Peter on deep-sea fishing-trips, and at night he curled up on a furled sail and went to sleep to the sound of Atlantic waves, and of negro men singing as only negro men can sing.  Sometimes they went seining at night in the river, and Peter never forgot the flaring torches, the lights dipping and glinting and sliding off brawny, half-naked figures and black faces, while the marshes were a black, long line against the sky, and the moon made a silver track upon the waters, and the salty smell of the sea filled one’s nostrils.

Now that he could no longer attend school, Peter snatched at any book that came his way, getting all sorts and conditions of reading-matter from all sorts and conditions of people.  His was the unappeasable hunger and thirst of those who long to know; and he wished to express what he learned, by making pictures and thus interpreting it for himself and others.  It wasn’t easy.  Life turned a rather harsh face to him.  He wasn’t clothed like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field:  he had to provide his own coverings as best he might.  He wouldn’t accept charity.  He would wear his own old clothes but he wouldn’t wear anybody else’s.

“Peter,” said Emma Campbell, anxiously, “yo’ rind is comin’ out o’ doors.  Dem britches o’ yourn looks like peep-thoo-de-winduh; daylight ’s comin’.”  She added anxiously:  “Don’t you let a heavy rain ketch you in dem pants, Peter, or it ’ll baptize you plum nekked to yo’ shirt-tail.”

Peter looked alarmed.  One may with decency run barefooted only to the knees.  Upon reflection, he sold his mother’s sewing-machine—­it was an old machine and didn’t bring much—­and bought enough to cover himself with.

“I wish I’d been born with my clothes on me, like you were,” he confided to the Red Admiral.  “Gee, you’re lucky!”

The Red Admiral flirted his fine coat vaingloriously. He didn’t have to worry about trousers, nor yet shoes for his six feet!  And all he had to do was to fly around a bit and he was sure to find his dinner waiting for him.

“Fairy,” said Peter, soberly, “I’m not sniffling, but I’m not having what you’d call a good time.  It’s hard to be me, butterfly.  Nothing nice has happened in such a long time.  I wish you’d think up something pleasant and wish it to happen to me.”

If you’ll hold out your first and second fingers and wiggle them in the friendliest way you know how, you’ll see how the Red Admiral moved his feelers just then.

When Peter Champneys went home that night, after a long afternoon of weeding an old lady’s garden and whitewashing a long-suffering chicken house, Emma Campbell spread before him, on a hot platter, and of a crispness and brownness and odorousness to have made St. Simon Stylites slide down his pillar and grab for a piece of it, a fat chicken with an accompaniment of hot biscuit and good brown gravy.  She didn’t tell Peter how she had come by the chicken, nor did he wait to ask.  He crammed his mouth, and Emma leaned against the door and watched him with profound satisfaction.  When he had polished the last bone to an ivory whiteness, Emma reached behind her and handed Peter the book she had that morning wrested from a peddler whose shirt she had washed and ironed.  Emma knew Peter liked books.