_February 7th._ Milly came to see me today. Grace has been for more than a month with George’s mother, who has been very ill. I was lying here thinking of her as I watched the jays outside, and of what Caro said when she was at home. Caro never could stand Cousin Jason, and has called him Cousin Jay ever since the first summer we came to Bird Corners. I took her to spend the day at Grace’s, and she went with Milly and her nurse down to the brook to wade. The brook divides Cousin Jason’s land from theirs; and the children, finding some of his hogs in Grace’s pasture, drove them before them with much laughter and little clods of earth. Cousin Jason, hearing his squealing beasts, came charging down the hill in a fury and jabbed his petty wrath straight to poor little Milly’s heart. She was always a timid creature, like her mother, and, like her mother, unkindness made her physically ill; so she wept miserably, poor baby, while her half-uncle stormed. But Caro flamed into wrath as fierce as his own. She had been feeding the birds that morning, and had jumped from the stool by my cot afterward a dozen times to scatter the jay-birds, who were out in unusual force, and bent on pecking off the head of any other bird who ventured to take a crumb. She sprang in front of Milly now, ruffling like an angry wren. “Go home, you horrid—jay-bird!” she shrieked; “you peck, an’ peck, an’ peck, _all_ the time! I hate you! Cousin Jay, Cousin Jay!” He stared at the mite, speechless, with purpling face. Milly gasped with fright, and old Aunt Susan, as she afterwards declared, “done choke herse’f ’mos’ ter death swallerin’ her laff.” Caro took Milly by the hand. “Let’s go home an’ play party,” she proposed calmly; “we don’t like pigs and jay-birds.” And back they went. Cousin Jason was immensely impressed. He told me about it afterwards, himself, and declared that he wished Milly had a little of Caro’s “spunk.” He even tried, in his not very happy fashion, to be friends with the child, and has always treated her with more consideration than any one else he knows. But Caro will have none of him, and to this day calls him Cousin Jay to his face. He is a man of large bulk, with a face at once sharp and heavy, as unlike Grace in body as he is in soul. And I’m afraid he makes life pretty hard for her.