Page:Vocal Speech for the Dumb.djvu/47



"Will you picture to yourself a scene near a life's commencement—such, as yours or mine—of a mother and her baby? Its tiny fingers wrestle with her hair; its sparkling eyes and dimpled cheeks, its crowings and croonings, are her heart's delight: they play together, laugh together, yes, talk together in baby language all day long; what companions will they not be, these two, a little later; every day growing dearer, in a love strong as death.

So God meant it to be; so it shall be, speaking roughly, in fifteen hundred cases as against one; and that one I think of it. No less happy is this mother with her child; the child with her. But after a time someone suggests a question: "Why doesn't baby begin to talk?" "Oh, it's too young yet." "But mine," says the visitor, "talks quite plainly, though it is a month younger." "Well, it will come in time: better be backward!" But nothing comes—only to the happy mother a slow awakening and a bitter cry.—"Oh, nurse; so backward as this? Better never born! Better dead!"

God help those two. God give them grace to bear up against the ever sundering years; because the tender, wooing voice of the mother shall be unknown to the child; the longed for and expected accents of the child shall be denied the poor mother. That early teaching at the knee of love, obedience, faith is God and man, it may not be for her to instil into the little heart. What wonder, if soon the baby daughter dies away, the dimpling smiles grow rare and disappear; the lonely life shrinks inward into death—a living death!