ce us
from top to bottom, till the wonder is that every organ in our bodies is
not displaced. They beat on glass and tin and iron to distract our
attention and drown out our noise by a bigger one; they shake back and
forth before our eyes all things that glitter and blaze; they shout and
sing songs; the house and the neighborhood are searched and racked for
something which will "amuse" the baby. Then, when we will no longer be
"amused," and when all this restlessness outside and around us, added to
the restlessness inside us, has driven us more than frantic, and the day
or the night of their well-meant clamor is nearly over, their strength
worn out, and their wits at end,--then comes the "soothing syrup,"
deadliest weapon of all. This we cannot resist. If there be they who are
mighty enough to pour it down our throats, physically or spiritually, to
sleep we must go, and asleep we must stay so long as the effect of the
dose lasts.

It is of this, we oftenest die,--not in a day or a year, but after many
days and many years; when in some sharp crisis we need for our salvation
the force which should have been developing in our infancy, the muscle or
the nerve which should have been steadily growing strong till that moment.
But the force is not there; the muscle is weak; the nerve paralyzed; and
we die at twenty of a light fever, we fall down at twenty, under sudden
grief or temptation, because of our long sleeps under soothing syrups when
we were babies.

Oh, good nurses and doctors of souls, let them cut their own teeth, in the
natural ways. Let them scream if they must, but keep you still on one
side; give them no false helps; let them alone so far as it is possible
for love and sympathy to do so. Man is the only animal that has trouble
from the growing of the teeth in his body. It must be his own fault
somehow that he has that; and he has evidently been always conscious of a
likeness between this difficulty and perversion of a process natural to
his body, and the difficulty and perversion of his getting sensible and
just opinions; for it has passed into the immortality of a proverb that a
shrewd man is a man who has "cut his eye-teeth;" and the four last teeth,
which we get late in life, and which cost many people days of real
illness, are called in all tongues, all countries, "wisdom teeth!"

Glass Houses.

Who would live in one, if he could help it? And who wants to throw stones?

But who lives in any thin