any
little griefs! Cradle that kindled so many hopes! Cradle that rested so
many fatigues! Sleep now thyself, after so many years of putting others to
sleep!

One of the great wants of the age is the right kind of a cradle and the
right kind of a foot to rock it. We are opposed to the usurpation of
"patented self-rockers." When I hear a boy calling his grandfather "old
daddy," and see the youngster whacking his mother across the face because
she will not let him have ice-cream and lemonade in the same stomach, and
at some refusal holding his breath till he gets black in the face, so that
to save the child from fits the mother is compelled to give him another
dumpling, and he afterward goes out into the world stubborn, willful,
selfish and intractable,--I say that boy was brought up in a "patented
self-rocker." The old-time mother would have put him down in the
old-fashioned cradle, and sung to him,

"Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,
Holy angels guard thy bed;"

and if that did not take the spunk put of him would have laid him in an
inverted position across her lap, with his face downward, and with a
rousing spank made him more susceptible to the music.

When a mother, who ought to be most interested in training her children for
usefulness and heaven, gives her chief time to fixing up her back hair, and
is worried to death because the curls she bought are not of the same shade
as the sparsely-settled locks of her own raising; and culturing the
dromedarian hump of dry-goods on her back till, as she comes into church, a
good old elder bursts into laughter behind his pocket-handkerchief, making
the merriment sound as much like a sneeze as possible; her waking moments
employed with discussions about polonaise, and vert-de-gris velvets, and
ecru percale, and fringed guipure, and poufs, and sashes, and rose-de-chene
silks, and scalloped flounces; her happiness in being admired at balls and
parties and receptions,--you may know that she has thrown off the care of
her children, that they are looking after themselves, that they are being
brought up by machinery instead of loving hands--in a word, that there is
in her home a "patented self-rocker!"

So far as possible, let all women dress beautifully: so God dresses the
meadows and the mountains. Let them wear pearls and diamonds if they can
afford it: God has hung round the neck of his world strings of diamonds,
and braided the black locks of the storm with bright r