As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home.At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of young shall be uttered upon the anesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known. I shall tell you what occured, and let you judge for yourself. The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore.
