Resolved, that old fashioned cow’s milk is better for Our Baby, than any prepared food."
The debate on the above subject will start at seven o’clock next Thursday evening. The Conservatives of our Colony will speak in favor of cow’s milk as a baby’s food. The Progressives will speak in favor of prepared food.
The parliamentary rules governing the debate will be the same as govern a “catch-as-catch-can” wrestling match.
No slugging will be permitted until forensic effort has proven ineffective. When further argument has become useless, the three-ounce boxing gloves, recently donated to us, may be used to force a decision. In fact, several of the boys who talk but little, are practising with the gloves, so that they may become factors in the final settlement of the problem.
On the other hand, the literary coterie is in deep study. One boy is reading up reference books on the subject whenever he can find the time. Still another blindfolds himself and opens the Bible at random, looking for spiritual guidance on the subject of infant diet. Of course the Court of Final Appeal will be Her Ladyship—The Baby Herself.
She already knows a great deal about crackers and breakfast foods, and she is far too clever not to have her own opinion on the dietary properties of milk and its substitutes.
And now it may be in point to tell how we came to have a ten-months-old baby at our Colony.
We are ostensibly a young men’s colony—men and boys trying to get to their feet and become independent and self-supporting. But if anyone comes to us hungry, we like to give them something more edible than a card to a professional charity.
Had Hunger delayed her coming another week, Our Baby and her mother might have been driven to ask food and shelter on Christmas Eve. As it was, they came to us on December 19th, at ten o’clock in the evening. They had no place in which to sleep except the local police station, and that is not the place for a little baby—even strong men weaken in the chill of its hospitality.