Page:The English Peasant.djvu/132

 fed, not with a bottle, but with a spoon, and it accordingly soon acquires a taste for the unnaturally solid food given it. Milk is dear, and not to be had, and so sugar-sop—a lumpy mass of bread, water, and sugar—is used instead. This is either given cold, or is left on the hob in a cup, seldom or never changed or cleaned, and from time to time this fermenting and sooty mess is heaped into the infant's mouth by the nurse.

Older mothers, after losing two or three children, begin to view the subject as one for ingenuity and speculation. The neighbours will say, "So-and-so has another baby; you'll see it won't live," and treat it as a sort of joke. A medical man is called in to the wasting infant, "because there is so much bother about the registration." The mother says the child is dying, and won't touch food. But when the doctor offers food, the child is ravenious, and "fit to tear the spoon in pieces."

The above is almost a literal quotation from the report, which then goes on to say: "It was more than once related that women who had lost two or three successive children lost no more after it had been plainly signified to them that their proceedings were watched."

Should the unhappy little creature struggle through this period of semi-starvation, its life is threatened by another domestic demon.

"There can be no doubt," says the report, "of the truth of the horrid statement made by almost every surgeon in the marshland, that there was not a labourer's house in which a bottle of opiate was not to be seen, and not a child but who got it in some form."

Each village has its own peculiar preparation, the favourite form for infants being Godfrey's Cordial, a mixture of opium, treacle, and sassafras. Each mother buys the "Godfrey" she favours most, so that, when she leaves her baby in the morning, she will leave her own bottle with the nurse. Should the nurse substitute her own, and should it turn out more potent, as is sometimes the case, the children will sink into such a state that, in a fright, she sends off for the surgeon, who on his arrival finds half a dozen babies, some snoring, some squinting, all pallid and eye-sunken, lying about the room. Happily, he is prepared for