[Illustration:  Mrs. Jones came out to take care of the butter.]

“Harold, O Harold, don’t you want to come and look at the baby?” Now James Sears in the twenty-four hours of his new sister’s life had not let the fact of her existence form expression on his lips.  Much less had he lowered his hostile flag to salute her; but he knew instinctively that Harold Jones was the sort of a boy who would unsex himself by looking at a baby.  When Mealy answered, “Yes’m,” and trotted down the back-yard path to the kitchen, Jimmy Sears scorned him heartily enough to fancy Mealy in the act of holding the loathsome thing in his arms.  Further contumely was beyond Jimmy’s imagination.

[Illustration:  The sort of boy who would unsex himself by looking at a baby.]

[Illustration:  James.]

When Mealy Jones came back, the barn wherein he had left Jimmy was empty; and only when Mealy had started homeward, and a clod came whizzing down the alley, hitting him under the ear, did Mealy know how Jimmy Sears resented an insult.  Mealy looked around; no one was in sight.

Right here the reader should know that Jimmy Sears was not alone in his displeasure.  There was mutiny in the Sears household.  When the baby came, the four elder of the seven Sears children joined Jimmy in informal, silent sedition.  They looked upon the newcomer as an intruder.  For all who extended sympathy to the pretender, the insurgents developed a wholesome scorn.  This scorn fell most heavily upon kind Mrs. Jones.  The Sears children regarded her familiar jocularity with undisguised repugnance; and when Jimmy heard Mrs. Jones tell his little sister Annie that morning that she was no longer the baby, Jimmy’s rage at what he considered a fiendish thrust at the innocent and forsaken child passed the bounds of endurance.  He hurled a bit of that anger in the clod that hit Mealy Jones, then Jimmy walked doggedly back to the house.  He coaxed the little sister from the kitchen, took the child’s chubby hand and led her to the barn.  There Jimmy nursed his sorrow.  He assured the younker as they sat on the hay that he for one would not desert her, “even if mamma had forgotten her.”  He hugged the wondering tot until her ribs hurt, and in his lamentations referred to the new baby as “that old thing.”  The evening before, when Mrs. Jones had marshalled the other Sears children and had taken them into the bedroom to see their new sister, Jimmy was not to be found.  None of the older children had looked at the baby.  They had turned their heads away deliberately, and had responded in gutteral affirmatives when they were asked if it were not a pretty baby.  But Jimmy had escaped that humiliation, and since then he had avoided all snares set to lure him to his mother’s bed-side.  He sat there in the barn, fuming as he recalled what he had heard while Annie was in his mother’s room early that morning.

[Illustration:  Jimmy heard Mrs. Jones tell his little sister Annie that morning that she was no longer the baby.]