German Babies

A German baby is a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up, like a mummy, in yards of bandages, which are unfolded once (at the outside twice) a day; it is never 'bathed,' but I suppose is sometimes washed after some occult manner. Its head is never touched with soap and water until eight or ten months old, when the thick skull-cap of incrusted dirt that it has by that time obtained is removed by the application of various unguents. Many German ladies have assured me that the fine heads of hair one sees in Germany are entirely owing to the unsavory skull-cap.

When, having some juvenile relatives staying with me, I insisted on their being tubbed, all my female friends were shocked at my ignorance and wilfulness, and assured me that it was entirely owing to our barbaric bath system that the King of Hanover had lost his sight. 'My friends, we are not all blind,' I said, and they were silenced if not convinced.

To this terrible system of bandaging and carrying the child in a peculiar fashion, wrapped in a mantle that is partly slung over the hips of the bearer, something after the fashion prevailing among Indian squaws, may be attributed in a great degree the number of curved spines, crooked shoulders, and abnormal development we meet in Germany. Yet, strange to say, 'rickets,' a disease only known with us amongst the poor, who cannot afford the time themselves or pay others to nurse their children properly, goes by the name of the Englische Krankheit.

The baby, being born and swathed up, now gets a huge peasant girl in loco parentis. A mummy is not a thing to fondle, nor is a little stiff bundle of humanity (which you might stand up on end in one corner of the room without detriment to its sumptuary arrangement) an object on which to lavish caresses. Thus the young mother is scarcely a mother at all, the maternal functions being delegated to another.

The baby does not lie on the floor or crawl to the hearth-rug, crowing and kicking, and curling its pink toes, tramping with its legs, and fighting with mottled arms, 'as one that beateth the air.' It does not swarm up and about its mother's neck and bosom, finding its little life and all its tiny pleasure in her arms; it does not fall at length into a slumber of rosy repletion, and with its mouth open, snoozily satisfied, rejoice its mother's eyes for the beautiful little animal that it is.

No, it is out walking, tied to a feather bed, and accompanied by a tall soldier, the father of its poor little foster-brother or sister, which is to grow up as it can. It comes in presently, and is taken to its mamma to kiss; but its real mother, the mother that fosters and feeds, soon carries it away again, and resumes all the privileges of true maternity for the rest of the day. The lady might as well be its aunt. 'Only that and nothing more.'—Fraser's Magazine.