", out of breath,
They trot the baby, most to death,
Sick or well, or cold or hot,
It's trottery, trottery, trottery, trot."

Of all these women there was not one who sat still for three
consecutive minutes. Heads were twisted to look at the name of the
corner lamp-posts, glove fingers were smoothed, the folds of
dress-skirts shaken out, hats straightened,--until I would fain have
cried out in irreverent paraphrase, at sight of the unrest which I
blush to confess made me conscious of my own nerves:

"Not one sitteth still--no, not one!"

That men have any patience with what they term "feminine fidgetiness,"
is but an evidence that they are better Christians than we of the
gentler sex are willing to admit. For I think I am not making a
sweeping assertion when I state that not one tolerably healthy man in
five hundred knows what it is to have nerves such as are the
birthright of his mother, sister, and wife. And yet how well the
physician, poet, autocrat and professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, knows
and sympathizes with this weakness in us! He touches the truth in a
direct way that wrings a sigh of familiar pain from many a patient
soul.

"Some people have a scale of your whole nervous system and can play
all the gamut of your sensibilities in semi-tones, touching the naked
nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument. I am
satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as
Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance. Married life is