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One day Ellen was called from the beach to attend to some detail of housekeeping, and upon her return was horrified to find the child playing with some poison ivy, which Mrs. Doly, in metropolitan ignorance of its qualities, had gathered from the adjacent bluff. He had rubbed it all over his face and crushed it between his hands, and was in the act of stuffing some of it down the back of his neck.
To be sure, he was a picture of health, and seldom had occasion for tears on the score of ailments; but it should be remembered, as Mrs, Doly, the nurse, proudly claimed, that babies are very apt to cry when there is nothing the matter with them. "Oh, Mrs.
Doly, seated in a camp-chair behind, could devote an almost uninterrupted attention to her knitting, rising only at intervals to see that the carriage occupied a proper position with respect to the movements of the tide, while Ellen reclined in idleness upon the sand. To so great an extent was her office a sinecure that once, when the water was very calm, Mrs.
With her gloved hands Ellen snatched the leaves away, upbraided poor Mrs. Doly, subjected Little John to violent ablution, and then sat down to await disaster. But it never came. The only inconvenience Little John ever experienced from the incident was the loss of a certain degree of liberty; for thence-forth Ellen would not suffer him to be separated from her for an instant. Mrs.
Doly fell asleep in the warm sun, during Ellen's temporary absence, and awoke as the water wetted her toes to find Little John completely surrounded and pretty nearly in his element literally. Far from being alarmed, however, he was in a state of exalted bliss, and emphatically protested against being removed to a more secure position.
Doly," Ellen exclaimed one morning, when by some means or other Little John had specially excited her admiration, "what a lovely woman his mother must have been! How I wish I might have known her before she died! Sometimes I feel as if it cannot be right for me to have this dear little baby without her consent."
Doly, however, did not escape so easily. The noxious Rhus produced its most evil effects upon her face and hands, and for a week she led a life of physical torture enhanced by humiliation of spirit. Upon another occasion a neighbor's child dropped a small marble in front of Little John, who unhesitatingly picked it up, put it into his mouth, and swallowed it before anybody could interfere.
Such confidence had the Lindsays in the invulnerability of his constitution that they were not alarmed when he experienced his inevitable first indisposition of a serious character. Mrs. Doly and Ellen agreed that it was a natural consequence of the change in his diet and mode of life since they had come back to the city, and Dr. Kreiss, who was at once summoned, substantiated the theory.
"I have never seen such a beautiful baby. Such a sweet little face, and such dear little ways! You must come up into the nursery immediately. I should have brought him down to welcome you, but it is just his supper-time, and Mrs. Doly thought he'd better not wait."
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