He wore upon the skirts of his fine dark-colored frock-coat a red-orange border sewed with tiny round black buttons; across the middle of his fore-wings, like the sash of an order, was a broad red ribbon, and the spatter of white on the tips may have been his idea of epaulets; or maybe they were nature’s Distinguished Service medals given him for conspicuous bravery, for there is no more gallant sailor of the skies than the Red Admiral.

When this gentleman comes to anchor on a flower he hoists his gay sails erect over his fat black back, in order that his under wings may be properly admired; for he knows very well that the cunningest craftsman that ever worked with mosaics and metals never turned out a better bit of jewel-work than those under wings.

It was this piece of painted perfection that caught Peter Champneys’s unhappy eyes and brought him to a standstill.  Peter forgot that he was the school dunce, that tears were still on his cheeks, that he had a headache and an empty stomach.  His eyes began to shine unwontedly, brightening into a golden limpidity, and his lips puckered into a smile.

The Red Admiral, if one might judge by his unrubbed wings and the new and glossy vividness of his colorings, may have been some nine hours old.  Peter, by the entry in his mother’s Bible, was nine years old.  Quite instinctively Peter’s brown fingers groped for a pencil.  At the feel of it he experienced a thrill of satisfaction.  Down on his knees he went, and crept forward, nearer and nearer; for one must come as the wind comes who would approach the Red Admiral.  Peter had no paper, so a fly-leaf of his geography would have to do.  All athrill, he worked with his bit of pencil; and on the fly-leaf grew the worm-fence with the blackberry bramble climbing along its corners, and the fennel, and the elder bushes near by; and in the foreground the tall thistle, with the butterfly upon it.  The Red Admiral is a gourmet; he lingers daintily over his meals; so Peter had time to make a careful sketch of him.  This done, he sketched in the field beyond, and the buzzard hanging motionless in the sky.

It was crude and defective, of course, and a casual eye wouldn’t have glanced twice at it, but a true teacher would instantly have recognized the value, not of what it performed, but of what it presaged.  For all its faults it was bold and rapid, like the Admiral’s flight, and it had the Admiral’s airy grace and freedom.  It seized the outlines of things with unerring precision.

The child kneeling in the dust of the Riverton Road, with an old geography open on his knee, felt in his thin breast a faint flutter, as of wings.  He looked at the sketch; he watched the Red Admiral finish his meal and go scudding down the wind.  And he knew he had found the one thing he could do, the one thing he wanted to do, that he must and would do.  It was as if the butterfly had been a fairy, to open for Peter a tiny door of hope.  He wrote under the sketch: