n. We suffer, we bleed; we are supposed to be relieved. The
tooth is said to be "through."

Through! Oh, yes; through before its time. Through to no purpose. In a
week, or a year, the wounded flesh, or soul, has reasserted its right,
shut down on the tooth, making a harder surface than ever, a cicatrized
crust, out of which it will take double time and double strength for the
tooth to break.

The gentle doctor gives us a rubber ring, it has a bad taste; or an ivory
one, it is too hard and hurts us. But we gnaw and gnaw, and fancy the new
pain a little easier to bear than the old. Probably it is; probably the
tooth gets through a little quicker for the days and nights of gnawing.
But what a picture of patient misery is a baby with its rubber ring!
Really one sees sometimes in the little puckered, twisting face such
grotesque prophecy of future conflicts, such likeness to the soul's
processes of grappling with problems, that it is uncanny.

When we come to the analysis of the diseases incident to the teething
period, and the treatment of them, the similitude is as close.

We have sharp, sudden inflammations; we have subtle and more deadly
things, which men do not detect till it is, in nine cases out of ten, too
late to cure them,--like water on the brain; and we have slow wastings
away; atrophies, which are worse than death, leaving life enough to
prolong death indefinitely, being as it were living deaths.

Who does not know poor souls in all stages of all these,--outbreaks of
rebellion against all forms, all creeds, all proprieties; secret adoptions
of perilous delusions, fatal errors; and slow settling down into
indifferentism or narrow dogmatism, the two worst living deaths?

These are they who live. Shall we say any thing of those of us who die
between our seventh and eighteenth spiritual month? They never put on
babies' tombstones "Died of teething." There is always a special name for
the special symptom or set of symptoms which characterized the last days.
But the mother believes and the doctor knows that, if it had not been for
the teeth that were coming just at that time, the fever or the croup would
not have killed the child.

Now we come to the treatments; and here again the parallelism is so close
as to be ludicrous. The lancet and the rubber ring fail. We are still
restless, and scream and cry. Then our self-sacrificing nurses walk with
us; they rock us, they swing us, they toss us up and down, they joun