I
As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At
present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the
first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of
a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger
Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in
the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a
hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the
astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.