A PRECIOUS BABY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 909, 25 October 1910, Page 3

A PRECIOUS BABY.

HEIR TO

Baby McLean enjoys the reputation of being the richest infant in America, and judging by the space devoted to him in the magazines here, be is about the best advertised baby in the world. It is estimated that Baby John D. Rockfeller 111. is heir to about jQ 12,000,000, but Baby Vinson Walsh McLean has to his account already, according to the New York World and that sum is steadily increasing. He gets his millions from his late maternal grandfather, a very lovable Colorado gold mine owner, and from his grandfather on the paternal side, Colonel John McLean, a capitalist and newspaper owner. Article writers for the American Sunday papers have long revelled in descriptions of the world’s richest baby, and photographs of the infant and his mother. Mrs Edward McLean, have been printed galore. 1 have before me as I write, says an American correspondent, a photograph of the little McLean in the gold cradle given to him by King Leopold, and a full-page description of “ his six nurseries and his farm.” I will not answer for the accuracy ot the details, but they are just of that romantic and picturesque kind for which the readers of American Sunday newspaper editions always crave with an appetite which seems to grow upon what it feeds. He has certainly several exclusive homes by the sea, land, and river. In Bar Harbour, Maine, he has quite a farm, and almost a menagerie, stocked for his benefit. Sheep from Colorado, dogs, ponies, ducks, turkeys—everything in the animal line that a baby heart can crave for, and all “warranted not to bite.”

This plutocratic baby travelled in California in a private railwaycar elaborately furnished for him and his parents. He has, says a New York World waiter, an automobile “as big as a circus waggon,” in which is a complete nursery. He has doctors, nurses, and private detectives, and the nurseries in which he plays have many toys ot “ solid gold.” Mrs McLean is, happily, a woman of strong common-sense, and, although she and her husband idolise the baby, he stands a good chance to escape being spoiled.