The Waterbury Democrat., 1934-08-08
COPYRIGHT, 1884 By NEA Service


 Corbeil, Ont.-The coupe jounc- ed and rattled as its lights picked out the rocky road from Callan- der. It was just short of o'clock in the morning of May 2S, and there was hardly trace of com ing dawn across the stump-dotted bush" country.
 Dr Dafoe, at the wheel, was not nut out by the bleakness of the hour. He was used to that. You don't practice healing for 26 years aniong the sturdy French Cana dians of this section without get ting used to irregular hours.
 Now he could see the kerosene lamp-lighted windows of the un- painted frame house of Oliva Dionne. Dr Dafoe unused on the case before him. Too bad he hadn't been called earlier. Prenatal care is sketchy in this country, but still Mrs Dionne wasn't in very good shape; he'd found traces of kid ! ney ailment when Dionne had called him in week before. So he insisted on staying with" the case.
 Dionne wasn't an unkind man. People here seldom call the doctor until things look pretty bad. And Mrs Dionne's five children had all been delivered without any particular difficulty, and she back in the kitchen after three days each time.
 ssNear- Miracle" Disclosed
 Dr Dafoe pulled up to the cot tage, and entered tito find (and help bring about) a modern mir acle.
 Two babies already had been born, and lay in clothes-basket hastily impoverished as cradle. A third, under ministrations of Mrs Alex Legros, neighbor woman who had come in to act as midwife, was in process of be- ing delivered.
 Mrs Legros, herself a mother of many children and assistant at the birth of many more, was vastly relieved at seeing Dr Da- foe. In fact she was visibly trem- bling. With relief, she left the case to cool, business-like Dr Dafoe, and turned to the three children already delivered. She lit the stove, turned up the wicks of the kerosene lamps, and as- sembled the babes in a temporary crib built from a clothes basket
 The mother was unconscious, and Dr Dafoe's problem was a difficult one. Each of the remain inn two babes was found to be enclosed in anniotic sacs, moving about freely in the fluid which filled these membranous con- tainers, and it was necessary for the physician to open these cover ings and remove the tiny body from each.
 The Dawn Baptism
 pr Dafoe turned now. to his desperate fight for the life or the mother, who had previously toxemia, and who was now far down in the shadow of death.
 As the gray sunrise light began to engulf the yellow glow of the oil lamps, pr Dafoe, Protestant, baptized the children in the Ro- man Catholic faith of the parents, using the Latin ritual. He had often done it before, as it is some times difficult to summon a priest in this sparsely settled country, and this morning no one knew how near death might be.
 In fact, early efforts centered on saving the life of Mrs Dionne. Few believed that all, or any of the babes could live, for no set of quintuplets has ever lived un- broken by death for more than a few hours. But Dr Dafoe was not the kind that gives up. He took over all arrangements. The five older Dionne children were placed with neighbors. And the best hos pital arrangements possible were rigged up on short notice within the little house.
 The World Astounded
 Dfonne was thunderstruck when first told that he had five new daughters. "I ought to be put in jail," he muttered. Then pride came to his rescue. He thought something ought to be put in the papers about it. After all, five was pretty unusual. He had his brother call a local newspaper.
 '.How much would it cost" he asked, ''to have an item put in the paper about five babies being born?"
 How little it cost was soon clear. For the newspaper flash brought an immediate deluge of telegrams, inquiries, congratulations, sugges- tions, pouring into Corbeil Within 24 hours two offers were received to exhibit the babies at the Chica- go Worlds Fair.