It ended all too soon.  He went up to Lynwood one morning to find Claribel packing for a hasty departure.  It was a new Claribel that morning, a Claribel with a rosy face and shining eyes and smiling lips.  She had gotten news, she told Peter joyously, that called her away at once—­beautiful news.  The most wonderful news in the world!

She turned over to Peter all the material she had on hand, and gave him painstaking directions as to how he was to proceed, what he was to strive for, what to avoid.  And she said that when he had become a great man in the big world, one of these days, he wasn’t to forget that she’d prophesied it, and had been allowed to play her little part in his career.  Then she kissed Peter as nobody had ever kissed him except his mother.  And so she left him.

He was turning fifteen then, and getting too big for the penny jobs Riverton had in pickle for him.  Nothing better offering, he hired out that autumn to a farmer who fed his stock better than he did his men.  Peter’s mouth still twists wryly when he remembers that first month of heavy farm work.  The mule was big and Peter wasn’t, the plow and the soil were heavy, and Peter was light.  Trammell, the farmer, held him to his task, insisting that “a boy who couldn’t learn to plow straight couldn’t learn to do nothin’ else straight, and he’d better learn now while he had the chanst.”  Peter would have cheerfully forfeited his chance to learn to plow straight; but the thing was there to do, and he tried to do it.

Sunday, his one free day, was the only thing that made life at all endurable to Peter.  It was a day to be looked forward to all through the heavy week.  Early in the morning, with such lunch as he could come by, his worn Bible in his coat pocket and a package of paper under his arm, Peter disappeared, not to return until nightfall.  The farmer’s over-burdened wife was glad enough to see him go; that meant one less for whom to cook and to wash dishes.

All the week, after his own fashion, Peter had been observing things.  On Sundays he tried to put them down on paper.  He had the great, rare, sober gift of seeing things as they are, a gift given to the very few.  A negro plowing in a flat brown field behind a horse as patient as himself; an old woman in a red jacket and a plaid bandana, feeding a flock of turkeys; a young girl milking; a boy driving an unruly cow—­all the homely, common, ordinary things of everyday life among the plain people, Peter, who had been set down among the plain people, tried to crowd on his scanty supply of drawing-paper on Sunday in the woods.

Peter had learned to draw animals playing, and birds flying, and butterflies fluttering, and folks working.  But he couldn’t draw a decent living-wage for his daily labor.  He was only a boy, and it seemed to be a part of the scheme of things that a boy should be asked to do a man’s work for a dwarf’s wages.  And the food they gave him at the Trammell farm-house was beginning to tell on him.  Peter asked for more money and was refused with contumely.  He asked for a change of diet, and was informed violently that this country is undoubtedly going to the dogs when folks like himself “think theirselfs too dinged uppidy for good victuals.  Eat ’em or leave ’em!”