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The Parson rebuked them for calling their youngest child out of her station. "Would not," said he, "a plain Mary or Eliza be more useful to her in later life when she went out to service?" But they refused to change, and the baby was christened Selina and given back to them.

On the following Sunday she was brought to meeting—not to be made a Colgate, since birth had made her one, but to be formally recognized by the Brethren. Ruth, looking thin and wan, with queer yellow tints in her face, stood up among them with the child wrapped in her shawl. The old men prayed, and Will Backshell read from the Book of Isaiah—"Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder," mocking in this way the poor little newcomer's sex and estate. Adam Spray was disappointed because their seventh child was not a boy. A boy would have been sure to be lucky; and might possibly have made their fortunes as well as his own. Anyway, a boy earned more money than a girl. He had three girls already, and this one made four, but he had only three boys. He hoped the next child would be a boy, and then things would at least be equal.