t thing. They read with avidity all
books and articles written on the subject of Children. They read that a
Child should always sleep lying on its back, and took it in turns to sit
awake o' nights to make sure that the Child was always right side up.

But another magazine told them that Children allowed to sleep lying on
their backs grew up to be idiots. They were sad they had not read of
this before, and started the Child on its right side. The Child, on the
contrary, appeared to have a predilection for the left, the result being
that neither the parents nor the baby itself for the next three weeks got
any sleep worth speaking of.

Later on, by good fortune, they came across a treatise that said a Child
should always be allowed to choose its own position while sleeping, and
their friends persuaded them to stop at that--told them they would never
strike a better article if they searched the whole British Museum
Library. It troubled them to find that Child sometimes sleeping curled
up with its toe in its mouth, and sometimes flat on its stomach with its
head underneath the pillow. But its health and temper were decidedly
improved.

The Parent can do no right.

There is nothing the parent can do right. You would think that now and
then he might, if only by mere accident, blunder into sense. But, no,
there seems to be a law against it. He brings home woolly rabbits and
indiarubber elephants, and expects the Child to be contented "forsooth"
with suchlike aids to its education. As a matter of fact, the Child is
content: it bangs its own head with the woolly rabbit and does itself no
harm; it tries to swallow the indiarubber elephant; it does not succeed,
but continues to hope. With that woolly rabbit and that indiarubber
elephant it would be as happy as the day is long if only the young
gentleman from Cambridge would leave it alone, and not put new ideas into
its head. But the gentleman from Cambridge and the maiden lady
Understander are convinced that the future of the race depends upon
leaving the Child untrammelled to select its own amusements. A friend of
mine, during his wife's absence once on a visit to her mother, tried the
experiment.

The Child selected a frying-pan. How it got the frying-pan remains to
this day a mystery. The cook said "frying-pans don't walk upstairs." The
nurse said she should be sorry to call anyone a liar, but that there was
commonsense in everything. The scullery-ma