ever saw such a thing before, he said. They were like
they were sewn on; it was impossible to disentangle that child by any
way short of rolling it on the floor.

Sergeant Jack is an old bachelor, and that is all he knows about
babies. The child was not sewn up at all. It was just swaddled, and no
Chinese had done that, but the Italian woman who found it. Sergeant
Jack sees such babies every night in Mulberry Street, but that is the
way with old bachelors. They don't know much, anyhow.

It was clear that the baby thought so. She was a little girl, very
little, only one night old; and she regarded him through her almond
eyes with a supercilious look, as who should say, "Now, if he was only
a bottle, instead of a big, useless policeman, why, one might put up
with him;" which reflection opened the flood-gates of grief and set
the little Chinee squalling: "Yow! Yow! Yap!" until the Sergeant held
his ears, and a policeman carried it upstairs in a hurry.

Downstairs first, in the Sergeant's big blotter, and upstairs in the
matron's nursery next, the baby's brief official history was recorded.
There was very little of it, indeed, and what there was was not marked
by much ceremony. The stork hadn't brought it, as it does in far-off
Denmark; nor had the doctor found it and brought it in, on the
American plan.

An Italian woman had just scratched it out of an ash barrel. Perhaps
that's the way they find babies in China, in which case the sympathy
of all American mothers and fathers will be with the present
despoilers of the heathen Chinee, who is entitled to no consideration
whatever until he introduces a new way.

The Italian woman was Mrs. Maria Lepanto. She lives in Thompson
Street, but she had come all the way down to the corner of Elizabeth
and Canal streets with her little girl to look at a procession passing
by. That, as everybody knows, is next door to Chinatown. It was ten
o'clock, and the end of the procession was in sight, when she noticed
something stirring in an ash barrel that stood against the wall. She
thought first it was a rat, and was going to run, when a noise that
was certainly not a rat's squeal came from the barrel. The child clung
to her hand and dragged her toward the sound.

"Oh, mamma!" she cried, in wild excitement, "hear it! It isn't a rat!
I know! Hear!"

It was a wail, a very tiny wail, ever so sorry, as well it might be,
coming from a baby that was cradled in an ash barrel. It was little
S