s (_clean_, Mary calls them) and eyes ablaze with life
petition me to start, my heart beats fast. To look on the children whom
one's own hand has arrayed, the pure skin brightly veined with blue,
that one has bathed, laved, and sponged and decked with gay colors of
silk or velvet--why, there is no poem comes near to it! With what eager,
covetous longing one calls them back for one more kiss on those white
necks, which, in their simple collars, the loveliest woman cannot rival.
Even the coarsest lithograph of such a scene makes a mother pause, and I
feast my eyes daily on the living picture!

Once out of doors, triumphant in the result of my labors, while I was
admiring the princely air with which little Armand helped baby to totter
along the path you know, I saw a carriage coming, and tried to get them
out of the way. The children tumbled into a dirty puddle, and lo! my
works of art are ruined! We had to take them back and change their
things. I took the little one in my arms, never thinking of my own
dress, which was ruined, while Mary seized Armand, and the cavalcade
re-entered. With a crying baby and a soaked child, what mind has a
mother left for herself?

Dinner time arrives, and as a rule I have done nothing. Now comes the
problem which faces me twice every day--how to suffice in my own person
for two children, put on their bibs, turn up their sleeves, and get
them to eat. In the midst of these ever-recurring cares, joys, and
catastrophes, the only person neglected in the house is myself. If the
children have been naughty, often I don't get rid of my curl-papers
all day. Their tempers rule my toilet. As the price of a few minutes
in which I write you these half-dozen pages, I have had to let them
cut pictures out of my novels, build castles with books, chessmen, or
mother-of-pearl counters, and give Nais my silks and wools to arrange
in her own fashion, which, I assure you, is so complicated, that she is
entirely absorbed in it, and has not uttered a word.

Yet I have nothing to complain of. My children are both strong and
independent; they amuse themselves more easily then you would think.
They find delight in everything; a guarded liberty is worth many toys.
A few pebbles--pink, yellow, purple, and black, small shells, the
mysteries of sand, are a world of pleasure to them. Their wealth
consists in possessing a multitude of small things. I watch Armand and
find him talking to the flowers, the flies, the chicke