Now suppose the aimless impulse straying to the baby’s eye muscles, making the eyes roam hither and yon; but as they reach a certain position, they fall upon a lighted surface, and a pleasant brightness flows back into the consciousness; and something stirs within that has power to send an intenser current through those same fibres. For the time, at least, that channel is deepened, the wandering impulses are drained into it, and the eye muscles are held steady in that position. And, in fact, with the beginning of staring the irregular movements of head and eyes did decline, and gradually disappear. It is an important moment that marks the beginning of even a passive power to control the movements; and when my grandmother handed down the rule that you should never needlessly interrupt a baby’s staring, lest you hinder the development of power of attention, she seems to have been psychologically sound. A fuller and pleasanter life now seemed to pervade the whole little body. The grimaces of vague discomfort were disappearing, and the baby began to wear a look of satisfaction as she lay, warm and fed and dry, gazing at some light surface. In the bath, where the release from clothes and the stimulus to circulation from the warm water heightened the pleasant condition of general sensation, her expression approached real delight; the movements of her limbs were freer, and all her muscles tenser. The neck muscles, especially, were so far “innervated”--that is, supplied with nervous energy--as fairly to lift her head from the supporting hand. This was probably not as yet a real effort to hold up the head, only a drafting of surplus energy into the neck muscles, partly because of inherited aptitude, partly because the pleasure received from the lifted head and better seeing tended to draw the energy thither, just as it was drawn to the eye muscles in the case of the staring. At least one careful observer, Mrs. Edith Elmer Wood, records this action of the neck muscles on the first day. It was at this period that the baby first smiled; but being forewarned of the “colic smile,” which counterfeits so exactly the earliest true smiles,--fleeting as these are, just touching the mouth and vanishing,--I never felt sure whether the baby was smiling for general contentment with life, or whether a passing twinge had crossed her comfort and drawn her lips into the semblance of a smile; and so never dared to record the expression till it first occurred for unmistakable pleasure.