Summary
A porcelain-skinned moon hangs over Babyland’s confectionary wasteland, where elfin artisans knead infants from riverbed clay, slide them into humming bread-ovens, and gamble away vigilance with a makeshift golf ball carved from ivory. When the timer forgets its duty, pigment deepens: honey gold, mahogany, obsidian—each shade a scar of inattention, yet every cherub exits the kiln laughing, unfazed by chromatic fate. Inside a vaulted stockroom, a fastidious registrar pigeon-holes these toddling parcels—labels, ledgers, color swatches—awaiting the maternal call. A white-picketed household telephones in an order for "a brother the color of milk"; the stork, half-asleep in moonlight, misfiles desire, lifts a carbon-dark newborn, and wings across constellations. Dismay erupts below: pastel curtains tremble, neighbors gasp, the factory foreman vaults onto a penny-farthing bicycle, pedals through cumulus, overtakes the errant bird, and swaps infants mid-air as if rectifying a typo in heaven’s manuscript.
Synopsis
In Babyland the babies are made of clay and baked in ovens until done. When they are overdone they come out brown, and when they are burnt, as it sometimes happens when the elves play a little game of African golf, then the babies come out Black. But they all seem just as happy regardless of the shade of their skin. The master of the factory keeps a stock room and in each pigeon hole he has a child. They are classified, indexed, and ready for delivery, so that when a little boy asks his mother for a brother he can get permission to call up on the 'phone and the master will deliver by stork. But this time the stork makes a mistake and picks a Black one instead of a white, which causes much trouble. The master himself rides a high-wheel bike through the air, overtakes the stork, and sees that the right baby is delivered.
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