Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/162

 Christs, for the well-begotten sons and daughters of God will throng all the ways of the world we live' in. The laugh was against myself, and it gives me unalloyed pleasure to renounce my error, and do justice to a subject which I did not comprehend, and to a view of it that had not then struck upon my spirit. . . I knew a man, and he married a wife, and she longed to be a mother. The husband was crooked, angular, yet had great mental power. The wife was healthy, ignorant, pretty, conceited, and simple. One day she told him a little bird had said it would in a few months bring them a little baby; she was sure of it. From that hour the husband began to magnetize her; he taught, trained, so gently, sang, read, talked to her; read about the child Jesus, and fully filled and inspired her with the idea that the babe she was to bear would be a boy, and the most perfect one imaginable. Time fled; the child was born, and a prettier and more intelligent one never yet saw the light; it was perfect, talked at six months, has a physique of astonishing beauty, solidity, and strength, and bids fair to be all that man can be in the age in which we live. Husbands, here's a hint; act upon it. . . . It is in the power of a good woman to destroy whatever there may be of the devil in a man, and to substitute therefor an ideal God. . . . Lola Montez — poor Lola! — used to say that a man, to please a woman, must be one-fourth parrot, one-fourth man, one-fourth peacock, and the rest monkey. That is the style of thing most taking and popular with modern women, but, take my word for it, is a very poor sort of stuff to permanently tie to. Reverse the picture, and behold the modern lady of fashion. What sort of wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, will such people make? For an answer, go look at the thousands of sickly, puling younglings abounding everywhere, and affording splendid incomes for doctors and manufacturers of diminutive shrouds, and the prettiest possible, neat little coffins, all spangled and laced and fit to be gazed at a week — tidy little fashionable coffins — just big enough for poor little Frederick Charles Montague Augustus, or Isabella Euphrosyne, who departed this life at two and a half, by reason of being built of poor material, badly put together. ... If you want to find the right sort of children, go into the middle classes, and even on the lower shelves you will find rare volumes of the human book, bound in rags and illustrated by all sorts of "cuts,"