others. The black beauty in the kitchen was heard to remark to the
house-girl:

"I hope that white man's skin will stretch, for I shore am going to
stuff it. He am a insult to any respectable skillet or pot." She did,
and at times I trembled for the poet.

He read to Miss Henrietta Spain's school the poem on "Space" which the
_Literary Opinion_ had copied; and he was the greatest possible success.
Most of it I feel sure the school didn't understand. But just as he
finished the last two lines--those lines the magazine had called "as
perfect in winged lyric quality as any lines in the English language
could be"--the Byrd, whom Sam had groomed carefully and brought in from
the brier-patch for the occasion, rose, and, with his freckles black
with the intensity of his comprehension of the poem, spread his little
arms and said:

"I fly! I fly!"

"I fly! I fly, too!" A little chubkin in a blue muslin dress just
behind him jumped to her feet and echoed him before they could be
repressed.

"That was the most perfect tribute I shall ever receive," Peter said,
that night out on the porch, after Sam had gone home, carrying the
exhausted Byrd, who even in sleep held in one hand the handle of a full
basket he had begged from mother, and in the other tightly grasped a
sack in which were two "little ones" daddy had got for him. These
treasures happened to be young rabbits, and Sam said he would charge
daddy with the damages.