affections are not trained to lay hold of the abstract or the
historical. If you question her, you will find that her heart does
not bleed for the poor negro, and she is not in the habit of
regarding the Emperor Caligula with abhorrence. She has one or two
brothers or sisters, but they are far away and have become almost as
historical as Caligula. In these circumstances, if she could not
feel motherly towards babies, what feeling would be left to her?
And, perhaps, if we knew her story, baby has a charm to open up an
old channel, long since dry and choked with the sands of a desert
life, in which a gentle stream of tenderness once flowed, with
"flowerets of Eden" on its banks, and fertilised her poor nature.
But we do not know her story. She says her husband is a cook. More
about him she does not say, but she hugs "Sunny Baba" to her breast
and kisses him and says that nothing shall ever part her from him
till he grows to be a great saheb, with plenty of pay, when he will
pension her and take care of her in her old age. And her eyes get
moist, for she means it more or less; but next day she catches a cold
and refuses food, saying that all her bones ache and her head is
revolving; then the horror of dying among strangers, "unhouseled,
disappointed, unaneled," proves too much for the faithful creature,
and she disappears without notice, leaving her darling and its mother
to look out for another Ayah.

It is a fortunate thing for us that the Ayah is able to conceive such
a devouring passion for our children, for it appears, from her own
statements, that but for this strong tie, nothing would induce her to
stay a day in our service where the constant broils with the other
servants, into which she is driven by her determination to be
faithful to her own mistress, make life almost unbearable to a
peaceable woman like her. The chief object of her righteous