im. He was thinking of the agony of his next meeting with
Piggy Pennington. Mealy fancied that Abe Carpenter, who was a quiet,
philosophical boy, would not tease him, but horror seized him when he
thought of Piggy.

As Mealy fastened his last button, he felt his father's finger under
his collar, and his own feet shambling blindly over the pebbles, up
the path, into the bushes; he heard the boys in the water laugh with
the new boy, and then--stories differ. The boys say that he howled
lustily, "Oh, pa, I won't do it any more," over and over again. Mealy
Jones says that it didn't hurt a bit.

[Illustration: _He felt his father's finger under his collar and his
own feet shambling_.]

This much is certain: that Master Harold Jones walked through the town
that day a few feet ahead of his fathers who tapped the boy's legs
with a hooked cane whenever his steps lagged. At the door of the Jones
home Mrs. Jones stood to welcome the martial procession, which she
saw, and then heard, approaching some time before it arrived. To his
wife, whose face pictured anxious grief, Mr. Jones said, as he
turned the captive over to her: "I found this young gentleman in
swimming--swimming and fighting. I have attended to his immediate
wants, I believe. I leave him to you."

Harold Jones was but a lad--a good lad whose knowledge of the golden
text was his Sunday-school teacher's pride. Yet he had collected other
scraps of useful information as he journeyed through life. One of
these was a perfectly practical familiarity with the official road map
to his mother's heart. Therefore, when he crossed the threshold of the
Jones home Harold began at once to weep dolefully.

"Harold Jones, what do you mean by such conduct?" asked his mother.

The boy stood by the window long enough to see that his father had
turned the corner toward the town. Then he fell on the floor, and
began to bewail his lot, refusing to answer the first question his
mother asked, but telling instead how "all the other boys in this town
can go swimmin' when they want to," hinting that he wouldn't care, if
papa had only just come and brought him home, but that papa--and this
was followed by a vocal cataract of woe that made the dish-pans ring.

He noted that his mother bent over him and said, "My poor boy;" at
which sign little Harold punctured the levees of his grief again,
and said he "never was goin' to face any of the boys in this town
again"--he "just couldn't bear it."