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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:

Jun. 2, 189- This day I notissed the red and blak buterfly on
the thissel.

He stared at this for a while, and added:

P.S. In futcher watch for this buterfly witch mite be a fary.

Th