A little low cry--what was it?--I never heard it before, yet it went to my heart almost with a pang of delight. Alice, bring it--bring it. I cannot wait for all those snowy robes, and all the joyful, tearful importance of my dear, dear, kind nurse, my almost mother. Here in its little flannel wrapper--a little moving bundle, thrusting about its little limbs, turning round its little downy head with the first instincts of life to that kind bosom, crying its little wailing cry--oh, kindest heaven!--oh, God most wonderful!--it is mine, mine, my own child! I felt neither pain nor weakness. I consented to lie still, because they said I must, and because I was happy beyond expression, and neither rebellion nor disobedience was in me. I lay quite still, pulling back the curtains to look at Alice as she put on those dainty little garments, one by one--to look at the moving thing upon her knee, the little hand thrust up into the air, the vigorous kicks and thrusts with which it struggled. _It!_ a spark of sudden anger woke in me when some one said _it_--that was correct enough half an hour ago--but this was he, an individual being, my baby, my own, mine! I cannot tell to any one the rapture in which I lay watching Alice as she put upon him his first little robes. I was in a woman's paradise--a moment which can come but once in a lifetime. What mother does not remember, after all her dread, her awe, her suffering, the heavenly rest in which she lay looking at her firstborn? I think there is no such ecstasy either before or after--it is all over--all over--the ordeal which frame and spirit have been trembling at, is past like a dream, and who remembers it?--and in that strange delicious luxury of ease and weakness, there seems no longer anything to desire. I do not know,--perhaps it is not an elevated idea at all,--but my best realization of unspeakable happiness was in that hour after my little boy was born. When that most important toilet was finished, Alice brought him to me in the long white robe, rich with my own needlework, and the pretty close cap covering his little downy head. She laid him down on my arm, and drew a step apart, and looked at us both, crying for joy. "Bless you, my darling!" cried Alice, and then she fairly ran away with her bright glistening face, and I knew very well it was to relieve her full heart, and spend her tears.