pleasure of the giving than to divide the welcome between
yourself and the gift. Let that follow after you are gone.

It is an exaggerated compliment to women when we ascribe to them alone
this natural sympathy with childhood. It is an individual, not a sexual
trait, and is stronger in many men than in many women. It is nowhere
better exhibited in literature than where the happy Wilhelm Meister
takes his boy by the hand, to lead him "into the free and lordly
world." Such love is not universal among the other sex, though men, in
that humility which so adorns their natures, keep up the pleasing
fiction that it is. As a general rule any little girl feels some
glimmerings of emotion towards anything that can pass for a doll, but
it does not follow that, when grown older, she will feel as ready an
instinct toward every child. Try it. Point out to a woman some bundle
of blue-and-white or white-and-scarlet in some one's arms at the next
street corner. Ask her, "Do you love that baby?" Not one woman in three
will say promptly, "Yes." The others will hesitate, will bid you wait
till they are nearer, till they can personally inspect the little thing
and take an inventory of its traits; it may be dirty, too; it may be
diseased. Ah! but this is not to love children, and you might as well
be a man. To love children is to love childhood, instinctively, at
whatever distance, the first impulse being one of attraction, though it
may be checked by later discoveries. Unless your heart commands at
least as long a range as your eye, it is not worth much. The dearest
saint in my calendar never entered a railway car that she did not look
round for a baby, which, when discovered, must always be won at once
into her arms. If it was dirty, she would have been glad to bathe it;
if ill, to heal it. It would not have seemed to her anything worthy the
name of love, to seek only those who were wholesome and clean. Like the
young girl in Holmes's most touching poem, she would have claimed as
her own the outcast child whom nurses and physicians had abandoned.

"'Take her, dread Angel! Break in love
This bruised reed and make it thine!'
No voice descended from above,
But Avis answered, 'She is mine!'"

When I think of the self-devotion which the human heart can contain--of
those saintly souls that are in love with sorrow, and that yearn to
shelter all weakness and all grief--it inspires an unspeakable
confidence that there must al