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Rh baby’s most two—if I could afford to hire her, but I can’t, so what ’m I to do?” he demanded. “There ought to be some place in Vineclad where you could dump little children while you worked, same’s I hear tell of elsewhere.”

“A Baby Dump, sometimes called a Day Nursery! There’s our Object!” cried Jane, stretching her slender neck backward to make Mary hear.

“Are there enough people here who would use such a place, Mr. Bell?” asked Mary, leaning over the door of the car with her sympathetic eyes on Joel Bell’s melancholy face.

“’Round here they is,” he said, looking at Mary with the frankest admiration. “There’s a mill right near here; lots of folks work in it, men and women; they’d get on better if they had some such dumpin’ place to leave their babies. An’ a kind of a dispensation would be good, run along with it.”

“A dispensation? From school? The children wouldn’t be old enough for that,” said Win, feeling his way toward enlightenment.

“Land, no! I don’t see what you mean,” said Joel Bell, mystified in his turn. “A dispensation where they’d get medicine free, an’ maybe a doctor’s overhaulin’.”