that I have never been obliged to have a nursemaid
under my feet or tagging after the boys, to the ruin of their
independence. For the first few years Effie, whose fiery locks have not
yet found their affinity, helped me, but now merely sees to buttons,
strings, and darns.
I found out long ago that those who get the best return from their
flower gardens were those who kept no gardeners, and it is the same
way with the child garden; those who are too overbusy, irresponsible,
ignorant, or rich to do without the orthodox nurse, never can know
precisely what they lose. To watch a baby untrammelled with clothes,
dimple, glow, and expand in its bath, is in an intense personal degree
like watching, early of a June morning, the first opening bud of a rose
that you have coaxed and raised from a mere cutting. You hoped and
believed that it would be fair and beautiful, but ah, what a glorious
surprise it is!
And so it is at the other end of day, when sleep comes over the garden
and all the flowers that have