A BABY ROMANCE.

Patea Mail, 31 March 1881, Page 2

A BABY ROMANCE.

The infant pauper which was lately perplexing three, magistrates, a bailiff, the police, and the Chairmen of two County Councils, has now found a home. The R.M. was benevolently worrying the Government to place the lost child in the Industrial School at Christchurch, but the Government answered with official tenderness that there wasn’t room even for a three-year-old. The Wanganui Council would not take the child in and do for it because, though born in Wanganui, it bad been abandoned at Patea. To the official mind, that reason is unanswerable. Then the Patea Council could not shelter the waif because it was born at Wanganui though abandoned at Patea. That looks equally unanswerable. These County Councils erect a barrier which enables one Council to shelter on one side and the other on the other side, while each bawls out that the other Council is on the wrong side. While quarrelling in this strictly official manner, where is the baby ? It was nobody’s child. Paupers are not wanted in a colony, and so no provision is made by which even a pauper baby can be succored. More than one reader of the Majl had been touched in a soft place by the story of this pauper baby, and soon there were two applications from married persons to adopt the child. A new trouble arose, for as each applicant was very urgent to have this infant girl as a foster child, “ to have and to hold,” &c., it was almost necessary to send outside for another infant derelict to meet the double demand. A Waverley settler, who had been childless, carried off the

prize ; and in years to come we may see a young lady riding into town with that pretty infant face developed into womanhood—perhaps the belle of the district with a dower to boot.