bies have come to
be farmed like taxes or turnpike gates. The arable infants seem to
gravitate towards the transpontine districts south of the Thames. It
will be an interesting task for our Legislature to ascertain whether
there is any actual law to account for the transfer, as it inevitably
will have to do when the delicate choice is forced upon it between
justifiable infanticide, wholesale Hospices des Enfants Trouves, and
possibly some kind of Japanese "happy despatch" for high-minded infants
who are superior to the slow poison administered by injudicious
"farmers." At all events, one fact is certain, and we can scarcely
reiterate it too often--the British baby is becoming emphatic beyond
anything we can recollect as appertaining to the infantile days of the
present generation. It is as though a ray of juvenile "swellishness," a
scintillation of hobbledehoyhood, were refracted upon the long clothes
or three-quarter clothes of immaturity.

For, if it is true--as we may tax our infantile experiences to assure
us--that "farmed" infants were an article unknown to husbandry in our
golden age, it is equally certain that the idea of the modern Baby Show
was one which, in that remote era, would not have been tolerated. Our
mothers and grandmothers would as soon have thought of sacrificing an
innocent to Moloch as to Mammon. What meant it then--to what can it be
due--to precocity on the part of the British baby, or degeneracy on the
part of the British parent--that two Baby Shows were "on" nearly at the
same moment--one at Mr. Giovannelli's at Highbury Barn, the other at Mr.
Holland's Gardens, North Woolwich?

Anxious to keep au courant with the times, even when those times are
chronicled by the rapid career of the British baby--anxious also to blot
out the idea of the poor emaciated infants of Brixton, Camberwell, and
Greenwich, by bringing home to my experience the opposite pole of
infantile development--I paid a visit, and sixpence, at Highbury Barn
when the Baby Show opened. On entering Mr. Giovannelli's spacious hall,
consecrated on ordinary occasions to the Terpsichorean art, I found it a
veritable shrine of the "Diva triformis." Immediately on entering I was
solicited to invest extra coppers in a correct card, containing the
names, weights, and--not colours; they were all of one colour, that of
the ordinary human lobster--but weights, of the various forms of
Wackford Squeers under twelve months, who were then and ther