I have been frequently lectured by those older, but more especially “new mothers” younger than I, about staying with the boys at bedtime until they grow drowsy.  “The baby is put to bed, and if he cries I pay no attention; it is only temper, not pain, for he stops the minute I speak to him,” they say.  I feel the blood rush to my face and the sting to my tongue always when I hear this.

Not pain, not temper, but the unconscious yearning for companionship, for mother-love, is oftener the motive of the pitiful cry.  Why should it be denied?  The mother bird broods her young in the nest at twilight, and the father bird sings a lullaby to both.  The kittens luxuriously sup themselves to sleep with the warm mother flesh responding to their seeking paws.  In wild life I know not an animal who does not in some way soothe her young to sleep.  Why should the human child, the son of man, be forced to live without the dream memories that linger about happy sleeping times?  What can the vaunted discipline give to replace them?  It is then, as they grow, and speech forms on their lips, that little confessions come out and wrongs are naturally righted through confidence, before they can sprout and grow.

I was not quite five when I last watched mother sowing her flower seeds, and yet I remember to this day the way in which she did it, and so when it came time to give my bed of summer roses its first bath of whale oil, soap, and water, and the boys gave whoops of joy when they saw Bertel wheel out the tub and I appeared with the shining brass syringe, I resolved to let them have the questionable delight of administering the shower bath, even if it took all day.

I have appropriated a long strip of rich, deep soil for these tender roses, quite away from the formal garden and across the path from the new strawberry bed, which by the necessity of rotation has worked its way from the vegetable garden to the open spot under the bank wall by the stable where the hotbeds congregate.  This wall breaks the sweep of the wind, and so both our tender roses and strawberries are of the earliest, the fruit already being well set and large.

It was the middle of the morning.  The work was progressing finely, without more than the usual amount of slop and misdirected effort, when a violent tooting from the direction of the highway caused me to stop, and Ian dropped the squirter that I had newly filled for his turn, upon the grass border, while he and Richard scurried toward the gateway to see what was the matter, for the sound was like the screech of an automobile horn in distress.  It was!

A streak of dark red and a glitter of brass flashed in between the gate posts, grazing them, and barely escaping an upset, and then came plunging toward me.  I screamed to the boys, who seemed to me directly in the path of the Thing, which in another moment I recognized as an automobile of the battering-ram variety, belonging to Harvey Somers, Gwendolen Burton’s fiance, which for the past week had been the terror of father’s steady old gray horses, owing to its constitutional eccentricities.