remark, with a mental addition which would not improve a Sunday-school book _much_, that that was the very thing you were about to propose yourself? [Illustration: “ROCK-A-BY BABY IN THE TREE-TOP.”] Oh! you were under good discipline, and as you went fluttering up and down the room in your undress uniform, you not only prattled undignified baby-talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to _sing_!—“Rock-a-by baby in the tree-top,” for instance. What a spectacle for an army of the Tennessee! And what an affliction for the neighbours, too; for it is not everybody within a mile around that likes military music at three in the morning. And when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or three hours, and your little velvet-head intimated that nothing suited him like exercise and noise, what did you do? (“Go on!”) You simply _went_ on until you dropped in the last ditch. The idea that a _baby_ doesn’t _amount_ to anything! Why, _one_ baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. _One_ baby can furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities. Do what you please, you can’t make him stay on the reservation. Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don’t you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot, and there ain’t any real difference between triplets and an insurrection. Yes, it was high time for a toast-master to recognise the importance of the babies. Think what is in store for the present crop! Fifty years from now we shall all be dead, I trust, and then this flag, if it still survive (and let us hope it may), will be floating over a Republic numbering 200,000,000 souls, according to the settled laws of our increase. Our present schooner of State will have grown into a political leviathan—a _Great Eastern_. The cradled babies of to-day will be on deck. Let them be well trained, for we are going to leave a big contract on their hands.