dy else's.

"Peter," said Emma Campbell, anxiously, "yo' rind is comin' out o'
doors. Dem britches o' yourn looks like peep-thoo-de-winduh;
daylight 's comin'." She added anxiously: "Don't you let a heavy rain
ketch you in dem pants, Peter, or it 'll baptize you plum nekked to
yo' shirt-tail."

Peter looked alarmed. One may with decency run barefooted only to
the knees. Upon reflection, he sold his mother's sewing-machine--it
was an old machine and didn't bring much--and bought enough to cover
himself with.

"I wish I'd been born with my clothes on me, like you were," he
confided to the Red Admiral. "Gee, you're lucky!"

The Red Admiral flirted his fine coat vaingloriously. _He_ didn't
have to worry about trousers, nor yet shoes for his six feet! And
all he had to do was to fly around a bit and he was sure to find his
dinner waiting for him.

"Fairy," said Peter, soberly, "I'm not sniffling, but I'm not having
what you'd call a good time. It's hard to be me, butterfly. Nothing
nice has happened in such a long time. I wish you'd think up
something pleasant and wish it to happen to me."

If you'll hold out your first and second fingers and wiggle them in
the friendliest way you know how, you'll see how the Red Admiral
moved his feelers just then.

When Peter Champneys went home that night, after a long afternoon of
weeding an old lady's garden and whitewashing a long-suffering
chicken house, Emma Campbell spread before him, on a hot platter,
and of a crispness and brownness and odorousness to have made St.
Simon Stylites slide down his pillar and grab for a piece of it, a
fat chicken with an accompaniment of hot biscuit and good brown
gravy. She didn't tell Peter how she had come by the chicken, nor
did he wait to ask. He crammed his mouth, and Emma leaned against
the door and watched him with profound satisfaction. When he had
polished the last bone to an ivory whiteness, Emma reached behind
her and handed Peter the book she had that morning wrested from a
peddler whose shirt she had washed and ironed. Emma knew Peter liked
books.

Now, Emma Campbell couldn't by any stretch of imagination be
considered a beautiful person. She had pulled almost all of her hair
out by the roots, from a fashion she had of twisting and winding it
tightly around a tin spoon, or a match stem, to "pull her palate
up." The colored people suffer from a mysterious ailment known as
"having your palate down," for which the one specific i