Those long, silent, solitary hours in the open gave Peter the power of concentration, and a serenity that sat oddly on his slight shoulders.  Thoughts came to him, out there, that he couldn’t put into words nor yet set down upon paper.

On warm nights, when his mother’s sewing-machine was for a time still and the tired little woman slept, Peter slipped out of the shed room into a big, white, enchanted world, and saw things that are to be seen only by an imaginative and beauty-loving little boy in the light of the midsummer moon.  Big hawk-moths, swift and sudden, darted by him with owl-like wings.  Mocking-birds broke into silvery, irrepressible singing, and water-birds croaked and rustled in the cove, where the tide-water lipped the land.  The slim, black pine-trees nodded and bent to one another, with the moon looking over their shoulders.  Something wild and sweet and secret invaded the little boy’s spirit, and stayed on in his heart.  Maybe it was the heart-shaking call of the whippoorwill, or the song of the mocking-bird, truest voices of the summer night; or perhaps it was the spirit of the great green luna-moth, loveliest of all the daughters of the dark.  Or perhaps the Red Admiral was indeed a fairy, as Peter said he was.

Peter was superstitious about the Red Admiral.  He was a good-luck sign, a sort of flying four-leaf clover.  Peter noticed that whenever the Red Admiral crossed his path now, something pleasant always impended; it meant that he wouldn’t be very unhappy in school; or maybe he’d find a thrush’s nest, or the pink orchid.  Or the meeting might simply imply something nice and homey, such as a little treat his mother contrived to make for him when sewing had been somewhat better-paying than usual, and she could sit by the table and enjoy his enjoyment as only one’s mother can.  Decidedly, the Red Admiral was good luck!

So, all along, quietly, persistently, not exactly secretly but still all by himself, Peter had been learning to use his fingers, as he had been learning to use his eyes and ears.  He was morbidly shy about it.  It never occurred to him that anybody might admire anything he could do, as nobody had ever admired anything he had done.

On his mother’s last birthday—­though Peter didn’t know then that it was to be her last—­he made for her his first sketch in water-colors.  By herculean efforts he had managed to get his materials; he had picked berries, weeded gardens until his head whirled and his back ached, chopped fire-wood, run errands, caught crabs.  Presently he had his paper and colors.

It was a beautiful surprise for Peter’s mother, that sketch, which was a larger copy of the one on the fly-leaf of his geography.  There was the gray worm-fence, a bit of brown ditch, an elder in flower, a tall purple thistle, and on it the Red Admiral.  Peter wished to make his mother personally acquainted with the Red Admiral, so he printed on the back of his picture: