ses and corsets and vinaigrettes?

"I once had a sweet little doll, dears,
The prettiest doll in the world,
Her face was so red and so white, dears,
And her hair was so charmingly curled;
But I lost my poor little doll, dears,
As I played on the heath one day,
And I sought for her more than a week, dears,
But I never could find where she lay.

"I found my poor little doll, dears,
As I played on the heath one day;
Folks say she is terribly changed, dears,
For her paint is all washed away;
And her arms trodden off by the cows, dears,
And her hair not the least bit curled;
Yet for old sake's sake she is still, dears,
The prettiest doll in the world."

Long live the doll!

"Dolly-o'diamonds, precious lamb,
Humming-bird, honey-pot, jewel, jam,
Darling delicate-dear-delight--
Angel-o'red, angel-o'white!"

"Take away the doll, you erase from the heart and head feelings,
images, poetry, aspiration, experience, ready for application to real
life."

Every mother knows the development of tenderness and motherliness
that goes on in her little girl through the nursing and petting and
teaching and caring for her doll. There is a good deal of journalistic
anxiety concerning the decline of mothers. Is it possible that
fathers, too, are in any danger of decline? It is impossible to
overestimate the sacredness and importance of the mother-spirit in the
universe, but the father-spirit is not positively valueless (so far
as it goes). The newspaper-pessimists talk comparatively little about
developing that in the young male of the species. In three years'
practical experience among the children of the poorer classes, and
during all the succeeding years, when I have filled the honorary and
honorable offices of general-utility woman, story-teller, song-singer,
and playmaker-in-ordinary to their royal highnesses, some thousands
of babies, I have been struck with the greater hardness of the small
boys; a certain coarseness of fibre and lack of sensitiveness which
makes them less susceptible, at first, to gentle influences.

Once upon a time I set about developing this father spirit in a group
of little gamins whose general attitude toward the weaker sex, toward
birds and flowers and insects, toward beauty in distress and wounded
sensibility, was in the last degree offensive. In the bird games we
had always had a mother bird in the nest with the birdlings; we now
introduced a father bird in