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.”  Mrs. Jones paused in her work at this, put down a potato that she was peeling, and stood up stiffly, saying in a freezing tone, “Harold Jones, you don’t mean to tell me that your father punished you in front of those other little boys?”

Her son only sobbed and nodded an affirmative, and gave lusty voice to the tearful wish that he was dead.  Mrs. Jones stooped to the floor and took her child by an arm, lifting him to his feet.  She smoothed his hair and took him with her to the big chair in the dining-room, where she raised his seventy pounds to her lap, saying as she did so, “Mama’s boy will soon be too big to hold.”  At that the spoiled child only renewed his weeping and clutched her tightly.  There, little by little, he forgot the mishaps of the day.  There the anguish lifted from his heart, and when his mother asked, “Harold, why did you go into the water when we told you not to?” the child only shook his head, and, after repeated questioning, his answer came,—­

“Well, they asked me, mom.”

“Who asked you?” persisted Mrs. Jones.

“Piggy Pennington and Jimmy Sears,” returned the lad.

[Illustration:  Mrs. Jones stooped to the floor and took her child by an arm.]