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_.] "See little sister's hands. Oh, what pretty hands!" Jimmy had reasoned, and probably correctly, that the pause was filled by the child's big-eyed astonishment. Mrs. Jones continued,-- "Weenty teenty little feets! See little sister's toeses. What little bitsey toeses. Baby touch little sister's toeses." Jimmy had chafed while he listened; but now that the scene came to him after reflection, he saw how inhuman a thing it was to dupe the child into an affection for her inevitable enemy.