d him, I wouldn't care," sobbed Rose. "I could stand it
better to have you hit him in anger, but you're so hard, so cruel. You
plan it all out so--how can you?"

Nevertheless, with a last convulsive hug and a broken "Mother can't help
it, darling," she put Billy on his feet, her tormented heart wrung with
bitterness as Martin took the clinging child from her and carried him
away, hysterical and resisting.

"What else could I do?" she asked herself miserably, stabbed by the
added fear that Billy might not forgive her. Could he understand how
powerless she had been?

When once more the child was cuddled against her, she realized that in
some mystical way there was a new bond between them, and as the
days passed, she discovered it was not so much the whipping, but the
unnatural perfidy of Dorcas that had scarred his mind. With his own
eyes he had seen a mother devour her baby. He woke from dreams of it
at night. Even the sight of her in the pasture contentedly suckling the
remaining nine did not reassure him. The modern methods of psychology
were then, to such women as Rose, a sealed book, but love and intuition
taught her to apply them.

"You see, Billy," she explained, "hogs are meant to eat meat like dogs
or bears or tigers. But they can live on just grain and grass, and that
is what most farmers make them do because there is so much more of it
and it costs so much less. Some of them feed what is called tankage. If
old Dorcas could have had some of that she probably would not have
eaten the little pig. You mustn't blame her too much, for she was just
famishing for flesh, the way you are, sometimes, for a drink of water,
when you've been playing hard." Thus rationalized, the old sow's conduct
lost some of its grewsomeness, and in time, of course, the shock of the
whole experience was submerged under other and newer impressions,
but always the remembrance of it floated near the surface of his
consciousness, his first outstanding memory of his father and the farm.

Inheriting a splendid physique from both parents, at six little Bill was
as tall as the average child of eight, well set up and sturdy, afraid
of nothing on the place except Martin, who, resenting his attitude, not
unreasonably put the blame for it on his wife. "It's not what I do to
him," he told her, "it's what you teach him to think I might do that
makes him dislike me." To which Rose looked volumes, but made no reply.

Whatever the reason for the child