into the world hideous phenomena of heredity at their very birth.  This one has a perforated palate, and this great copper-coloured patches on the forehead, all of them rickety.  Then they are dying of hunger.  Notwithstanding the spoonfuls of milk, of sweetened water, which are forced down their throats, notwithstanding the feeding-bottle employed now and then, though against orders, they perish of inanition.  These little creatures, worn out before birth, require the most tender and the most strengthening food; the goats might perhaps be able to give it, but apparently they have sworn not to suck the goats.  And this is what makes the dormitory mournful and silent, not one of those little clinched-fisted tempers, one of those cries showing the pink and firm gums in which the child makes trial of his lungs and strength; only a plaintive moaning, as it were the disquiet of a soul that turns over and over in a little sick body, without being able to find a comfortable place to rest there.

Jenkins and the director, who have seen the bad impression produced on their guests by this inspection of the dormitory, try to put a little life into the situation, talk very loudly in a good-natured, complacent, satisfied way.  Jenkins shakes hands warmly with the superintendent.

“Well, Mme. Polge, and how are our little nurslings getting on?”

“As you see, M. le Docteur,” she replies, pointing to the beds.

This tall Mme. Polge is funereal in her green dress, the ideal of dry-nurses.  She completes the picture.

But where has Monsieur the Departmental Secretary gone?  He has stopped before a cot which he examines sadly, as he stands nodding his head.

“Bigre de bigre!” says Pompon in a low voice to Mme. Polge.  “It is the Wallachian.”

The little blue placard hung over the cot, as in the foundling hospitals, states the child’s nationality:  “Moldo, Wallachian.”  What a piece of ill-luck that Monsieur the Secretary’s attention should have been attracted to that particular child!  Oh, that poor little head lying on the pillow, its linen cap askew, with pinched nostrils, and mouth half opened by a quick, panting respiration, the breathing of the newly born, of those also who are about to die.

“Is he ill?” asked Monsieur the Secretary softly of the director, who has come up to him.

“Not the least in the world,” the shameless Pompon replies, and, advancing to the side of the cot, he tries to make the little one laugh by tickling him with his finger, straightens the pillow, and says in a hearty voice, somewhat overcharged with tenderness:  “Well, old fellow?” Shaken out of his torpor, escaping for a moment from the shades which already are closing on him, the child opens his eyes on those faces leaning over him, glances at them with a gloomy indifference, then, returning to his dream which he finds more interesting, clinches his little wrinkled hands and heaves an elusive sigh.  Mystery!  Who shall say for what end that baby had been born into life?  To suffer for two months and to depart without having seen anything, understood anything, without any one even knowing the sound of his voice.