Genre:

Ballad

Subjects:

Medical Practitioners, Railways, Class, Human Development

    Written in a style to represent an inferior literary skill, relates the story of a doctor and his friend and their meeting with a woman who gave them her child and subsequently vanished. Later in the story the doctor is ordered by its mother to return the baby to Devon. The doctor goes to a judge to decide what to do with the child, but leaves refusing to deposit the child in the workhouse. Contrasts the cruelty of the mother to the kindness of the doctor.