Humphreys walked down the lane to her house, with a very
thoughtful face.

CHAPTER IV

THE SOUL OF BLACK FOLKS

The negro to the white man, as the moon to the earth, shows one side
only; the other is dark and unknown. It is an instinct with him to
conceal the truth--any truth--from white men; who knows to what use
they will put it and him? So deeply have ages of slavery and
oppression ingrained this upon black men's subconsciousness, that
only one white man in a thousand ever knows or suspects what his
dark brethren think, or know, or feel. Peter Champneys happened to
be the thousandth.

There wasn't a cabin in all that countrywide in which this
barefooted last scion of a long line of slave-holding gentry wasn't
known and welcome. There wasn't a negro in the county he didn't know
by name: even "mean niggers" grinned amiably at Peter Champneys.
They remembered what he had once said to a district judge whom he
heard bitterly inveighing against their ingratitude, immorality,
shiftlessness, and general worthlessness. Peter had lifted his quiet
eyes.

"I've often thought, Judge, what a particularly mean nigger I'd have
been, myself," he said, and studied the judge with disconcerting
directness. "If you'd been born a colored man, and some folks talked
and behaved to you like some folks talk and behave to colored men,
don't you reckon you'd be in jail right this minute, Judge?"

The white men who heard Peter's remark smiled, and one of them said,
spitting out a mouthful of tobacco juice, that it was just another
piece of that boy's damfoolishness. But the negroes, who knew that
judge as only negroes can know white men, chuckled grimly. They have
an immense respect for intelligence, and they made no mistake where
Peter's was concerned.

They knew him, too, a mild-eyed, brown-faced child reading out of a
Book by the light of a kerosene lamp to groups of gray-headed,
reverent listeners in lonely cabins. And Peter was always making
pictures of them--Mindel at the wash-tub, Emma Campbell picking a
chicken, old Maum' Chloe churning, Liza playing with her fat black
baby, Joe Tuttle plowing, old Daddy Neptune Fennick leaning on his
ax. Sometimes these sketches caught some fleeting moment of fun, and
were so true and so amusing that they were received with shouts of
delighted laughter, passed from hand to hand, and cherished by
fortunate recipients.

Now, no simple and natural heart can even for a little while beat