For this faux pas the gangling youth stopped Peter, fell to abusing and cursing him for his impudence, his egotism, his attempt at social equality,—­all of which charges, no doubt, were echoes from the round table.  Such wrath over such an offense was unusual.  Ordinarily, a white villager would have thought several uncomplimentary things about Peter, but would have said nothing.

Peter stopped with a shock of surprise, then listened to the whole diatribe with a rising sense of irritation and irony.  Finally, without a word, he corrected his mistake by retracing his steps and passing Sam again, this time on the outside.

Peter walked on up the street, outwardly calm, but his ears burned, and the queer indignity stuck in his mind.  As he went along he invented all sorts of ironical remarks he might have made to Arkwright, which would have been unwise; then he thought of sober reasoning he could have used, which would perhaps have been just as ill-advised.  Still later he wondered why Arkwright had fallen into such a rage over such a trifle.  Peter felt sure there was some contributing rancor in the youth’s mind.  Perhaps he had received a scolding at home or a whipping at school, or perhaps he was in the midst of one of those queer attacks of megalomania from which adolescents are chronic sufferers.  Peter fancied this and that, but he never came within hail of the actual reason.

When the brown man reached the old manor, the quietude of the library, with its blackened mahogany table, its faded green Axminster, the meridional globe with its dusty twinkle, banished the incident from his mind.  He returned to his work of card-indexing the Captain’s books.  He took half a dozen at a time from the shelves, dusted them on the piazza, then carried them to the embrasure of the window, which offered a pleasant light for reading and for writing the cards.

He went through volume after volume,—­speeches by Clay, Calhoun, Yancy, Prentiss, Breckenridge; an old life of General Taylor, Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”; a collection of the old middle-English dramatists, such as Lillo, Garrick, Arthur Murphy, Charles Macklin, George Colman, Charles Coffey, men whose plays have long since declined from the boards and disappeared from the reading-table.

The Captain’s collection of books was strongly colored by a religious cast,—­John Wesley’s sermons, Charles Wesley’s hymns; a treatise presenting a biblical proof that negroes have no souls; a little book called “Flowers Gathered,” which purported to be a compilation of the sayings of ultra-pious children, all of whom died young; an old book called “Elements of Criticism,” by Henry Home of Kames; another tome entitled “Studies of Nature,” by St. Pierre.  This last was a long argument for the miraculous creation of the world as set forth in Genesis.  The proof offered was a resume of the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, showing their perfect fitness for man’s