a good deal, and even something over. You soldiers all know that when
that little fellow arrived at family headquarters you had to hand in your
resignation. He took entire command. You became his lackey, his mere
body-servant, and you had to stand around too. He was not a commander
who made allowances for time, distance, weather, or anything else. You
had to execute his order whether it was possible or not. And there was
only one form of marching in his manual of tactics, and that was the
double-quick. He treated you with every sort of insolence and
disrespect, and the bravest of you didn’t dare to say a word. You could
face the death-storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for
blow; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted
your nose, you had to take it. When the thunders of war were sounding in
your ears you set your faces toward the batteries, and advanced with
steady tread; but when he turned on the terrors of his war whoop you
advanced in the other direction, and mighty glad of the chance, too.
When he called for soothing-syrup, did you venture to throw out any side-
remarks about certain services being unbecoming an officer and a
gentleman? No. You got up and got it. When he ordered his pap bottle
and it was not warm, did you talk back? Not you. You went to work and
warmed it. You even descended so far in your menial office as to take a
suck at that warm, insipid stuff yourself, to see if it was right–three
parts water to one of milk, a touch of sugar to modify the colic, and a
drop of peppermint to kill those immortal hiccoughs. I can taste that
stuff yet. And how many things you learned as you went along!
Sentimental young folks still take stock in that beautiful old saying
that when the baby smiles in his sleep, it is because the angels are
whispering to him. Very pretty, but too thin–simply wind on the
stomach, my friends. If the baby proposed to take a walk at his usual
hour, two o’clock in the morning, didn’t you rise up promptly and remark,
with a mental addition which would not improve a Sunday-school book much,
that that was the very thing you were about to propose yourself? Oh!
you were under good discipline, and as you went fluttering up and down
the room in your undress uniform, you not only prattled undignified baby-
talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to sing!–Rock a-by
Baby in the Tree-top, for instance. What a spectacle far an Army of the
Tennessee! And what an affliction for the neighbors, too; for it is not
everybody within, a mile around that likes military music at three in the
morning. And, when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or
three hours, and your little velvet head intimated that nothing suited
him like exercise and noise, what did you do? You simply went on until
you dropped in the last ditch. The idea that a baby doesn’t amount to
anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself.
One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior
Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of
lawless activities. Do what you please, you can’t make him stay on the
reservation. Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in
your right mind don’t you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a
permanent riot. And there ain’t any real difference between triplets and
an insurrection.
Yes, it was high time for a toast-master to recognize the importance of
the babies. Think what is in store for the present crop! Fifty years
from now we shall all be dead, I trust, and then this flag, if it still
survive (and let us hope it may), will be floating over a Republic
numbering 200,000,000 souls, according to the settled laws of our
increase. Our present schooner of State will have grown into a political
leviathan–a Great Eastern. The cradled babies of to-day will be on