Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 June 1883 — The Organ Baby. [ARTICLE]

The Organ Baby.

There is another kind of little creature that is carried out with barrel organs in London; its lot is thoughtlessly made far worse than that of the monkeys ; yet we know its nightly rest is not in the shed, but in the kitchen where the macaroni hangs, where the men smoke by the hearth, where the women gossip in Italian, taking off their flat linen head-dresses, and hugging their babes against short skirts and bodices as bright as a rainbow. One subject of our anxiety is the organ baby. Who that walks through London streets has not seen it lying like an inanimate bundle upon the top of the organ, or a little older, crowing from the basket on the handcart at the end of the ironlunged piano-organ? Where are its brains? Will it grow up deaf, or will it shout, haunted all life long by an at!mosphere of noise? Has custom be l come second nature to those that hear organs all day ? Has the baby, strapped on the organ-top, an inherited knack of not caring ? Will it grow up to hear and understand, and sleep like other children ? Or will it grow up at all ? We can conceive the monkey going mad, and tearing the organ, and scattering the crowd, if he were condemned to lie with his head against it all day. But what can the baby do ? Chambers' Journal.