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 in
unison with other hearts, encased in whatsoever colored skin may
please God, without a quickening of that wisdom which is one of the
keys of the Kingdom to come. To be able really to know, truly to
understand and come human-close to the lowly, to men and women under
the bondage of age-old prejudice, or outcast by the color of their
skin, is a terrible and perilous gift. This is the much knowledge in
which there is much grief.