Tirednature'ssweetrestorer, and to take your snatches of sleep _à pied_, a kind of fatherly walking Stewart, as if you were doing your thousand miles in a thousand hours for a thousand dollars, and were sure of winning the money? Believe me, my friend, the world has many such martyrs, unknown, obscure, suffering men, whose names Rumor never blows through her miserable conch-shell,--and I am one of them. As Bully Bertram says, in Maturin's pimento play,--"I am a wretch, and proud of wretchedness." A child, the offspring of your own loins, is something worth watching for. Such a father is your true Tapley; --there _is_ some credit in coming out jolly under such circumstances. The unnatural parent, as those warning cries break the silence, may counterfeit Death's counterfeit, and may even be guilty of the surpassing iniquity of simulating a snore. _Nunquam dormio_; I am like "The Sun" newspaper,--sleepless, tireless, disturbed, but imperturbable. I meet my fate, and find the pang a pleasant one. And so may I ever be, through all febrile, cutaneous, and flatulent vicissitudes,--careful of chicken-pox, mild with mumps and measles, unwearied during the weaning, growing tenderer with each succeeding rash, kinder with every cold, gentler with every grief, and sweeter-tempered with every sorrow sent to afflict my little woman! 'Tis a rough world. We must acclimate her considerately. Of the matter of education I also have what are called "views." I may be peculiar. School-committee-men who spell Jerusalem with a G, drill-sergeants who believe in black-boards and visible numerators, statistical fellows who judge of the future fate of the republic by the average attendance at the "Primaries," may not agree with me in my idea of bending the twig. I do believe, that, if Dame Nature herself should apply for a school, some of these wise Dogberries would report her "unqualyfide." I will not murder my pretty pet. So she be gentle, kindly, and loving, what care I if at sixteen years of age she cannot paint the baptism of John upon velvet, does not know a word of that accursed French language, breaks down in the "forward and back" of a cotillon, and cannot with spider fingers spin upon the piano the swiftest Tarantelle of Chopin.--[Illustration: musical note] = 2558 Metronome? We will find something better and braver than all that, my little Alice! Confound your Italianos!--the birds shall be the music-masters of my tiny dame. Moonrise, and sunset, and the autumnal woods shall teach her tint and tone. The flowers are older than the school-botanies;-- she shall give them pet names at her own sweet will. We will not go to big folios to find out the big Latin names of the butterflies; but be sure, pet, they and you shall be better acquainted. And long before you have acquired that most profitless of all arts, the art of reading, we will go very deeply into ancient English literature. There is the story of the enterprising mouse, who,