University of Virginia Library

The Baby of the Future

NURSE
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!

BABY
(coldly)
How doth the little bee do this?
Why, by an impulse blind.
Cease, then, to praise good works of such
An automatic kind.

NURSE
Let dogs delight to bark and bite
For Heaven hath made them so.
Let bears and lions growl and fight,
For 'tis their nature to.

BABY
(ironically)
Indeed? A brutal nature, then,
Excuses brutal ways,
Unthinking girl! you little know
The problems that you raise.

NURSE
(continuing)
But, children, you should never let
Your angry passions rise;
Your little hands were never made
To tear each other's eyes.

BABY
(contemptuously)
Not “made” to tear? Well, what of that?
No more, at first, were claws.
All comes by adaptation, fool!
No need of Final Cause.
And if we use the hands to tear,
Just as the nose to smell,
Ere many ages have gone by
They'll do it very well.

NURSE
Tom, Tom, the Piper's son,
Stole a pig, and away he run!

BABY
(reproachfully)
Come, come! Away he “run”!
Grammar condemns what you've just “done.”
Should we not read, “The Piper's man
Stole a pig, and away he “‘ran’”?

NURSE
Hush-a-by, Baby
On the tree-top,
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall:
Down will come Baby,
Cradle and all.

BABY
(slyly)
This, but a truth
So familiar, you see,
As hardly to need
Illustration in me.

NURSE
Twinkle, twinkle, little star!
How I wonder what you are!

BABY
(pityingly)
Do you really wonder, Jane?
And to me all seems so plain!
Go downstairs, my girl, and find
Books wherewith to improve your mind;
And if Heavenly bodies then
Still remain beyond your ken,
You had better go and ax
Good Professor Parallax.

NURSE
Bye, Baby-bunting,
Father's gone a-hunting,
All to get a rabbit's skin
To wrap the Baby-bunting in.

BABY
(sternly)
The cruel sport of hunting
To moral sense is stunting;
And since Papa's objection
To useful vivisection
Convicts him, as it seems to me,
Of signal inconsistency,
I must with thanks decline the skin
For wrapping Baby-bunting in.

(Puts Nurse to bed. Scene closes)