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The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 by George MacDonald
page 60 of 193 (31%)

"What a provoking man you are! You know what I mean well enough."

"As well as I choose to know--certainly," I answered.

This lady was one of my oldest parishioners, and took liberties for which
she had no other justification, except indeed an unhesitating belief in the
superior rectitude of whatever came into her own head can be counted
as one. When she was gone, my wife turned to me with a half-comic,
half-anxious look, and said:

"But it would be rather alarming, Harry, if this were to get abroad, and
we couldn't go out at the door in the morning without being in danger of
stepping on a baby on the door-step."

"You might as well have said, when you were going to be married, 'If God
should send me twenty children, whatever should I do?' He who sent us this
one can surely prevent any more from coming than he wants to come. All that
we have to think of is to do right--not the consequences of doing right.
But leaving all that aside, you must not suppose that wandering mothers
have not even the attachment of animals to their offspring. There are not
so many that are willing to part with babies as all that would come to. If
you believe that God sent this one, that is enough for the present. If he
should send another, we should know by that that we had to take it in."

My wife said the baby was a beauty. I could see that she was a plump,
well-to-do baby; and being by nature no particular lover of babies as
babies--that is, feeling none of the inclination of mothers and nurses
and elder sisters to eat them, or rather, perhaps, loving more for what I
believed than what I saw--that was all I could pretend to discover. But
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