But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful.

They never do them any harm.

If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous.
When his father had finished his breakfast, which he did rather in a hurry, he got up and went down into the yard to get out his horse and put him to the cab.
"Won't you come and see the cab, Diamond ?" he said.
"Yes, please, father--if mother can spare me a minute," answered Diamond.
"Bless the child! I don't want him," said his mother cheerfully.
But as he was following his father out of the door, she called him back.
"Diamond, just hold the baby one minute.

I have something to say to your father." So Diamond sat down again, took the baby in his lap, and began poking his face into its little body, laughing and singing all the while, so that the baby crowed like a little bantam.

And what he sang was something like this--such nonsense to those that couldn't understand it! but not to the baby, who got all the good in the world out of it:-- baby's a-sleeping wake up baby for all the swallows are the merriest fellows and have the yellowest children who would go sleeping and snore like a gaby disturbing his mother and father and brother and all a-boring their ears with his snoring snoring snoring for himself and no other for himself in particular wake up baby sit up perpendicular hark to the gushing hark to the rushing where the sheep are the woolliest and the lambs the unruliest and their tails the whitest and their eyes the brightest and baby's the bonniest and baby's the funniest and baby's the shiniest and baby's the tiniest and baby's the merriest and baby's the worriest of all the lambs that plague their dams and mother's the whitest of all the dams that feed the lambs that go crop-cropping without stop-stopping and father's the best of all the swallows that build their nest out of the shining shallows and he has the merriest children that's baby and Diamond and Diamond and baby and baby and Diamond and Diamond and baby-- Here Diamond's knees went off in a wild dance which tossed the baby about and shook the laughter out of him in immoderate peals.