ild was born where you
could not get a bandage, what then? Now I think this child will remain
intact without a bandage, and, if I am willing to take the risk, why
should you complain?"

"Because," said she, "if the child should die, it would injure my name
as a nurse. I therefore wash my hands of all these new-fangled notions."

So she bandaged the child every morning, and I as regularly took it off.
It has been fully proved since to be as useless an appendage as the
vermiform. She had several cups with various concoctions of herbs
standing on the chimney-corner, ready for insomnia, colic, indigestion,
etc., etc., all of which were spirited away when she was at her dinner.
In vain I told her we were homeopathists, and afraid of everything in
the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms lower than the two-hundredth
dilution. I tried to explain the Hahnemann system of therapeutics, the
philosophy of the principle _similia similibus curantur_, but she had no
capacity for first principles, and did not understand my discourse. I
told her that, if she would wash the baby's mouth with pure cold water
morning and night and give it a teaspoonful to drink occasionally during
the day, there would be no danger of red gum; that if she would keep the
blinds open and let in the air and sunshine, keep the temperature of the
room at sixty-five degrees, leave the child's head uncovered so that it
could breathe freely, stop rocking and trotting it and singing such
melancholy hymns as "Hark, from the tombs a doleful sound!" the baby and
I would both be able to weather the cape without a bandage. I told her I
should nurse the child once in two hours, and that she must not feed it
any of her nostrums in the meantime; that a child's stomach, being made
on the same general plan as our own, needed intervals of rest as well as
ours. She said it would be racked with colic if the stomach was empty
any length of time, and that it would surely have rickets if it were
kept too still. I told her if the child had no anodynes, nature would
regulate its sleep and motions. She said she could not stay in a room
with the thermometer at sixty-five degrees, so I told her to sit in the
next room and regulate the heat to suit herself; that I would ring a
bell when her services were needed.

The reader will wonder, no doubt, that I kept such a cantankerous
servant. I could get no other. Dear "Mother Monroe," as wise as she was
good, and as tender as she was stro