The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-12-03
0 you believe in babies?


 If there is any man or woman with soul so who does not love little sweet innocent babies then that man or woman to my way of thinking, has no heart, no sympathy, no love to give anybody! Everybody believes in babies more or less, and everybody loves babies, and I think it must be mainly, as Mark Twain said,:
 Because we've all been babies and we know how it feels."
 Sometimes
 In brief flashes, no matter how old and worn and gray and lonely we may be, it is given to us to re- turn momentarily to our earliest youth, ere "the shades of the prison house" began to close round about us, and then indeed we realize that a glory departed from the earth when the doors of childhood closed behind us.
 What would we not give, we hopelessly .grown-ups" to recap ture and retain the enthusiasm and the zest and trust of our baby years and to revisit that enchanted land that lies south of -Four Years Old?"
 Sometimes when the storm gathers about us and the old world almost gets the best of us, when everything else fails, how many of us revert to that wonderfully ap- pealing verse:
 Backward, turn backward,
 Oh Time in your flight
 Make me child again
 Just for tonight;
 Mother come back from that
 Echoless shore,
 Make me a child again
 Just as of yore."
 A Trip to Babyland
 Won't you make little "Per- sonally Conducted" trip over to the Children's hospital with us, the lovely Miss Mary Ida Wood and myself, for few brief minutes that wonderful institution which Is the beneficiary of the wonderful Doll Bazar every year?
 I've called it "A Trip to Baby land" IS
 And someone naS aSked.
 (Which is the way to Babyland?
 Why anyone can tell.
 Up one flight,
 To your right,
 Please to ring the bell"
 And so here we are, where pink checked, rosy-faced, curly-haired, brown-eyed, blue-eyed, rolly-polly, lovely babies greet you on every side.
 "Only baby small
 Dropped from the skies,
 Only laughing face,
 Two sunny eyes;
 Only two cherry lips,
 One chubby nose;
 Only two little hands.
 Ten little toes.
 Only tender flower,
 Sent us to rear;
 Only life to love
 While we are here;
 Only a baby small,
 Never at rest.
 Small-but how dear to us
 God knoweth best"
 For it was to "Babyland" that Miss Mary Ida Wood were the one day last week, in her sweet spirited, interested way, for she IS one of the most enthusiastic mem hers of the Junior league, which this wear has charge of the doll booth at the Doll Bazar" for the Chilaren's hospital, and l am going to tell you about her visit to the hospital just as she told it to me, If l can.
 Miss Wood began by saying:
 sFor all jaded and worldweary souls I should like to recommend a visit to the Children's hospital. It will do much toward reviving de- pleted interest in life.
 "A pair of rare old Chinese porcelains may give one person a thrill of pleasure, powerful piece of machinery, oiled and shining, throbbing with mechanical life may produce a glow in another; a bit of exquisite Burano lace may bring ioy to a third, but there is some thing universal in the appeal of little children, especially suffering ones. They are ill through no fault of their own and they are so power less to help themselves. Their courage, their patience, their hope leach is all inspiration. Take Midas for instance. She is 12 years old and her poor foot was so twisted and uniformed it seemed as though she was going to be a cripple forever.
 But the hospital discovered her and one of it's splendid staff per formed an operation to correct the deformity. One whole bone was taken out and every other one broken in order to straighten the foot. And now Midas has to sit or lie quite still on account of the plaster cast, but she smiled at us bravely when Miss Adams steered me over to her bedside, for she knows that in six more weeks she will be able to walk like other children.
 ssIn the same room is a three months-old baby-such a fragile, infinitesimal atom of humanity. Because of tumor or some terrible obstruction the child was actually starving to death. Now, under the proper care and treatment, he is rapidly improving.
 "The nurses are so capable in their stiffly starched white and un- derstand SO well the needs of their small patients. I wonder if the babies don't look upon the hospital as sort of heaven, provided their miniature minds function to that extent. Out on the sunporch there are many more little white