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Show SHE'S A REMARKABLE MOTHER Mrs. Ormsby Has Had Fourteen Babies In Seven Years. (New York Sun.) Chicago. The record of motherhood, in this country at least, is Mrs. Joseph K. Ormsby's. In her seven years of married life she has had fourteen children, chil-dren, an average of two a year, an! she is only 30. Twice twins have, been born to her. once her babies have been tripletis and a few days ago she gave birth to quadruplets. Of her big family three children were living when the four came. Only one twin and two of the triplets survived. But the four new babies are all healthy. They weigh three pounds apiece and everybody thinks they will live, though that isn't often the case with quadruplets. Mrs. Ormsby's is the most remarkable remark-able case of maternity ever known in this country, so the Chicago physicians say. All the same it is a hard case for the mother, for the children have only her to look to for support. Her husband hus-band became insane last June and disappeared. dis-appeared. His delusion was that he had invented a perpetual motion machine. ma-chine. He is two years jrounger than his wife. She is not large rather a frail little woman, with fair hair and blue eyes. Ormsby was a plumber when they married in 1894. They went to housekeeping in a cottage in West Forty-third street, and there in the first three years three babies came. Then it was twins, then still more twins, and finally triplets. The triplets trip-lets won a gold cup at the Chicago baby show, and the Ormsby children who survived the first twins and three other children had died became a sorl of curio exhibit in the neighborhood, and- the subject of paragraphs In the newsnaners To help to feed the early comers, the wife persuaded her husband to take out the front of their cottage and build a small grocery store before it. She tended store herself besides doing all the housework and taking care of the children. But with the increased revenue rev-enue came the triplets. Then the plumber's ideas began to run to inventing in-venting things. It was the old delu sion of perpetual motion that took hold of him. Day and night he worked on a machine that was never to stop. Last summer he thought he had solved the problem. He had given up work to devote himself to it and he thought he saw success in sight. He finished the machine and started it. It was a wonderful won-derful contraption, and it actually ran for sixty-two hours, so the neighbors say. Then it stopped, and the plumber's plumb-er's brain stopped working with it. In one of his fits of frenzy he vanished. Nobody has seen him since. That was last June. The deserted wife went on tending store, doing her housewoik and keeping her children tidy. They were the nicest children in the block, so everybody said. Then in the last weec of September came the four, three boys and a girl, all at once. Now the mother is almost in despair about how to feed a family double the size of that she had before. It was a hard struggle then, and how to get along now she doesn't know. Fortunately for her the newspapers news-papers printed stories about it, long stories with pictures of all the surviving sur-viving babies, and charitable people have come forward to help along so remarkable re-markable a mother, "They are the dearest little babies in the world," she said to a reporter who went to interview her. and she glanced over the four little faces in a row in the cot beside her. "I hardly know what I shall do with all these children but I'll do my best." ,She d'dn't look as if she could spare one of them, and there are seven left. Ge rge Dewey. Carter Harrison and Helen Gould were the names given to the triplets. Carter Harrison didn't get over it. He died in early infancy, but Georpe Dewey and Helen Gould are fine, healthy youngsters. So is David, one of the twins. The latest tabies haven't been named yet formally, for-mally, that is; but for one, the lustiest youngster in the lot, it is settled. "What are you going to call him?' repeated Mrs. Ormsby, when the reporter re-porter asked that question "Why, Theodore Roosevelt." |