Then there was Sammy, with the funny face and big nose, who looked like a little old man in a baby’s dress. Sammy could not hear when you spoke to him.—But mostly the children forgot all about eyes and ears between dressing-times, they had so much to make them happy.
After dinner the children put back their chairs nicely, and then the victrola played lovely music. It was pleasant to see all the little children stand at salute when they heard the Star-Spangled Banner. Even the deaf ones did as they saw the others do.
On sunny days they played out on the balcony of the ward below. It was a pity that they had no balcony of their own, leading from the nursery. Greatly it is needed. But it will come, no doubt, with a great many other needed things, when more people know about the Infirmary on Charles Street, and the good luck it brings to little children and big; when more parents, reading the story of Paolo, Stephanie, and these others, will understand that what helps such children protects the health of the whole community, including their own little ones.
The ounce of prevention has gone up in the scale of modern values. It is worth not pounds but tons of possible cure. Every child kept out of an asylum is a civic asset. Every penny spent in the prevention of blindness or deafness is an investment placed on interest a thousandfold.
Those were wonderful days for babies like Stephanie who had seen too little luck in their lives. Breakfast at half past six; a luncheon of fruit and milk at nine; dinner at eleven, and supper at four. All the bread and butter a child could eat; all the milk she wished to drink. And most of the children drank a quart of milk every day. No wonder Stephanie began to be less pale and thin before the nurse’s eyes. No wonder her eyes began to be better almost directly. Soon she was running and racing about the nursery among the liveliest of them all.
One day a visitor came to talk for a minute with the nurse. She had been to the clinic, and after that they had given her this extra privilege. To Stephanie this Person seemed a beautiful grown-up lady. But Mamie was really only a nice girl of sixteen, with happy, sunburned face and shining brown eyes. Stephanie squirmed with delight when Mamie took her up on her lap while she talked with Nurse.
“She has eyes like mine were,” said Mamie in an aside to the nurse. But Stephanie heard, and hoped. Would her grey-blue eyes ever get big and brown like this nice Person’s, she wondered?
“Oh, sure! I’m all right now,” said the visitor, in answer to a question. “They pronounced me O. K. Just look how fat and brown I am. Say, it don’t seem possible. Why, I was sicker than Stephanie here when I came, wasn’t I?” The nurse assented. “I’ll never forget how I felt, working in the store: my eyes all swollen and weepy. I was down and out, all right. For, of course, I haven’t a relation on God’s earth. And with my salary,—how could I go to a specialist? Then a lady gave me a hunch about this Infirmary. So here I came; and everybody was mighty good to me. You know, don’t you, Dearie?” She caught Stephanie up close.
“Yes!” affirmed Stephanie, snuggling.
“I came here all in,” Mamie went on. “But what a difference when I left! Just to think of going to the country for a rest, instead of right back to the store. And nothing to pay for it all, either. Some dream!”