Page:Women Wanted.djvu/350

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WOMEN WANTED

record in which is entered every fact of his family history and environment and his own physical condition, with the phenomena of its changes from week to week. The weekly weighing indicated very accurately his progress. And the week that his weary mother's milk failed, the scales reported it. The modified milk was carefully prescribed but the next week's weighing indicated that Mrs. Smith wasn't getting the ingredients together right. The Health Visitor was assigned to go home with her and show her just how. Like that, Jimmie was constantly supervised. When the doctor at the consultation, tapping the little distended abdomen with skilled fingers, announced, "This baby is troubled with colic," Mrs. Smith said he had been having it a good deal lately. Well, a little questioning corrected the difficulty. The trouble was pickles, and he never had them after that. Also he never had the summer complaint, which the former Smith babies always had in September.

You see, there is no proper cupboard at Jimmie's house. There is only the recess beside the chimney, and flies come straight from the manure heap at the back of the house to the milk pitcher on the shelf. Mrs. Smith didn't know that flies mattered. She knows now, and at the school she has learned that you protect the baby from summer complaint by covering the pitcher with a muslin cloth. She also has learned how to make the most ingenious cradle that ever was contrived. It's constructed from a banana box, but it perfectly well serves the purpose