not as yet aware. It was the great power of being able clearly to
visualize things, of bringing before his mind's eye whatever he had
seen, with every distinction of shape and size and color sharply
present, and accurately to portray it in the absence of the
original. If one should ask him, "What's the shape of the milkweed
butterfly's wing, and the color of the spice-bush swallowtail, Peter
Champneys? What does the humming-bird's nest look like? What's the
color of the rainbow-snake and of the cotton-mouth moccasin? What's
the difference between the ironweed and the aster?"--Ask Peter
things like that, and lend him a bit of paper and a pencil, and he
literally had the answers at his finger-tips.

But they never asked him what would, to him, have been natural
questions; they wished him, instead, to tell them where the Onion
River flows, and the latitude of the middle of Kamchatka, and to
spell phthisis, and on what date the Battle of Somethingorother was
fought, and if a man buys old iron at such a price, and makes it
over into stoves weighing so much, and sells his stoves at such
another price, what does it profit him, and other such-like
illuminating and uplifting problems, warranted to make any
school-child wiser than Solomon. It is a beautiful system; only,
God, who is no respecter of systems, every now and then delights to
flout it by making him a dunce like Peter Champneys, to be the
torment of school-teachers--and the delight of the angels of the
Little Peoples.

Those long, silent, solitary hours in the open gave Peter the power
of concentration, and a serenity that sat oddly on his slight
shoulders. Thoughts came to him, out there, that he couldn't put
into words nor yet set down upon paper.