feeder's own mouth has been objected to on
the plea that it will drive an observant baby frantic, making it imagine
that it is about to be robbed of its rights; but the plan is to be
commended on the ground of safety.]

Do not be in a hurry, nor yet be appalled at the difficulty and slowness
of the operation, for as a rule seven-eighths of the preparation gets
spread over baby's cheeks and chin, portions even reaching to the
wrinkles of the neck; for here is where a clever feeder shines in the
deft management of the spoon, which is inserted here, drawn there, and
all with the delicacy of a barber with a keen razor, till every moist
portion has been scraped away, and has disappeared through the little
pink buttonhole-like apology for a gate which leads to the road to
digestion. Keep up the cooing and repeat.

This is the genuine old-fashioned way, dating from a very early year
after the world's creation. In fact, it seems evident from the
discovery of bone spoons, roughly fashioned, in caverns, that some of
the cave-dwellers practised it, the preparation used for nurturing the
very early baby being most probably marrow out of an auroch's leg-bone,
or, maybe, the brains of the megatherium, which may account for the
wisdom that has come down from our ancestors, who knew everything, while
we are ignorant in the extreme.

Now we have changed all that, as the French say, and the very modern
babe is supplied with somebody's patent infants' food, out of which
everything noxious has been eliminated. Such preparations are
advertised by the dozen, and when cooked there is no more old-fashioned
spoon, but the food is placed in a peculiarly shaped bottle fitted with
hose and branch like a small fire-engine, from the indiarubber tube of
which baby imbibes health very seldom. For what with neglect in
cleaning the apparatus, putrescent particles of milk, fermenting yeasty
paste, and the like, the infant becomes an infant prodigy if it manages
to escape the many disorders incidental to early childhood, and can be
exhibited as a specimen brought up by the bottle, which slays as many as
that effected by people of larger growth.

No unwashed feeding-bottle slew the Reverend Henry Lambent, for your
modern hookah-pattern food imbiber had not been invented when he was
born. He was reared as aforesaid, honestly by hand, but his nurse must
have made a mistake in the packets from which she obtained his supplies,
and in place of biscuit,