A poet is writing a delightful sonnet. His wife is going out, and she brings him their eldest to kiss; he kisses the child, but to his horror his wife places it in a cradle by his side. Then she brings in the eldest but one, and places that in an arm-chair on the other side. Finally she brings in the tiniest baby, and forcing that into the reluctant father’s arms, rushes out and leaves him just as all three children begin to yell their loudest. The distracted father tries to soothe first one child, and then another, and his friend the Lieutenant enters while he is in the middle of it. He pushes the Lieutenant into a chair, saddles all three babies into his lap before he can say a word and rushes from the room. The Lieutenant follows as quickly as he can with the three children in his arms. Then begins a chase of the wildest and most exciting order. The poet walks rapidly along reciting his verse as he goes; his friend the Lieutenant meeting the Colonel outside, forces one baby into his arms and the two give pursuit; a policeman whom they pass is pressed into the chase and given the third baby to carry. They dash through the streets and out on the tow-path by the river, followed by an ever increasing crowd of children. Other policemen join in, and becoming imbued with the spirit of the thing, they seize babies from the arms of astonished mothers as they pass, and all, including the mothers, give chase to the distracted poet. By this time the crowd has swelled to about one hundred, and they swarm over fields and through hedges, and tumble and scramble down the steep banks, until at last the poet sinks exhausted behind a blackberry bush. Then the people carrying babies begin to arrive, and very soon the luckless father finds himself almost smothered under a heap of six screaming, struggling mites, three of which may or may not be his own, and three certainly are not. Next come the mothers, and begin wildly sorting out the babies to find their own offspring, and they all unite in denouncing the, unhappy man, who is marched off by the policemen.