trying, "Touch me now! Touch me if you dare!"

"Aw, you coward! drop them rocks," snarled the new boy.

Mealy looked at his friends imploringly. He felt lonely, deserted, and mistreated, but he saw in the faces of his comrades the reflection of the injunction to put down the stones. He did so, and his anger began to cool. But he whimpered again, "Well now, touch me if you dare!"

The new boy came over briskly, and made a feint to slap the naked lad, who warded off the blow, sniffling, "You just leave me alone. I ain't hurtin' you." The boys in the water laughed—it seemed to Mealy such a cruel laugh. Anger enveloped him again, and he struck out blindly through his tears, hand over hand, striking the new boy in the mouth and making it bleed, before he realized that the fight had begun. The new boy tried to clinch Mealy, but the naked body slipped away from him; and just then the combatants saw the satisfied grin freeze on the faces of the boys in the water. A step crunched the gravel near them, and in a moment that flashed vividly with rejoicing that the fight was ended, then with abject, chattering terror, Mealy Jones saw his father approaching. Mealy did not run. The uplifted cane and the red, perspiring face of his father transfixed the lad, yet he felt called upon to say something. His voice came from a dry throat, and he spoke through an idiotic grin as he said, "I didn't know you wanted me, pa."

After the burst of his father's anger ten awful minutes of shame passed for Mealy while he was putting on his wet clothes. The boys in the water swam noiselessly upstream to the roots of the elm-tree, where he saw them looking at his disgrace. During those ten minutes Mealy realized that his father's deepening silence portended evil; so he tried to draw his father into a discussion of the merits of the case by whimpering from time to time, "Well, I guess they ast me to come," or "Piggy said it wouldn't hurt, 'cause 't ain't in dog days," or "I wasn't in where it was deep. I was only a-wadin'." The new boy, who was seated upon a log near by with a stone in his hand, which he had picked up fearing the elder Jones would join the fray, sniffed audibly. He called to the other boys derisively, "Say, any of you boys got the baby's blocks?" It did not lift the mantle of humiliation that covered Mealy to hear his father reply to the new boy, "That will do for you, sir." While Mealy wept he wiped away his tears first with one hand and then with the other, employing the free hand in fastening his clothes together. He did not fear the punishment that might be in store for him. He was thinking of the agony of his next meeting with Piggy Pennington. Mealy fancied that Abe Carpenter, who was a quiet, philosophical boy, would not tease him, but horror seized him when he thought of Piggy.

As Mealy fastened his last button, he felt his father's finger under his collar, and his own feet shambling blindly over the pebbles, up the path, into the bushes; he heard the boys in the water laugh with the new boy, and then—stories differ. The boys say that he howled lustily, "Oh, pa, I won't do it any more," over and over again. Mealy Jones says that it didn't hurt a bit.

He felt his father's finger under his collar and his own feet shambling

This much is certain: that Master Harold Jones walked through the town that day a few feet ahead of his fathers who tapped the boy's legs with a hooked cane whenever his steps lagged. At the door of the Jones home Mrs. Jones stood to welcome the martial procession, which she saw, and then heard, approaching some time before it arrived. To his wife, whose face pictured anxious grief, Mr. Jones said, as he turned the captive over to her: "I found this young gentleman in swimming—swimming and fighting. I have attended to his immediate wants, I believe. I leave him to you."

Harold Jones was but a lad—a good lad whose knowledge of the golden text was his Sunday-school teacher's pride. Yet he had collected other scraps of useful information as he journeyed through life. One of these was a perfectly practical familiarity with the official road map to his mother's heart. Therefore, when he crossed the threshold of the Jones home Harold began at once to weep dolefully.

"Harold Jones, what do you mean by such conduct?" asked his mother.

The boy stood by the window long enough to see that his father had turned the corner toward the town. Then he fell on the floor, and began to bewail his lot, refusing to answer the first question his mother asked, but telling instead how "all the other boys in this town can go swimmin' when they want to," hinting that he wouldn't care, if papa had only just come and brought him home, but that papa—and this was followed by a vocal cataract of woe that made the dish-pans ring.

He noted that his mother bent over him and said, "My poor boy;" at which sign little Harold punctured the levees of his grief again, and said he "never was goin' to face any of the boys in this town again"—he "just couldn't bear it." Mrs. Jones paused in her work at this, put down a potato that she was peeling, and stood up stiffly, saying in a freezing tone, "Harold Jones, you don't mean to tell me that your father punished you in front of those other little boys?"

Mrs. Jones stooped to the floor and took her child by an arm.

Her son only sobbed and nodded an affirmative, and gave lusty voice to the tearful wish that he was dead. Mrs. Jones stooped to the floor and took her child by an arm, lifting him to his feet. She smoothed his hair and took him with her to the big chair in the dining-room, where she raised his seventy pounds to her lap, saying as she did so, "Mama's boy will soon be too big to hold." At that the spoiled child only renewed his weeping and clutched her tightly. There, little by little, he forgot the mishaps of the day. There the anguish lifted from his heart, and when his mother asked, "Harold, why did you go into the water when we told you not to?" the child only shook his head, and, after repeated questioning, his answer came,—

"Well, they asked me, mom."

"Who asked you?" persisted Mrs. Jones.

"Piggy Pennington and Jimmy Sears," returned the lad.

To the query, "Well, do you have to do everything they ask you to, Harold?" the lad's answer was a renewal of the heart-breaking sobs. These softened the mother's heart, as many and many a woman's heart has been melted through all the ages. She soothed the truant child and petted him, until the cramping in his throat relaxed sufficiently to admit of the passage of an astonishingly large slice of bread and butter and sugar. After it was disposed of, Harold busied himself by assorting his old iron scraps on the back porch, and his mother smiled as she fancied she heard the boy trying to whistle a tune.

Harold had left the porch before his father came home with the beefsteak for supper, and Mrs. Jones met her husband with: "Pa Jones, what could you be thinking of—punishing that boy before the other children? Do you want to break what little spirit he has? Why, that child was nearly in hysterics for an hour after you left!"

Mr. Jones hung up his crooked cane, put a stick of wood in the stove, scraped his pipe with his knife, and blew through the stem.

"I guess he wasn't hurt much," replied the father. Then he added, as he put a live coal in the pipe: "I s'pose you went an' babied him an' spoiled it all." There was a puffing pause, after which Mr. Jones added, "If you'd let