The day following my advent being Sunday, and the place of my birth being in the country, many of the neighbors dropped in to see Mrs. Smith and the baby. All went through the same programme.
“How d’ye do, Mrs. Smith; I hope you came through well; but then this is your first. There’s nothing like getting used to it. And where’s the little dear?”
And without waiting for my mother’s replies and thanks, they would turn to the nurse holding me in her lap on the pillow, and removing the wrapping from my face as carefully as if it were a bird, and would fly out, they would gaze at me mesmerically, cluck to me with a perseverance undamped by the want of effect, and finally turn away with the defiant assertion that I was the perfect image of both my parents; an assertion which would have been at least debatable, from the fact that my father was very dark in complexion and feature, and my mother very fair. Some even insisted on holding me, the spinster visitors being particularly desirous of this privilege; and getting me in their laps, they would examine the tightness of my clothing, and the temperature of my skin, with the well assumed criticism of experience. And if one found, on thrusting her hands beneath my clothes, that my feet were cold, most proudly and complacently she would unfold my garments, and expose my little splotched limbs to the fire. My feet and legs must have looked very pitiful indeed, sticking out of a wilderness of flannel like two slim beets, crossing each other with their little flat soles, as if I was born to be a tailor!
When the visitors were gone my father would come and gaze long and steadily into my face, then anxiously suggest that something must be the matter with me, because I was lying so still; and my mother would call for me to be brought to her, and after innumerable fixings, adjusting the cloth over my face this way, turning my head that way, hiding the point of one pin, pulling out another, straightening this and that fold of a garment—after all these nervousnesses, peculiar to young mothers, I would be found to be sleeping soundly; and then mother would regale herself with a long conversation between us, though it is more than probable she monopolized the talking.