Although the visitors to the Devil Baby included persons of every degree of prosperity and education, even physicians and trained nurses, who assured us of their scientific interest, the story constantly demonstrated the power of an old wives’ tale among thousands of men and women in modern society who are living in a corner of their own, their vision fixed, their intelligence held by some iron chain of silent habit. To such primitive people the metaphor apparently is still the very “stuff of life,” or rather no other form of statement reaches them; the tremendous tonnage of current writing for them has no existence. It was in keeping with their simple habits that the reputed presence of the Devil Baby should not reach the newspapers until the fifth week of his sojourn at Hull-House--after thousands of people had already been informed of his whereabouts by the old method of passing news from mouth to mouth. For six weeks as I went about the house, I would hear a voice at the telephone repeating for the hundredth time that day, “No, there is no such baby”; “No, we never had it here”; “No, he couldn’t have seen it for fifty cents”; “We didn’t send it anywhere, because we never had it”; “I don’t mean to say that your sister-in-law lied, but there must be some mistake”; “There is no use getting up an excursion from Milwaukee, for there isn’t any Devil Baby at Hull-House”; “We can’t give reduced rates, because we are not exhibiting anything”; and so on and on. As I came near the front door, I would catch snatches of arguments that were often acrimonious: “Why do you let so many people believe it, if it isn’t here?” “We have taken three lines of cars to come and we have as much right to see it as anybody else”; “This is a pretty big place, of course you could hide it easy enough”; “What are you saying that for, are you going to raise the price of admission?” We had doubtless struck a case of what the psychologists call the “contagion of emotion” added to that “æsthetic sociability” which impels any one of us to drag the entire household to the window when a procession comes into the street or a rainbow appears in the sky. The Devil Baby of course was worth many processions and rainbows, and I will confess that, as the empty show went on day after day, I quite revolted against such a vapid manifestation of even an admirable human trait. There was always one exception, however; whenever I heard the high eager voices of old women, I was irresistibly interested and left anything I might be doing in order to listen to them. As I came down the stairs, long before I could hear what they were saying, implicit in their solemn and portentous old voices came the admonition:-- “Wilt thou reject the past Big with deep warnings?”