ake care of their babies. One of
them sent for me just when the close air and long days' work were
beginning to tell upon my health, and it was decided that I had better
go. The salt wind soon restored my strength, and those months of quiet
family life were very good for me.

Like most young girls, I had a motherly fondness for little children,
and my two baby-nephews were my pride and delight. The older one had a
delicate constitution, and there was a thoughtful, questioning look in
his eyes, that seemed to gaze forward almost sadly, and foresee that he
should never attain to manhood. The younger, a plump, vigorous urchin,
three or four months old, did, without doubt, "feel his life in every
limb." He was my especial charge, for his brother's clinging weakness
gave him, the first-born, the place nearest his mother's heart. The
baby bore the family name, mine and his mother's; "our little Lark," we
sometimes called him, for his wide-awakeness and his
merry-heartedness.(Alas! neither of those beautiful boys grew up to be
men! One page of my home-memories is sadly written over with their
elegy, the "Graves of a Household." Father, mother, and four sons, an
entire family, long since passed away from earthly sight.)

The tie between my lovely baby-nephew and myself became very close. The
first two years of a child's life are its most appealing years, and
call out all the latent tenderness of the nature on which it leans for
protection. I think I should have missed one of the best educating
influences of my youth, if I had not had the care of that baby for a
year or more just as I entered my teens. I was never so happy as when I
held him in my arms, sleeping or waking; and he, happy anywhere, was
always contented when he was with me.

I was as fond as ever of reading, and somehow I managed to combine baby
and book. Dickens's "Old Curiosity Shop" was just then coming out in a
Philadelphia weekly paper, and I read it with the baby playing at my
feet, or lying across my lap, in an unfinished room given up to
sea-chests and coffee-bags and spicy foreign odors. (My cherub's papa
was a sea-captain, usually away on his African voyages.) Little Nell
and her grandfather became as real to me as my darling charge, and if a
tear from his nurse's eyes sometimes dropped upon his cheek as he
slept, he was not saddened by it. When he awoke he was irrepressible;
clutching at my hair with his stout pink fists, and driving all
dream-people