Wee Janet was afraid of Pete.  All the Primer Class children who attended the country school were afraid of the boy.  He used to chase them and threaten to cut off their ears; once he whispered across the aisle to Bessie Saunders that he would like to eat little girls, and she believed it.

The teacher said that Pete was a bad boy.  There was never a school day when the child wasn’t justly punished for something.  It did seem as if no one ever said a kind word about Pete.  Wee Janet thought that even his mother was discouraged, because he cruelly teased his own brothers and sisters until they were in tears half the time.

No one in the country knew where Pete and his family lived before they came to the Perkins’ farm.  In reply to that question Pete said “None of yer business!” to the Sabbath school superintendent.

Wee Janet was much troubled about Pete.  “He’ll be a dreadfully bad man,” she said to her mother, “unless someone can make him into a good little boy.  The teacher says she can’t do it—­she’s tried.  She says it’s a problem.”

“I’ll tell you what to do, little daughter,” said Wee Janet’s mother.  “Try to think Pete is the lovely boy he might have been if he had been born in the Perkins’ house, and dear old Grandma Perkins was his own grandmother.”

“But—­but my thinker isn’t strong enough,” objected Wee Janet.  “Besides, that wouldn’t make Pete into a different kind of a boy.”

“No,” agreed Wee Janet’s mother; “but if you could imagine Pete is lovely, you must treat him in a different way, and it might make him better.”

The following day Wee Janet tried her best to do as her mother suggested.  The day after she begged all the little girls in the Primer Class to treat Pete as if he were a good boy.  At last Wee Janet and the Primer Class gave it up.

“He just gets worse and worse,” Wee Janet told her mother.  “He says he ‘don’t care for nuthin’ nor nobody,’—­that’s just what he said.”

“Well,” replied Janet’s mother, “there is one thing you can do, and that is, always be polite and kind to him.  ‘Overcome evil with good.’”

Days passed.  Every night when she said her prayers Wee Janet remembered Pete.  Each day she tried to be kind to him in every way known to a little girl eight years old and extremely small for her age.  He threw the flowers she gave him into the dusty road and danced on them.  He accepted her gifts only to destroy them, every one, and then called her “Cry-baby.”

At last the Sabbath-school superintendent learned that Pete was born and had lived all his life in a tenement house in a great city.  His father died in State’s Prison.  After that it seemed to Wee Janet that there was almost no hope for Pete.

One Thursday morning the little girl’s mother asked her to carry a pail of buttermilk to Aunt Nancy.  “You needn’t be afraid to go by the Perkins’ house this morning,” she said, “because your father was told that Pete went fishing to-day.”