coaxing her to catch them, and eluding her hands by the smallest part of an inch, but this only made the fun more riotous, and one of them always ended the game by letting itself be captured.

But one day a wonderful thing happened to Marjorie. The nurse and the manager came to Marjorie's incubator, and consulted the chart, and weighed Marjorie and pinched her arms and legs to see whether they were firm and solid, and after that the air in the incubator lost a little of its warmth every day, until it was as cool as the air of the great outside world.

Marjorie was playing the foot game when the end came. She had not the least idea that anything of the sort was going to happen. No one thought of consulting her convenience in the matter.

First her father and mother appeared, and she might have known that something unusual was on foot if she had thought about it, for they had never before visited Marjorie simultaneously, but Marjorie was too deeply in the foot game to pay attention to parents. Parents were a necessity, but the foot game was a joy.

The nurse, who often did unaccountable things to Marjorie, did the most unaccountable of all. She took Marjorie from her bed on the soft, pillow and dressed her in stiff new garments, and enfolded her in blankets and capes until she was like a bundle of soft cloths, with only a little peephole for her eyes, and then, with cruelty unthought of, she handed her bodily to Mrs. Fielding. Marjorie objected. She foresaw some trick in all this. She raised her voice and protested, but they covered her face with a soft white veil. Marjorie indignantly went to....

When she awoke the world had changed. She was in a strange foreign land, where the walls were of white and blue tiles, and the ceiling was white, and the floor was covered with soft rugs. It may have been beautiful but it was not home. There was no incubator.

There were charts and sterilizers and scales and thermometers and everything necessary for a highly systematized and scientific nursery, but there was no incubator, and there was no long line of impertinent, curious faces, constantly passing and constantly changing. Marjorie was homesick.

Mrs. Fielding made the first entry on a brand-new chart, with triumphant satisfaction. She epitomized Marjorie in an array of dates and figures. To Mrs. Fielding and Chiswick, the new nurse, all was well so long as the chart was normal. When the figures on the chart were abnormal they considered that the baby in the crib had transgressed the laws of system and science, and they paid her little attentions in the way of small powders administered in a teaspoon.

Marjorie missed the nickel-plated trimmings of her incubator and she longed to see the procession of faces that she had seen so often. She would have given two degrees of temperature and three respirations just to have a fat, greasy East Side washlady beam upon her as in the incubator days. Even the occasional visits of her father became a joy. She hoped he would be sufficiently weak-minded to take her in his arms, but he was afraid to do anything that might affect the beautifully correct procession of figures on the chart. She tried to soften Chiswick with smiles, and betray her father with gurgles, and she even attempted to astonish her mother by assuming a high temperature and a low pulse, but all she got was a disreputable chart record and a dose of white powder.

She lay back and puckered up her chin and yelled a good, healthy baby yell. Chiswick entered it on the chart. She added a disparaging remark to the effect that the cry was for "no apparent reason." It was an insult, and Marjorie considered it one.

Where were the pink and white playfellows? A ripple shook the white of her lace-decked skirt; two lumps arose in it; they pushed upward higher and higher until the skirt slid back, and peeping over its edge came ten rosy toes that twinkled at her mischievously. Marjorie held out her hand appealingly, and the two plump feet, that had not dared to venture into the atmosphere of the scientific nursery, cast aside their hesitation, and met the waiting hands half way.

"Sakes alive!" exclaimed Chiswick, "if the child isn't trying to put both its feet in its mouth!"

Marjorie lay in blissful content; she had found human companionship.

II

It must be said, to the credit of incubators and science, that Marjorie was a beautifully normal baby. Mrs. Fielding took the greatest possible satisfaction in that. She was always ready to show Marjorie's record charts to visitors, and it was touching to see with what motherly pride she exhibited them. There was not another baby in the town that had maintained such an even temperature, such a steady respiration, or such a reliably even pulse.

Mr. Fielding was no less proud of the record. He bragged about it at the club and tried to induce his married friends to allow their babies to enter temperature matches with Marjorie, offering to wager two to one that Marjorie could maintain a normal temperature for a longer time than any baby of her age and weight.

When Marjorie reached six months Mr. Fielding decided that she deserved a reward of merit, and he made her a present of an oak filing cabinet of sixteen drawers, together with three thousand index cards. There was the food drawer, with cards for every day of the year, and places on each card to note the time of every feeding, the ounces of food taken, the minutes Marjorie required to take the food, the formula of the food, and the average cost of food per hour.

There was the clothing drawer, with cards on which to record the weight of clothing worn, the temperature of the air, the number of pieces of clothing worn, the method by which the garments were washed, and for remarks on the comparative good effects of cotton, wool, silk, and linen garments.

There were cards for sleep records, weight records, temperature, respiration, and pulse records—in fact Marjorie was analyzed and specified until one could tell at a glance just how many thousandths of an ounce of food she consumed for each beat of her heart, or how many times she breathed per pound of clothing worn.

Unfortunately, the nurse, Chiswick, objected. She threatened to leave. She said her professional training had not included card systems, and that even if she had had a modern business education, she had no time to keep such multitudinous records. Mr. Fielding promptly engaged a private secretary for Marjorie. Miss Vickers knew all about card index systems. She loved two things passionately—card systems and babies.

And then, just when a record card had been allotted to every function of Marjorie's pink and white body, a complication arose. Marjorie developed a will and a temper.

She decided that she had reached the age when she ought to sit alone. She looked upon the world and saw Chiswick sitting upright and Miss Vickers sitting upright and she longed to sit upright too. For six months she had reposed docilely upon her back or her stomach, with occasional variations of lying on one side or the other, and she felt that she had had enough of it. It was time to have a backbone and to take her place as a sitter. She told Chiswick so plainly enough. When Chiswick laid her on her back she yelled and raised her head. When Chiswick laid her on her stomach she turned over upon her back and raised her head and yelled. A little more and she would have been able to sit up without aid. Her head and her neck sat up—as far as they could. At least they flopped forward and tossed from side to side, but her backbone would not follow. It continued to repose in placid flatness on the pillow. Marjorie was very angry with her backbone. She got quite purple in the face about it at times, and choked.

Chiswick was very dense. Marjorie's head and neck explained again and again what they wanted to do, but