They later admitted the error of their gloomy prophecy; but nobody, in fact, denied that Hanno was a little backward. His early infancy was a struggle for life, and his family was in constant anxiety. At birth he had been too feeble to cry out; and soon after the christening a three-day attack of cholera-infantum was almost enough to still for ever the little heart set pumping, in the first place, with such difficulty. But he survived; and good Dr. Grabow did his best, by the most painstaking care and nourishment, to strengthen him for the difficult period of teething. The first tiny white point had barely pricked through the gum, when the child was attacked by convulsions, which repeated themselves with greater and greater violence, until again the worst was to be feared. Once more the old doctor speechlessly pressed the parents’ hands. The child lay in profound exhaustion, and the vacant look in the shadowy eyes indicated an affection of the brain. The end seemed almost to be wished for. But Hanno regained some little strength, consciousness returned; and though the crisis which he had survived greatly hindered his progress in walking and talking, there was no longer any immediate danger to be feared. The child was slender of limb, and rather tall for his age. His hair, pale brown and very soft, began to grow rapidly, and fell waving over the shoulders of his full, pinafore-like frocks. The family likenesses were abundantly clear, even now. From the first he possessed the Buddenbrook hand, broad, a little too short, but finely articulated, and his nose was precisely the nose of his father and great-grandfather, though the nostrils would probably remain more delicate. But the whole lower part of his face, longish and narrow, was neither Buddenbrook nor Kröger, but from the mother’s side of the house. This was true of the mouth in particular, which, when closed, began very early to wear an anxious, woebegone expression that later matched the look of his strange, gold-brown, blue-shadowed eyes. So he began to live: brooded over by his father’s reserved tenderness, clothed and nurtured under his mother’s watchful eye; prayed over by Aunt Antonie, presented with tops and hobby-horses by the Frau Consul and Uncle Justus; and when his charming little perambulator appeared on the streets, it was looked after with interest and expectation. Madame Decho, the stately nurse, had attended the child up to now; but it had been settled that when they moved into the new house, not she, but Ida Jungmann, should move in with them, and the latter’s place with the old Frau Consul be filled by somebody else.