was sufficient to excite
contraction, and, in an upright position, she gave birth to a fetus,
which fell at her feet. The crowd pushed back and made way for the
ambulance officials, and mother and child were carried off, the mother
apparently experiencing little embarrassment. Quoted by Taylor,
Anderson speaks of a woman accused of child murder, who walked a
distance of 28 miles on a single day with her two-days-old child on her
back.
There is also a case of a female servant named Jane May, who was
frequently charged by her mistress with pregnancy but persistently
denied it. On October 26th she was sent to market with some poultry.
Returning home, she asked the boy who drove her to stop and allow her
to get out. She went into a recess in a hedge. In five minutes she was
seen to leave the hedge and follow the cart, walking home, a distance
of a mile and a half. The following day she went to work as usual, and
would not have been found out had not a boy, hearing feeble cries from
the recess of the hedge, summoned a passer-by, but too late to save the
child. At her trial she said she did not see her babe breathe nor cry,
and she thought by the sudden birth that it must have been a still-born
child.
Shortt says that one day, while crossing the esplanade at Villaire,
between seven and eight o'clock in the morning, he perceived three
Hindoo women with large baskets of cakes of "bratties" on their heads,
coming from a village about four miles distant. Suddenly one of the
women stood still for a minute, stooped, and to his surprise dropped a
fully developed male child to the ground. One of her companions ran
into the town, about 100 yards distant, for a knife to divide the cord.
A few of the female passers-by formed a screen about the mother with
their clothes, and the cord was divided. The after-birth came away, and
the woman was removed to the town. It was afterward discovered that she
was the mother of two children, was twenty-eight years old, had not the
slightest sign of approaching labor, and was not aware of parturition
until she actually felt the child between her thighs.
Smith of Madras, in 1862, says he was hastily summoned to see an
English lady who had borne a child without the slightest warning. He
found the child, which had been born ten minutes, lying close to the
mother's body, with the funis uncut. The native female maid, at the
lady's orders, had left the child untouched, lifting the bed-clothes to
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