"Oh, yes they are good," I replied, adding mysteriously. "If two
children named August and Anna allow you to call them Hansanella for
five weeks without comment, it isn't likely that they would be very
fertile in evil doing!"

I had a full year's experience with the false Hansanella and in that
time they blighted our supremest joys. There was always a gap in the
circle where they stood and they stopped the electric current whenever
it reached them. I am more anxious that the Eugenic Societies should
eliminate this kind of child from the future than almost any other type.
It has chalk and water instead of blood in its veins. It is as cold as
if it had been made by machinery and then refrigerated, instead of being
brought into being by a mother's love; and it never has an impulse, but
just passes through the world mechanically, taking up space that could
be better occupied by some warm, struggling, erring, aspiring human
creature.

How can I describe Jacob Lavrowsky? There chanced to be a row of little
Biblical characters, mostly prophets sitting beside one another about
half way back in the room:--Moses, Jeremiah, Ezekial, Elijah and Elisha,
but the greatest of these was Jacob. He was one of ten children, the
offspring of a couple who kept a secondhand clothing establishment in
the vicinity. Mr. and Mrs. Lavrowsky collected, mended, patched, sold
and exchanged cast-off wearing apparel, and the little Lavrowsky's
played about in the rags, slept under the counters and ate Heaven knows
where, during the term of my acquaintance with them. Jacob differed from
all the other of my flock by possessing a premature, thoroughly
unchildlike sense of humor. He regarded me as one of the most
unaccountable human beings he had ever met, but he had such respect for
what he believed to be my good bottom qualities that he constantly tried
to conceal from me his feeling that I was probably a little insane. He
had large expressive eyes, a flat nose, wide mouth, thin hair, long neck
and sallow skin, while his body was so thin and scrawny that his clothes
always hung upon him in shapeless folds. His age was five and his point
of view that of fifty. As to his toilettes, there must have been a large
clothes-bin in the room back of the shop and Jacob must have daily
dressed himself from this, leaning over the side and plucking from the
varied assortment such articles as pleased his errant fancy. He had no
prejudices against bits of feminine at