ime I kept saying persuasively: "You fool! Bring
forth as quickly as you can!" and, as a matter of fact, was feeling so
sorry for her that tears continued to spurt from my eyes as much as
from hers, and my very heart contracted with pity. Also, never did I
cease to feel that I ought to keep saying something; wherefore, I
repeated, and again repeated: "Now then! Bring forth as quickly as ever
you can!"

And at last my hands did indeed hold a human creature in all its
pristine beauty. Nor could even the mist of tears prevent me from
seeing that that human creature was red in the face, and that to judge
from the manner in which it kept kicking and resisting and uttering
hoarse wails (while still bound to its mother by the ligament), it was
feeling dissatisfied in advance with the world. Yes, blue-eyed, and
with a nose absurdly sunken between a pair of scarlet, rumpled cheeks
and lips which ceaselessly quivered and contracted, it kept bawling:
"A-aah! A-a-ah!"

Moreover, so slippery was it that, as I knelt and looked at it and
laughed with relief at the fact that it had arrived safely, I came near
to letting it fall upon the ground: wherefore I entirely forgot what
next I ought to have done.

"Cut it!" at length whispered the mother with eyes closed, and features
suddenly swollen and resembling those of a corpse.

"A knife!" again she whispered with her livid lips. "Cut it!"

My pocket-knife I had had stolen from me in the workmen's barraque; but
with my teeth I severed the caul, and then the child gave renewed
tongue in true Orlovian fashion, while the mother smiled. Also, in
some curious fashion, the mother's unfathomable eyes regained their
colour, and became filled as with blue fire as, plunging a hand into
her bodice and feeling for the pocket, she contrived to articulate with
raw and blood-flecked lips:

"I have not a single piece of string or riband to bind the caul with."

Upon that I set to, and managed to produce a piece of riband, and to
fasten it in the required position.

Thereafter she smiled more brightly than ever. So radiantly did she
smile that my eyes came near to being blinded with the spectacle.

"And now rearrange yourself," I said, "and in the meanwhile I will go
and wash the baby."

"Yes, yes," she murmured uneasily. "But be very careful with him--be
very gentle."

Yet it was little enough care that the rosy little homunculus seemed to
require, so strenuously did he clench his fists, a