OCR Text |
Show j Habv Heaven i I! 1LA LKW'15 iMi-CMure Syiulu-jt WNU ScrvletJ ! 1IAVK Just the place you are ' Imikinfi furl" cunllileil the real cstalr am'in. "No radio playing I after flcvrn p. m., no saxophones, 1 no iIoks or imisieal students allowed ! why, you couldn't ask for a quiet- vr place than llayberry Haven!" "What was the name?" Inquired j my wife In a startled lone. "Oh I see." She added, "for Just a moment mo-ment I thought you snid 'Daby Heaven! ' " , "Ma! ha!" laughed the ayent. In what I thounht at the time was a i remarkably hollow tone, "Hu! ha! ha!" And so we moved to Hayberry ' Haven. A little far out, but sunlight sun-light in every room, an outside entrance en-trance to every apartment, and a real c,rass lawn in the middle. "Welcome to llaby Heaven!" cried the iceman nayly as my wife let him in at the front door the next morning. And Daby Heaven it was. As I ran for my train in the morn-lnR. morn-lnR. I would leap over a toy auto-i auto-i mobile, broad Jump over eight kid-' kid-' die cars in a row. pole vault over ' a scooter bike and roll merrily down tli e sidewalk with two roller 1 skates under one foot. I True, there was no radio playing j after eleven at night. There were ; no dogs, there were no saxophones, there were no musical students. : Cut there was no law against the l infant above us, and the infant be-1 be-1 low us, and the infant to the right of us. and the Infant to the left of ' us. taking regular turns all night to disrupt the peace and quiet for ! which I had come to Bayberry Haven. Sometimes, when starting out In the morning. I would look about me : at the beautiful sunshine and at the little porch of green lawn, and I would determine to ask some of the ! boys from the office out to dinner j that night, so the poor city-bound oafs could sec what a blade of grass I looked like. ( But ah. the kiddies! The kiddies! Rv dinner time wh&t with their abandoned dollies, and their lost caps, and their paper airplanes you know, you fold up little pieces of paper and sail them all over the place and hear the Janitor swear well, what with them scattered knee deep all over our little green lawn space. I don't believe the boys from the office ever did get to lee a blade of grass. And the chalk marks on the walk! How my friend, Hobbsnotch, of the Evening Graphonews, used to pore over them! He was writing his book then you know, "Sally In Our Back Alley" and of course he wanted to get it suppressed In Boston. Bos-ton. He needed the money. He has claimed ever since, with tears of gratitude in his eyes, that his success suc-cess dates from the first time I asked him out to dinner and he read the words that the innocent little kiddies had chalked on my front steps. One Saturday afternoon I went to the grocery store on an errand for my wife. I thought at first I was back on the East Side. But I soon realized that they were not push carts they were baby buggies. A sea of baby buggies. I counted eighteen of them in one block. You can depend on the number, because I am a certified public accountant. If you saw a young couple strolling stroll-ing down to the grocer's without a baby buggy, you Just knew that they had one at home, with a nice-reliable - colored - girl-by-the-hour-that-loves-children wheeling it up and down the sidewalk. Or if they didn't have any baby buggy at all, you knew that Santa Claus had them down on his list, and they would find one in a stocking stock-ing on Christmas morning. I should have known it would be like that. I should have known that every couple with one or two or three or four or Ave children or even those young couples whose mammas are still squabbling over which one shall make the bassinet I should have known that they would all move out here: It's so good for the children, you know. And so the stork hovers over Bay-berry Bay-berry Haven constantly. It's not his fault. It's the sunshine, and the fresh air. And you know how it is, in an epidemic of that sort you begin to get panic-stricken. Fear of contagion; force of example; exam-ple; power of suggestion; and all that sort of thing. You, too, may fall a victim! A stork, after all, is only human. Or inhuman, whichever way you look at ' it. He might, some day, get mixed up in his chimneys. And, frankly speaking, being a man who is fond of his peace and quiet, I had rather be elsewhere when It happened. hap-pened. So that is why, last week, we gave notice to the landlord that w were leaving Bayberry Haven on the first of the month. But only this morning my wife whispered to me that it might be just as well to stay ... |