I wish any one could only have seen my dear, dear mother--I can assure them it really was a treat worth living for--sitting by the fireside, with my little unconscious angel lying in her lap, and pulling down its sweet little nose, so as to seduce it into symmetry. She told me the first duty a mother owed to her infant was to pay proper attention to its nose, as really, at that tender age, it was as plastic as putty, and could be drawn out just like so much india-rubber; indeed, Nature, she might say, seemed to have kindly placed the child’s nose in its mother’s hands, and left it for her to say whether the cherub should be blessed with an aquiline, or cursed with a snub. I had to thank herself, she said, for the shape of mine; for when I was born, she really had fears that it would take after my father, and his was a bottle; so that it was only by never neglecting my nasal organ for an instant, and devoting every spare minute she had to its growth and formation, that she had been able to rescue it from the strong likeness it had, at first, to my father’s. And she begged of me to carry this maxim with me to my grave--“That noses might be grown to any shape, like cucumbers; and that it was only for the mother to decide whether the infant nasal gherkin should be allowed to run wild, and twist itself into a ‘turn up,’ or should, by the process of cultivation, be forced to grow straight, and elongate itself into a Grecian.” And then the dear, good body informed me that, touching the dear cherub’s eyes, I should find they would require a great deal of looking after--indeed, quite as much as the nose; for all children naturally squinted, and she thought nothing on earth looked so dreadful and vulgar as to see a pair of eyes wanting to go different ways, for all the world like two perverse greyhounds coupled together; and she was convinced that goggle-eyes and swivel-eyes, and, in fact, every other variety of eye but the right, merely arose from bad nursing. Consequently, I ought to be very careful not to allow any nurse with even so much as a cast to enter my service, until my little dear had learnt to look straight before it. And, above all, I was to be very particular, for some time to come, never to permit my little petsy wetsy to look over its head, for fear its eyes should become fixed in that uncomfortable position, and I should have my poor little girl walking about with them always turned up like a methodist preacher. Then she begged of me, as I loved my baby, never to allow it to yawn without putting my hand under its chin, to prevent it dropping its jaw, or I should have the misery of seeing my eldest daughter going through the world with its mouth always open, like a carriage dog, or one of the French toy nut-crackers. Moreover, she said she hoped I would be very particular with the little darling’s little wee legs; for if I should be imprudent enough to rub them downwards, as sure as her name