It is worth noting that this complete swaddling of infants is almost universal among both barbarous and civilised peoples who dwell in sub-tropical or temperate climates. It is done not so much (or not only) to keep the child warm, but to prevent it from scratching itself, from moving about and hurting itself, and from bruising itself or breaking its tender bones if it should chance to fall. A baby, however, that is done up tight and flat as a Red-skin baby is, must be almost as safe on a top-shelf as on the ground. The close swaddling and padding of baby is found, the more we consider it, to be the fashion among both civilised and barbarous kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, where women are very hard-worked. It is easy to understand how that must be. When the mother digs and plants the soil, and grinds the corn, draws the water and cooks the food for her husband and children--as does the savage woman of every clime--when she spins and brews, and makes and mends, and cooks and cleans, as does the house-wife of almost every degree in almost every country of Europe; when the mother has thus her hands full of toil or occupation from morning till night, and when the expense or the convenience of a nurse is not available, what can she do, what must she do, with baby, but contrive some means of keeping him from troubling her and at the same time from damaging himself? Therefore the American Indian papoose is bound and laced in the thing we have seen; therefore the Amazon Indian child is slung in a close net-like hammock from tree to tree; therefore the New Guinea child hangs like a bunch of onions in a bag-net either from a jutting bamboo of his father's hut or on his mother's back by a strap passed across the forehead; and therefore the European baby of several countries is wrapped and padded in the ways we are about to describe. [Illustration: A GERMAN BABY.] [Illustration: "BABY WAS FOUND ASLEEP IN THE SNOW."] Of all house-wives in Europe, probably the German is the hardest worked, and of all European mothers the German practises most completely the art of swathing and padding her baby, and of putting it on the shelf. The German baby is swaddled in a long, narrow pillow, which is made to meet completely round him, being tucked up over his feet and turned under his solemn chin. Three bands of gay blue ribbons are then passed round the whole bundle and tied in large, florid bows about where his chest, his waist, and his ankles may be supposed to be. In this guise he can be deposited as an ornament either on the sumptuous best bed, or on the kitchen dresser, or on the drawing-room table. How fond the Germans are of this presentment of baby may be guessed from the fact that it figures largely in their picture-books, among their dolls, and even in the bakers' shops at Easter-time, made of dough and covered with sugar to be devoured by greedy live babies. [Illustration: "A VERY QUEER FISH."]