himself up on these occasions by slyly licking the churn-dasher; but the good cheer on the dasher was a stimulant that left him more miserable than it found him.  Ever and anon from some remote chamber in the house behind him came the faint, gasping cry of a day-old baby.  That cry drowned the cooing of the doves, the song of the robin, and the chirping of the dwellers in the grass; to Jimmy the bleat of the little human lamb sounded like the roar of a lion.  He could endure penal servitude on his Saturday, with a patience born of something approaching a philosophy; he could wear a checked gingham apron, even as a saint wears an unbecoming halo; but the arrival of the new baby—­the fifth addition to the family in the short period of years covered by Jimmy Sears’s memory—­brought a bitter pill of wrath and dropped it in the youth’s brimful cup of woe.  As the minutes dragged wearily along, Jimmy Sears reviewed the story of his thraldom.  He thought of how, in his short-dress days, he had been put to rocking a cradle; how in his kilted days, there had been ever a baby’s calico dress to consider; how, from his earliest fishing-days, there had been always a tot tagging after him, throwing sticks and stones in the water to scare the fish; and how, now in his swimming and cave-dwelling days, there was a swarm of tow-headed Searses, a crawler, a creeper, a toddler, a stumbler, and a sneaker to run away from.

[Illustration:  Throwing sticks in the water to scare the fish.]

[Illustration: 
A crawler,
A creeper,
A toddler,
A stumbler,
and
A sneaker.]

As the churn-dasher grew heavier, the wrath in Jimmy’s cup began to sputter, dissolving into that which in his older sister’s heart would have been tears; in Jimmy’s heart, it took the form of convulsive sniffling.  The boy could hear his sister clattering the breakfast dishes in the kitchen.  The thing that ground upon his heart was the firm footfall of Mrs. Jones, a neighbor woman, who was overseeing the affairs of the household.  Jimmy could not remember hearing that footstep except in times of what seemed to him to be the family’s disgrace.  He hated Mrs. Jones because she tried to cool his ire by describing the superior points of the particular new baby that had arrived each time she came upon her errands of neighborly mercy.  Just as the yellow granules began to appear in the buttermilk pool on the churn-top, Jimmy heard a step on the gravel walk behind him.  The step came nearer; when Jimmy lifted his eyes, they glared into the face of Harold Jones.  Choler cooled into surprise, and surprise exploded into a vapid, grinning “Huh!” which was followed by another “Huh!” that gurgled out into a real laugh as Jimmy greeted the visitor.  The Jones boy giggled, and Jimmy found his tongue and asked:  “Did you ever churn?” When Harold admitted that he, too, was a slave of the churn, the freemasonry of Boyville was established.  A moment later Mealy—­Harold’s title in the Court—­was exemplifying the work.  When Mrs. Jones came out of the house to take care of the butter, she saw her son and Jimmy lying on the grass.  Half an hour later the boys in the barn heard Mrs. Jones’s voice calling,—­