No one was more surprised than Peter, at the sudden notoriety, or at the far-reaching results.  He collected the articles, and sent them to his mother.  He wrote: 

“Don’t think that this means any great start.  In truth, I am a hundred dollars the poorer for the case, and shall have to cut off a few expenses for the rest of the year.  I tell you this, because I know you will not think for a moment that I grudge the money, and you are not to spoil my trifling self-denial by any offer of assistance You did quite enough in taking in those two little imps.  Were they very bad?  Did they tramp on your flowers, and frighten poor old Russet [Russet was the cat] out of his fast waning lives?  It was a great pleasure to me to see them so plump and brown, and I thank you for it.  Their testimony in court was really amusing, though at the same time pathetic.  People tell me that my speech was a good one.  What is more surprising, they tell me that I made the prisoner, and Mr. Bohlmann, the brewer, who sat next to Dummer, both cry.  I confess I grieve over the fact that I was not prosecuting Bohlmann.  He is the real criminal, yet goes scot free.  But the moral effect is, I suppose, the important thing, and any one to whom responsibility could be traced (and convicted) gives us that.  I find that Mr. Bohlmann goes to the same church I attend!”

His mother was not surprised.  She had always known her Peter was a hero, and needed no “York papers” to teach her the fact.  Still she read every line of the case, and of the subsequent crusade.  She read Peter’s speech again and again, stopping to sob at intervals, and hugging the clipping to her bosom from time to time, as the best equivalent for Peter, while sobbing:  “My boy, my darling boy.”  Every one in the mill-town knew of it, and the clippings were passed round among Peter’s friends, beginning with the clergyman and ending with his school-boy companions.  They all wondered why Peter had spoken so briefly.  “If I could talk like that,” said a lawyer to the proud mother, “I’d have spoken for a couple of hours.”  Mrs. Stirling herself wished it had been longer.  Four columns of evidence, and only a little over a half column of speech!  It couldn’t have taken him twenty minutes at the most.  “Even the other lawyer, who had nothing to say but lies, took over a column to his speech.  And his was printed close together, while that of Peter’s was spread out (e.g. solid and leaded) making the difference in length all the greater.”  Mrs. Stirling wondered if there could be a conspiracy against her Peter, on the part of the Metropolitan press.  She had promptly subscribed for a year to the New York paper which glorified Peter the most, supposing that from this time on his name would appear on the front page.  When she found it did not and that it was not mentioned in the press and Health Board crusade against the other “swill-milk” dealers, she became convinced that there was some definite attempt to rob Peter of his due fame.  “Why, Peter began it all,” she explained, “and now the papers and Health Board pretend it’s all their doings.”  She wrote a letter to the editor of the paper—­a letter which was passed round the office, and laughed over not a little by the staff.  She never received an answer, nor did the paper give Peter the more attention because of it.