“I’ve often thought, Judge, what a particularly mean nigger I’d have been, myself,” he said, and studied the judge with disconcerting directness.  “If you’d been born a colored man, and some folks talked and behaved to you like some folks talk and behave to colored men, don’t you reckon you’d be in jail right this minute, Judge?”

The white men who heard Peter’s remark smiled, and one of them said, spitting out a mouthful of tobacco juice, that it was just another piece of that boy’s damfoolishness.  But the negroes, who knew that judge as only negroes can know white men, chuckled grimly.  They have an immense respect for intelligence, and they made no mistake where Peter’s was concerned.

They knew him, too, a mild-eyed, brown-faced child reading out of a Book by the light of a kerosene lamp to groups of gray-headed, reverent listeners in lonely cabins.  And Peter was always making pictures of them—­Mindel at the wash-tub, Emma Campbell picking a chicken, old Maum’ Chloe churning, Liza playing with her fat black baby, Joe Tuttle plowing, old Daddy Neptune Fennick leaning on his ax.  Sometimes these sketches caught some fleeting moment of fun, and were so true and so amusing that they were received with shouts of delighted laughter, passed from hand to hand, and cherished by fortunate recipients.

Now, no simple and natural heart can even for a little while beat in unison with other hearts, encased in whatsoever colored skin may please God, without a quickening of that wisdom which is one of the keys of the Kingdom to come.  To be able really to know, truly to understand and come human-close to the lowly, to men and women under the bondage of age-old prejudice, or outcast by the color of their skin, is a terrible and perilous gift.  This is the much knowledge in which there is much grief.

Peter Champneys saw both sides.  He saw and heard and knew things that would have made his mother turn in her grave had she known.  He knew what depths of savagery and superstition, of brute sloth and ignorance, lay here to drive back many a would-be white helper in despair, and to render the labor of many a splendid negro reformer all but futile.  But he knew, too, the terrible patience, the incredible resignation, with which poverty and neglect and hunger and oppression and injustice are borne, until at times, child as he was, his soul sickened with shame and rage.  He relished the sweet earthy humor that brightens humble lives, the gaiety and charity under conditions which, when white men have to bear them, go to the making of red terrorists.  Some of the things he saw and heard remained like scars upon Peter’s memory.  He will remember until he dies the June night he spent with Daddy Neptune Fennick in his cabin on the edge of the River Swamp.