From the day when Mrs. Stannard took home her sister’s little boy, Charles Harold, or Harry, as he was usually called, she gave him a mother’s care equally with her own son, Kenneth, who was nearly the same age as his cousin, but as unlike him as one boy can be unlike another. “He is his father all over and can’t help it,” Mrs. Stannard would say, as an excuse for Harry’s faults, which, without his father, she would have condoned for the sake of his mother and because of his handsome face and affectionate, winning ways. At a very early age he began to assume an air of superiority over his associates, because of the money left him by his father, who, he said, was a gentleman and not a farmer, and came of a family which never had to work. And Harry wouldn’t work. Why should he? he said, when his board was paid and he was not beholden in any way to the uncle and aunt who cared for him. They could charge what they liked, he didn’t care. He should still have quite a fortune when he was twenty-one, after which he intended to travel and see the world and have a good time generally. He had a pretty good time as a boy, Kenneth thought, when he stayed in bed till breakfast was ready on cold winter mornings, while he, Kenneth, was up before light, helping his father with the fires and chores, and sometimes hanging out the Monday’s washing for his mother, when the wind was so sharp as to penetrate through her mittens and the thick hood upon her head. Kenneth was decidedly a mother’s boy, an unselfish, helpful boy, doing for every one whatever his hands found to do, and never dreaming that any necessary labor was beneath him. Every dumb beast on the place, from Sorrel, the horse, and the big rooster who ruled the hen-yard, down to the lambs feeding in the sheep pasture, knew him and came at his call as readily as the watch dog, Chance, or the house cat, Fan, with her family of six kittens just opening their eyes, and six more gambolling about the premises and getting their daily rations from the trough Kenneth had scooped out from a log, and into which, morning and night, he always poured a part of old Limeback’s milk. She was the cow set apart for the cats, and Kenneth saw that they had their rights religiously, and bore meekly Harry’s jeers at what he called Ken’s soft-heartedness for dogs and cats and animals generally. Sometime he meant to have a blooded horse and put him on the racecourse with large bets behind him, but as for farm animals, they were like country people, and he hated them, and the only serious quarrel he and Kenneth ever had was when he tied two kittens together by their hind legs and then set a rat terrier belonging to a neighbor to worry them. The dog was dealt a blow with a hoe which sent him yelping home, the little cats were untied, and then Harry had a thrashing such as he never forgot. His lip was cut and swollen, his eyes black for a week, but he bore no malice against Kenneth for the castigation. On the contrary, he rather