But it so happened that my father was at that moment engaged in the important consideration whether the Iliad was written by one Homer—or was rather a collection of sundry ballads, done into Greek by divers hands, and finally selected, compiled, and reduced into a whole by a Committee of Taste, under that elegant old tyrant Pisistratus; and the sudden affirmation “It is a boy,” did not seem to him pertinent to the thread of the discussion. Therefore he asked, “What is a boy?”—vaguely, and, as it were, taken by surprise. “Lord, sir!” said Mrs Primmins, “what is a boy? Why, the baby!” “The baby!” repeated my father, rising. “What, you don’t mean to say that Mrs Caxton is—eh—?” “Yes I do,” said Mrs Primmins, dropping a curtsey; “and as fine a little rogue as ever I set eyes upon.” “Poor, dear woman!” said my father with great compassion. “So soon too—so rapidly!” he resumed in a tone of musing surprise. “Why, it is but the other day we were married!” “Bless my heart, sir,” said Mrs Primmins, much scandalised, “it is ten months and more.” “Ten months!” said my father with a sigh. “Ten months! and I have not finished fifty pages of my refutation of Wolfe’s monstrous theory! In ten months a child!—and I’ll be bound complete—hands, feet, eyes, ears, and nose!—and not like this poor Infant of Mind (and my father pathetically placed his hand on the treatise)—of which nothing is formed and shaped—not even the first joint of the little finger! Why, my wife is a precious woman! Well, keep her quiet. Heaven preserve her, and send me strength—to support this blessing!” “But your honour will look at the baby?—come, sir!” and Mrs Primmins laid hold of my father’s sleeve coaxingly. “Look at it—to be sure,” said my father kindly; “look at it, certainly, it is but fair to poor Mrs Caxton; after taking so much trouble, dear soul!” Therewith my father, drawing his dressing robe round him in more stately folds, followed Mrs Primmins up stairs, into a room very carefully darkened. “How are you, my dear?” said my father, with compassionate tenderness, as he groped his way to the bed. A faint voice muttered, “Better now,—and so happy!” And, at the same moment, Mrs Primmins pulled my father away, lifted a coverlid from a small cradle, and, holding a candle within an inch of an undeveloped nose, cried emphatically, “There—bless it!” “Of course, ma’am, I bless it,” said my father rather peevishly. “It is my duty to bless it;—BLESS IT! And this, then, is the way we come into the world!—red, very red,—blushing for all the follies we are destined to commit.” My father sat down on the nurse’s chair, the women grouped round him. He continued to gaze on the contents of the cradle, and at length said musingly:—“And Homer was once like this!” At this moment—and no wonder, considering the propinquity of the candle to his visual organs—Homer’s infant likeness commenced the first untutored melodies of nature.