and so he showed none of the uneasiness that met me in Donny's face as he looked at his mother like someone asking what this business was about. During my visit, curious visitors came to the house and asked the mother to let them take a picture of the twins; she received this with every welcome and made the operation easy for them, while her husband talked with me: "I never knew there were so many friends in the world until this happened. People want to offer a great many things when extraordinary things occur... A man we don't know, from California, sent us a check for a hundred dollars, and gifts keep pouring in from every direction."

I could hear the mother talking with her visitors — she has

The Hartley family welcomes the amazing twins

become a famous mother now, and many stream in to write and to photograph. She laughed mer-rily when I asked her whether she was thinking of another birth: "I don't want children; what I have is enough."

The story of the twins begins in the mother's womb on February 21, 1953, shrouded in mystery, a strangeness in the pregnancy: the fertilized egg began to grow in two halves instead of one part during the first three months of the pregnancy. And we can be certain that the twins inherited this from the family: the father has two twin sisters, and his mother had two twin sisters, and thus the birth of twins can be inherited in a family. We also

know that the division of an egg into two parts is not so very strange. This is shown by exper-iments tried on fish and birds, by lowering the temperature of the fertilized egg or by neglecting it.

The parents were living, in that harsh month, in a cold dwelling on a farm far from the city, and the family had no means of

"How darling!" — says the little sister.