The Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Dime Novel Bibliography

Item - A Little Incident*

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(source: Stanford Libraries)
Online Full Text: Stanford Digital Repository
Series: New York Weekly v. 23 no. 47 — page 8
Subject / Tag: Poem
Part of: New York Weekly, v. XXIII, no. 47, October 8, 1868 (Issue)
Author: Kidder, M. A. (Mary Ann), 1820-1905
Date: October 8, 1868
Edition Description:

*The incident of travel on which this was written is narrated by a correspondent of the Daily Saratogian. It took place on the Rensselear and Saratoga Railroad, on one of the Northern trains, between Saratoga and Whitehall.

When the train halted at Saratoga, among the passengers from the West came a man of about 30 years of age, elbowing his way through the crowd, and bearing in his arms a child. He was a poor man; his clothes were poor; he looked poor. Around his hat was tied a piece of soiled, worn crape. It was evidently all the mourning his scanty means would permit, for the mother of the child was dead.

This man was rough in exterior, yet his face was an honest one. He handled the baby awkwardly, yet there was a tenderness in his sad look that showed the purity of a father's love. The little fellow lay asleep on his coarsely clad knee; a stray sunbeam glanced across its tired face. They were both tired, the father and the child, for they had come from the far West; and as he placed his hard, toil-worn hand to shield it from the golden rays, there was in his look a mixture of sadness and care, as if his pent-up feelings had been so crowded back into the inner cells of his heart that even tears could have been no relief to the hidden anguish that was making his life a misery.

The poor child cried; it might be the little thing was tired; it might be it missed its mother; perhaps it was hungry: perhaps it was sick, and so it cried. The tears rolled down its baby cheeks; the father wiped away the dewdrops as they fell, and then tried to feed it. He was so awkward with the bottle-his has been a life of toil and hardship-and he knew not how to give his darling its nourishment. As he made effort after effort to stifle the cries and check the tears of his motherless babe, how he must have mussed her who in his life of labor and privation had been his solace and comfort. An unbidden tear started to his eye, but he brushed it quickly away. All who saw him pitied him. At length a woman, richly appareled, with an infant resting on the lap of his nurse beside her-she had been watching the man-said in a gentle tone, "Give me the child." The poor fellow looked at her with a look of gratitude, for there was a mother's tenderness in her voice. With humble resignation, as though it were pain to part with him, even for a moment, he gave her his boy. The woman took it; its soiled clothes rested on her costly silk; its tiny head was soon beneath her shawl, and in a moment all was still. Like the Grecian daughter who, through the iron bars fed her starving father, so did this high-born lady from her breast feed the hungry child, and when, on her gentle bosom the little one lay in calm and unvexed sleep, she put aside the shawl.

The father's heart swelled with gratitude. He said, as a tear welled in his eye, and his voice was thick with emotion, "Thank you. I'll take him now." Then the woman's nature spoke forth, as she gently answered, "Not yet, you will wake him," and for mile after mile that noble-hearted woman held that poor man's child, and it was not until her own babe required such nourishment as only a mother can give, she gently rose and placed the stranger boy with its father.
First Sentence: Among the eager crowd that thronged
Last Sentence: With that fond mother's milk!

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