Now, Emma Campbell couldn’t by any stretch of imagination be considered a beautiful person.  She had pulled almost all of her hair out by the roots, from a fashion she had of twisting and winding it tightly around a tin spoon, or a match stem, to “pull her palate up.”  The colored people suffer from a mysterious ailment known as “having your palate down,” for which the one specific is to take a wisp of your hair and wrap it as tightly around a tin spoon, or a match stem, as you can twist it; that pulls your palate up.  It is, of course, absolutely necessary for you to have your palate up, even though you scalp yourself in the process of making it stay up.  Emma generally had a couple of spoons and two or three matches in what was left of her wool.  She could screw her mouth up until it looked like a nozzle, and she could shoot her eyes out like a crab’s.  She was so big that most folks were afraid of her.  But as she stood there beaming at Peter with the book in his hand, the loveliest lady in the land couldn’t have looked better or kinder.

Peter laid the Collection of Poetic Gems on the table, and blinked at Emma Campbell.  Then, because he was only a boy, and because nothing so pleasant as this had happened to him for a long, long time—­not since his mother died—­he put his head down on the green-covered book and cried as only a boy can cry when he lets go.

Emma Campbell seemed to grow about nine feet tall.  “Peter,” said she, in a terrifying voice, “I axes you not to lemme see you cryin’ like dat!  When I sees Miss Maria’s chile cryin’, jes’ ’cause a ole nigger woman gives ‘im a book, I wants to go out an’ bust dis town wide open wid a ax!”

When he had time to examine his Collection of Poetic Gems, Peter was overjoyed.  The paper was poor, the cuts atrocious, the binding a poisonous green, but many of the Gems were of purest ray serene despite their wretched setting.  Old-fashioned stuff, most of it, but woven on the loom of immortality.  Peter, of course, had Simms’s “War Poems of the South.”  He knew much of Father Ryan by heart.  He, as well as another, could wave his brown stick of an arm and bid somebody “Take that banner down, ’tis tattered.”  He had been brought up on the story of the glory of the men who wore the gray, and for him the sword of Robert Lee would never dim nor tarnish.  But these things were different.  They talked to something deep down in him, that was neither Yankee nor Southerner, but larger and better than both.  When Peter read these poems he felt the hair of his scalp prickle, and his heart almost burst with a rapture that was agony.

But one can’t exist on a collection of gems in a vile binding.  Shirts and shoes wear out, and trousers must be replaced when they’re too far gone to stand another stitch.  Peter was too small to do any responsible work, and he was getting too big to be paid in pennies and dimes.  People didn’t exactly know what to do with him.  One can’t be supercilious to a boy who is a Champneys born, but can one invite a boy who runs errands, is on very familiar footing with all the colored people in the county, and wears such clothes as Peter wore, to one’s house, or to be one of the guests when a child of the family gives a birthday party?  Not even in South Carolina!