noon
I stand godmother to the girls , and the Man of Wrath to the boys , and as all the babies are accordingly named after us the village swarms with tiny Elizabeths and Boys of Wrath . A hunchbacked woman , unfit for harder work , looks after the babies during the day in a room set apart for that purpose , so that the mothers may not be hampered in their duties at the farm ; they have only to carry the babies there in the morning , and fetch them away again in the evening , and can feel that they are safe and well looked after . But many of them , for some reason too cryptic to fathom , prefer to lock them up in their room , exposed to all the perils that surround an inquiring child just able to walk , and last winter one little creature was burnt to death , sacrificed to her mother 's stupidity . This mother , a fair type of the intelligence prevailing in the village , made a great fire in her room before going out , so that when she came back at noon there would still be some with which to cook the dinner , left a baby in a perambulator , and a little Elizabeth of three loose in the room , locked the door , put the key in her pocket , and went off to work . When she came back to get the dinner ready , the baby was still crowing placidly in its perambulator , and the little Elizabeth , with all the clothes burnt off her body , was lying near the grate dead . Of course the mother was wild with grief , distracted , raving , desperate , and of course all the other women were shocked and horrified ; but point the moral as we might , we could not bring them to see that it was an avoidable misfortune with nothing whatever to do with the _ Finger Gottes _ , and the mothers who preferred locking their babies up alone to sending them to be looked after , went on doing so as undisturbed as though what had occurred could in no wise be a lesson to themselves . `` Pray , _ Herr Lehrer _ , why are those two little boys sitting over there on that seat all by themselves and not singing ? ''