On the
child not receiving this advance with rapture, Miss Granger was wont to
observe that he was not so forward in taking notice as some of her model
children; at which the young mother flamed up in defence of her darling,
declaring that he did take notice, and that it was a shame to compare him
to "nasty village children."
"The 'nasty village children' have immortal souls," Sophia replied
severely.
"So they may; but they don't take notice sooner than my baby. I would never
believe that. He knows me, the precious darling;" and the little soft warm
thing in voluminous muslin was kissed and squeezed about to extinction.
Miss Granger was great upon the management of infancy, and was never tired
of expounding her ideas to Clarissa. They were of a Spartan character, not
calculated to make the period of babyhood a pleasant time to experience or
to look back upon. Cold water and nauseous medicines formed a conspicuous
part of the system, and where an ordinary nurse would have approached
infancy with a sponge, Miss Granger suggested a flesh-brush. The hardest,
most impracticable biscuits, the huskiest rusks, constituted Miss Granger's
notion of infant food. She would have excluded milk, as bilious, and would
have forbidden sugar, as a creator of acidity; and then, when the little
victim was about one and a half, she would have seated it before the most
dry-as-dust edition of the alphabet, and driven it triumphantly upon the
first stage on the high-road to Kings and Chronicles.
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