My buterfly done for mother’s burthday by her loveing son
    Peter Champneys the 11th Year of his Aige.

The little woman cried, and held him off the better to look at him, with love, and wonder, and pride, and drew his head to her breast and kissed his hair and eyes, and wished his dear, dear father had been there to see what her wonder-child could do.

“I can’t to save my life see where you get such a lovely gift from, Peter.  It must be just the grace of God that sends it to you.  Your dear father couldn’t so much as draw a straight line unless he had a ruler, I’m sure.  And I’m not bright at all, except maybe about sewing.  But you are different.  I’ve always felt that, Peter, from the time you were a little baby.  At the age of five months you cut two teeth without crying once!  You were a wonderful baby.  I knew it was in you to do something remarkable.  Never you doubt your mother’s word about that, Peter!  You’ll make your mark in the world yet!  God couldn’t fail to answer my prayers—­and you the last Champneys.”

Peter was too innately kind and considerate to dim her joy with any doubts.  He knew how he was rated—­berated is the better word for it.  He knew acutely how bad his marks were:  his shoulders too often bore witness to them.  The words “dunce” and “sissy” buzzed about his ears like stinging gnats.  So he wasn’t made vainglorious by his mother’s praise.  He received it with cautious reservations.  But her faith in him filled him with an immense tenderness for the little woman, and a passionate desire, a very agony of desire, to struggle toward her aspirations for him, to make good, to repay her for all the privations she had endured.  A lump came in his throat when he saw her place the little sketch under his father’s picture, where her eyes could open upon it the first thing in the morning, and close to it at night.

“Ah, my dear!  God’s will be done—­I’m not complaining—­but I wish, oh, how I wish you could be here to see what our dear child can do!” she told the smiling crayon portrait.  “Some of these days the little son you’ve never seen is going to be a great man with a great name—­your name, my dear, your name!”

Her face kindled into a sort of exaltation.  Two large tears ran down her cheeks, and two larger ones rolled down Peter’s.  His heart swelled, and again he felt in his breast the flutter as of wings.  Far, far away, on the dim and distant horizon, something glimmered, like sunlight upon airy peaks.

Peter’s mother wasn’t at all beautiful—­just a little, thin, sallow woman with mild brown eyes and graying hair, and a sensitive mouth, and dressed in a worn black skirt and a plain white shirt-waist.  Her fingers were needle-pricked, and she stooped from bending so constantly over her sewing-machine.  She had been a pretty girl; now she was thirty-five years old and looked fifty.  She wasn’t in the least intellectual; she hadn’t even the