delivered of a fine baby. It was an enormous big boy,
and Ona was such a tiny creature herself, that it seemed
quite incredible. Jurgis would stand and gaze at the
stranger by the hour, unable to believe that it had really
happened.

The coming of this boy was a decisive event with Jurgis.
It made him irrevocably a family man; it killed the last
lingering impulse that he might have had to go out in the
evenings and sit and talk with the men in the saloons.
There was nothing he cared for now so much as to sit and
look at the baby. This was very curious, for Jurgis had
never been interested in babies before. But then, this
was a very unusual sort of a baby. He had the brightest
little black eyes, and little black ringlets all over his head;
he was the living image of his father, everybody said --
and Jurgis found this a fascinating circumstance. It was
sufficiently perplexing that this tiny mite of life should
have come into the world at all in the manner that it had;
that it should have come with a comical imitation of its
father's nose was simply uncanny.

Perhaps, Jurgis thought, this was intended to signify
that it was his baby; that it was his and Ona's, to care for
all its life. Jurgis had never possessed anything nearly
so interesting -- a baby was, when you came to think about
it, assuredly a marvelous possession. It would grow up
to be a man, a human soul, with a personality all its own,
a will of its own! Such thoughts would keep haunting
Jurgis, filling him with all sorts of strange and almost
painful excitements. He was wonderfully proud of little
Antanas; he was curious about all the details of him -- the
washing and the dressing and the eating and the sleeping
of him, and asked all sorts of absurd questions. It took
him quite a while to get over his alarm at the incredible
shortness of the little creature's legs.

Jurgis had, alas, very little time to see his baby; he
never felt the chains about him more than just then.
When he came home at night, the baby would be asleep,
and it would be the merest chance if he awoke before
Jurgis had to go to sleep himself. Then in the morning

[[127]]

p126 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p127w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p128

v?