Upon my honour, some married people don’t deserve to have a baby at all. Take my parents. Here am I just about to celebrate the first anniversary of my birthday, and, candidly, at times I feel disposed to give up fighting even here, on the very threshold of a career which many experts have agreed to consider most promising. If it were not for my bottle-holder, I should have thrown up the sponge long ago. My papa and mamma, to be frank, get on my nerves and age me; my nurse alone has power to calm the storm. The truth is, that with a first child the average inexperienced young father and mother expect a jolly deal too much. The parents of a long family take new babies as they come, and don’t worry about them and boast about them, and look for signs and wonders before a chap is weaned. But your beginners! What my people expect I don’t know. I try to oblige, but there is always something wrong. If they would only leave me to my nurse--who is a particularly pleasing, competent person, and knows her business--it might be better for everybody concerned. And that is true, because I have heard her say so a dozen times in private. Moreover, they--I mean my father and mother--might give Nature a chance. To hear them you would think that Nature had overlooked me altogether. For instance, it cannot be denied that she was a trifle behindhand with my first teeth--the four little front ones. Well, what then? It merely amounted to a question of a few days. _I_ didn’t want the teeth. My whole life stretched out before me, and a fortnight more or less without them made no practical difference. I knew--nobody better--that they were on the way all right. But my parents had read somewhere at what time the teeth were due; or else my doctor, like a fool, had been worried into giving a definite date; and when the day arrived and the teeth didn’t, my mother cried and my father poked about in my mouth with his forefinger until I felt I would have given something for a tooth or two, just to remonstrate with. I couldn’t say what I thought about it, but my nurse could, thank God, and did. And then my mother said she had produced a horrid, toothless freak of Nature, and my father went away to town with a face from which all joy in life had departed. It was the same look which he wore for a week during my vaccinating troubles. It is not too much to say that he added a pang to the horrors of that circumstance. I “took” badly, and came out speckled one morning in consequence. My medical man was sent for, and said it was a “noble arm,” and seemed pleased at what he had arranged. Well, that was good enough for me. The man had brought me into the world, and I trusted him. But my father declared that he had never seen vaccination speckle a child on the stomach in his life (which was doubtless true) and he murmured something about a second opinion. The doctor was good-natured about it, fortunately; many practitioners would have thrown up the case; but when the speckles went