for the
Champneyses. The fact that the Indian Maid had but one bantling to
her back, and the Swamp Fox none at all, didn't in the least
disconcert her. If he _had_ had any children, they would have
ancestored the Champneyses; so there you were!

Peter, who had a fashion of thinking his own thoughts and then
keeping them to himself, presently hit upon the truth. His was one
of those Carolina coast families that, stripped by the war and
irretrievably ruined by Reconstruction, have ever since been
steadily decreasing in men, mentality, and money-power, each
generation slipping a little farther down hill; until, in the case
of the Champneyses, the family had just about reached rock-bottom in
himself, the last of them. There had been, one understood, an uncle,
his father's only brother, Chadwick Champneys. Peter's mother hadn't
much to say about this Chadwick, who had been of a roving and
restless nature, trying his hand at everything and succeeding in
nothing. As poor as Job's turkey, what must he do on one of his
prowls but marry some unknown girl from the Middle West, as poor as
himself. After which he had slipped out of the lives of every one
who knew him, and never been heard of again, except for the report
that he had died somewhere out in Texas; or maybe it was Arizona or
Idaho, or Mexico, or somewhere in South America. One didn't know.

Behold small Peter, then, the last of his name, "all the sisters of
his father's house, and all the brothers, too." Little, thin, dark
Peter, with his knock-knees, his large ears, his shock of black
hair, and, fringed by thick black lashes, eyes of a hazel so clear
and rare that they were golden like topazes, only more beautiful.
Leonardo would have loved to paint Peter's quiet face, with its shy,
secret smile, and eyes that were the color of genius. Riverton
thought him a homely child, with legs like those of one's
grandmother's Chippendale chair, and eyes like a cat's. He was so
quiet and reticent that nearly everybody except his mother and Emma
Campbell thought him deficient in promise, and some even considered
him "wanting."

Peter's reputation for hopelessness began when he went to school,
but it didn't end there. He really was somewhat of a trial to an
average school-teacher, who very often knows less of the human
nature of a child than any other created being. Peter used the
carelessly good-and-easy English one inherits in the South, but he
couldn't understand the written