hen the June-Bug was
born, the daughter who was to be the very light of her adoring father's
eyes. (Her real name is Alice Lee.) "Mother, there never really _was_
such a baby, _was_ there?" he would ask ten times a day. She was not
born up on the hill; but in ten days we were back from the hospital and
out day and night through that glorious July, on some one of the porches
overlooking the bay and the hills. And we added our adored Nurse Balch
as a friend of the family forever.

I always think of Nurse Balch as the person who more than any other,
perhaps, understood to some degree just what happiness filled our lives
day in and day out. No one assumes anything before a trained nurse--they
are around too constantly for that. They see the misery in homes, they
see what joy there is. And Nurse Balch saw, because she was around
practically all the time for six weeks, that there was nothing but joy
every minute of the day in our home. I do not know how I can make people
understand, who are used to just ordinary happiness, what sort of a life
Carl and I led. It was not just that we got along. It was an active, not
a passive state. There was never a home-coming, say at lunch-time, that
did not seem an event--when our curve of happiness abruptly rose. Meals
were joyous occasions always; perhaps too scant attention paid to the
manners of the young, but much gurglings, and "Tell some more, daddy,"
and always detailed accounts of every little happening during the last
few hours of separation.

Then there was ever the difficulty of good-byes, though it meant only
for a few hours, until supper. And at supper-time he would come up the
front stairs, I waiting for him at the top, perhaps limping. That was
his little joke--we had many little family jokes. Limping meant that I
was to look in every pocket until I unearthed a bag of peanut candy.
Usually he was laden with bundles--provisions, shoes from the cobbler, a
tennis-racket restrung, and an armful of books. After greetings, always
the question, "How's my June-Bug?" and a family procession upstairs to
peer over a crib at a fat gurgler. And "Mother, there never really _was_
such a baby, _was_ there?" No, nor such a father.

It was that first summer back in Berkeley, the year before the June-Bug
was born, when Carl was teaching in Summer School, that we had our
definite enthusiasm over labor-psychology aroused. Will Ogburn, who was
also teaching at Summer School that year, and whose