These humble domestic virtues, of which women see the need so much more vividly than men do, have furthermore developed their penalties. The latter, too, are put into aphorisms which, in time, when Memory has done her work upon them, may become legendary wisdom. Such a penalty was recently illustrated in our neighborhood by the fate of an old man who was found in his room almost starved to death. He was pointed out by many of our neighbors as an example of the inevitable fate of one who deserts his family and therefore, “without a woman to keep him straight,” falls into drink and shiftlessness and the endless paths of wrong-doing, so that loneliness and destitution inevitably overtake his old age. The women were so fatalistically certain of this relation of punishment to domestic sin, of reward to domestic virtue, that when they talked about them, as they so constantly did in connection with the Devil Baby, it often sounded as if they were using the words of a widely known ritual. Among the visitors to the Devil Baby were many foreign-born peasant women who, when they had come to America, had been suddenly subjected to the complicated and constantly changing environment of city life, and, finding no outlet for many inherited tendencies, might easily have been thrown into that state described by psychologists as one of “baulked disposition.” To them this simple tale, with its direct connection between cause and effect, between wrong-doing and punishment, brought soothing and relief, and restored a shaken confidence as to the righteousness of the universe. They used the story not only to tame restless husbands, but mothers threatened their daughters that if they went to dance halls or out to walk with strange young men, they would be eternally disgraced by devil babies. As the story grew, the girls themselves seized upon it as a palpable punishment to be held over the heads of reckless friends. That the tale was useful was evidenced by many letters similar to the anonymous epistle here given.