it when it awoke, as I was soon to leave the
train. It slept the two hours I remained--how much longer I never heard.

A young man, who had witnessed the proceeding, got off at the same
station and accosted me, saying:

"I should be very thankful if you would come and see my baby. It is only
one month old and cries all the time, and my wife, who is only sixteen
years old, is worn out with it and neither of us know what to do, so we
all cry together, and the doctor says he does not see what ails it."

So I went on my mission of mercy and found the child bandaged as tight
as a drum. When I took out the pins and unrolled it, it fairly popped
like the cork out of a champagne bottle. I rubbed its breast and its
back and soon soothed it to sleep. I remained a long time, telling them
how to take care of the child and the mother, too. I told them
everything I could think of in regard to clothes, diet, and pure air. I
asked the mother why she bandaged her child as she did. She said her
nurse told her that there was danger of hernia unless the abdomen was
well bandaged. I told her that the only object of a bandage was to
protect the navel, for a few days, until it was healed, and for that
purpose all that was necessary was a piece of linen four inches square,
well oiled, folded four times double, with a hole in the center, laid
over it. I remembered, next day, that I forgot to tell them to give the
child water, and so I telegraphed them, "Give the baby water six times a
day." I heard of that baby afterward. It lived and flourished, and the
parents knew how to administer to the wants of the next one. The father
was a telegraph operator and had many friends--knights of the
key--throughout Iowa. For many years afterward, in leisure moments,
these knights would "call up" this parent and say, over the wire, "Give
the baby water six times a day." Thus did they "repeat the story, and
spread the truth from pole to pole."

CHAPTER VIII.

BOSTON AND CHELSEA.

In the autumn of 1843 my husband was admitted to the bar and commenced
the practice of law in Boston with Mr. Bowles, brother-in-law of the
late General John A. Dix. This gave me the opportunity to make many
pleasant acquaintances among the lawyers in Boston, and to meet,
intimately, many of the noble men and women among reformers, whom I had
long worshiped at a distance. Here, for the first time, I met Lydia
Maria Child, Abby Kelly, Paulina Wright, Elizabeth Peabody, Ma