At last I heard the cry of a child, and I sprang to my feet. Mrs. Henderson was intently slapping the skinny backside of the wailing baby boy who looked like a brick-red fish and nothing human. His black hair did not grow from his skull but lay close like a mat pasted on, and his poor head which seemed all out of shape, curiously dented and noded, lolled over the midwife’s wrist as though his neck had been wrung. When he was bathed and oiled and swaddled in a blanket, Mrs. Henderson carried him to the bedside and with a scoop of the blanket, framed the pitiful face from whose crimson mouth issued a ceaseless protest. My mother turned away with a groan. “Oh, take it away! Oh, leave me be!”

The neighbor woman, her kindly mouth half open with anxiety and surprise, whispered to her sister, “Poor dear, she’s all worn out. Look, would you, he has his mother’s hair and eyes,” and she turned her bundle to me. I could see no eyes among the furrows of the ancient, vociferous face. But I pitied the improbable thing and against my will felt drawn toward it and asked if I might see its hands and feet, for I wondered if they, like the useless bud of a nose, had been executed as amateurishly. Indeed, no! Several authors had collaborated on the composition of this creature. The novice band that had created the nose which possessed only one property common to noses, that is, two large nostrils, had not been the same one which, with so grim and un-Christian a humor, had made the long, prehensile feet with all five toes the same length, flexing and straightening as though a jungle vine to swing on were just outside their reach.

“Somebody’s pleased with her little brother, that’s not hard to see,” said Mrs. Henderson’s sister with a giggle as she held out a finger for the gruesome foot to grip. Brother! I felt with this prodigy only the most general fraternity: we breathed and were flesh. And yet, immediately the words were out, a leaven commenced to resolve my wonder into the emotion the woman had assumed in me and my pity became protective. Almost as soon as my instinct to mother him matured, there came to me the more complicated feeling of love, so that I longed to hold him myself and to kiss his bawling, cockled face, and to bestow upon him all the tender services that were the right of anything so supremely helpless.

He was, said Mrs. Henderson to her sister, a “puny one,” and the sister, feeling his feet and skinny legs, agreed, although she said she had seen punier. My mother, who lay with her eyes closed, scarcely moved her lips when she said, “If it’s true he’s puny like you say, maybe he won’t live forever.”