He was standing one morning at Mrs. Lake's apron-string, his arms clasped lovingly, but somewhat too tightly, round the waist of a sandy kitten, who submitted with wonderful good-humor to the well- meant strangulation, his black eyes intently fixed upon the dumplings which his foster-mother was dexterously rolling together, when a strange footstep was heard shuffling uncertainly about on the floor of the round-house just outside the dwelling-room door. Mrs. Lake did not disturb herself. Country folk were constantly coming with their bags of grist, and both George and the miller were at hand, for a nice breeze was blowing, and the mill ground merrily.

After a few seconds, however, came a modest knock on the room-door, and Mrs. Lake, wiping her hands, proceeded to admit the knocker. She was a smartly dressed woman, who bore such a mass of laces and finery, with a white woollen shawl spread over it, apparently with the purpose of smothering any living thing there might chance to be beneath, as, in Mrs. Lake's experienced eyes, could be nothing less than a baby of the most genteel order.

The manners of the nurse were most genteel also, and might have quite overpowered Mrs. Lake, but that the windmiller's wife had in her youth been in good service herself, and, though an early marriage had prevented her from rising beyond the post of nursemaid, she was fairly familiar with the etiquette of the nursery and of the servants' hall.

"Good morning, ma'am," said the nurse, who no sooner ceased to walk than she began a kind of diagonal movement without progression, in which one heel clacked, and all her petticoats swung, and the baby who, head downwards, was snorting with gaping mouth under the woollen coverlet, was supposed to be soothed. "Good morning, ma'am. You'll excuse my intruding" -

"Not at all, mum," said Mrs. Lake. By which she did not mean to reject the excuse, but to disclaim the intrusion.

When the nurse was not speaking, she kept time to her own rocking by a peculiar click of her tongue against the roof of her mouth; and indeed it sometimes mingled, almost confusingly, with her conversation. "You're very obliging, ma'am, I'm sure," said she, and, persuaded by Mrs. Lake, she took a seat. "You'll excuse me for asking a singular question, ma'am, but WAS YOUR HUSBAND'S FATHER AND GRANDFATHER BOTH MILLERS?"

"They was, mum," said Mrs. Lake. "My husband's father's father built this mill where we now stands. It cost him a deal of money, and he died with a debt upon it. My husband's father paid un off; and he meant to have built a house, mum, but he never did, worse luck for us. He allus says, says he,—that's my husband's father, mum,—'I'll leave that to Abel,'—that's my maester, mum. But nine year ago come Michaelmas" -

Mrs. Lake's story was here interrupted by a frightful outburst of coughing from the unfortunate baby, who on the removal of the woollen shawl presented an appearance which would have been comical but for the sympathy its condition demanded.

A very red and utterly shapeless little face lay, like a crushed beet-root, in a mass of dainty laces almost voluminous enough to have dressed out a bride. As a sort of crowning satire, the face in particular was surrounded by a broad frill, spotted with bunches of pink satin ribbon, and farther encased in a white satin hood of elaborate workmanship and fringes.

The contrast between the natural red of the baby's complexion and its snowy finery was ludicrously suggestive of an over-dressed nigger, to begin with; but when, in the paroxysms of its cough, the tiny creature's face passed by shades of plum-color to a bluish black, the result was appalling to behold.

Mrs. Lake's experienced ears were not slow to discover that the child had got whooping-cough, which the nurse confessed was the case. She also apologized for bringing in the baby among Mrs. Lake's children, saying that she had "thought of nothing but the poor little chirrub herself."

"Don't name it, mum," replied the windmiller's wife. "I always say if children be to have things, they'll have 'em; and if not, why they won't." A theory which seems to sum up the views of the majority of people in Mrs. Lake's class of life upon the spread of disease.

"I'm sure I don't know what's coming to my poor head," the nurse continued: "I've not so much as told you who I am, ma'am. I'm nurse at the Grange, ma'am, with Mr. Ammaby and Lady Louisa. They've been in town, and her ladyship's had the very best advice, and now we've come to the country for three months, but the dear child don't seem a bit the better. And we've been trying every thing, I'm sure. For any thing I heard of I've tried, as well as what the doctor ordered, and rubbing it with some stuff Lady Louisa's mamma insisted upon, too,—even to a frog put into the dear child's mouth, and drawed back by its legs, that's supposed to be a certain cure, but only frightened it into a fit I thought it never would have come out of, as well as fetching her ladyship all the way from her boudoir to know what was the matter—which I no more dared tell her than fly."

"Dear, dear!" said the miller's wife; "have you tried goose-grease, mum? 'Tis an excellent thing."

"Goose-grease, ma'am, and an excellent ointment from the bone- setter's at the toll-bar, which the butler paid for out of his own pocket, knowing it to have done a world of good to his sister that had a bad leg, besides being a certain cure for coughs, and cancer, and consumption as well. And then the doctor's IMPRECATION on its little chest, night and morning, besides; but nothing don't seem to do no good," said the poor nurse. "And so, ma'am,—her ladyship being gone to the town,—thinks I, I'll take the dear child to the windmill. For they do say,—where I came from, ma'am,—that if a miller, that's the son of a miller, and the grandson of a miller, holds a child that's got the whooping-cough in the hopper of the mill whilst the mill's going, it cures them, however bad they be."

The reason of the nurse's visit being now made known, Mrs. Lake called her husband, and explained to him what he was asked to do for "her ladyship's baby." The miller scratched his head.

"I've heard my father say that his brother that drove a mill in Cheshire had had it to do," said he, "but I never did it myself, ma'am, nor ever see un done. And a hopper be an ackerd place, ma'am. We've ground many a cat in this mill, from getting in the hopper at nights for warmth. However," he added, "I suppose I can hold the little lady pretty tight." And finally, though with some unwillingness, the miller consented to try the charm; being chiefly influenced by the wish not to disoblige the gentlefolk at the Grange.

The little Jan had watched the proceedings of the visitors with great attention. During the poor baby's fit of coughing, he was so absorbed that the sandy kitten slipped through his arms and made off, with her tail as stiff as a sentry's musket; and now that the miller took the baby into his arms, Jan became excited, and asked, "What daddy do with un?"

"The old-fashioned little piece!" exclaimed the nurse, admiringly. And Mrs. Lake added, "Let un see the little lady, maester."

The miller held out the baby, and the nurse, removing a dainty handkerchief edged with Valenciennes lace from its face, introduced it as "Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby;" and Mrs. Lake murmured, "What a lovely little thing!" By which, for truth's sake, it is to be hoped she meant the lace-edged handkerchief.

In the exchange of civilities between the two women, the respective children in their charge were admonished to kiss each other,—a feat which was accomplished by Jan's kissing the baby very tenderly, and with all his usual gravity.

As this partly awoke the baby from a doze, its red face began to crease, and pucker, and twist into various contortions, at which Jan gazed with a sort of solemn curiosity in his black eyes.

"Stroke the little lady's cheeks, love," said Mrs. Lake, irrepressibly proud of the winning ways and quaint grace which certainly did distinguish her foster-child.

Jan leaned forward once more, and passed his little hand softly down the baby's face twice or thrice, as he was wont to stroke the sandy kitten, as it slept with him, saying, "Poor itta pussy!"

"It's not a puss-cat, bless his little heart!" said the matter-of- fact nurse. "It's little Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby."

"Say it, love!" said Mrs. Lake, adding, to the nurse, "he can say any thing, mum."

"Miss AM—ABEL AD—E—LINE AM—MA—BY," prompted the nurse.

"Amabel!" said the little Jan, softly. But, after this feat, he took a fit of childish reticence, and would say no more; whilst, deeply resentful of the liberties Jan had taken, Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby twisted her features till she looked like a gutta-percha gargoyle, and squalled as only a fretful baby can squall.

She was calmed at last, however, and the windmiller took her once more into his arms, and Mrs. Lake carrying Jan, they all climbed up the narrow ladder to the next floor.

Heavily ground the huge stones with a hundred and twenty revolutions a minute, making the chamber shake as they went round.

They made the nurse giddy. The simplest machinery has a bewildering effect upon an unaccustomed person. So has going up a ladder; which makes you feel much less safe in the place to which it leads you than if you had got there by a proper flight of stairs. So—very often—has finding yourself face to face with the accomplishment of what you have been striving for, if you happen to be weak-minded.

Under the combined influences of all these causes, the nurse listened nervously to Master Lake, as he did the honors of the mill.

"Those be the mill-stones, ma'am. Pretty fastish they grinds, and they goes faster when the wind's gusty. Many a good cat they've ground as flat as a pancake from the poor gawney beasts getting into the hopper."

"Oh, sir!" cried the nurse, now thoroughly alarmed, "give me the young lady back again. Deary, deary me! I'd no notion it was so dangerous. Oh, don't, sir! don't!"

"Tut, tut! I'll hold un safe, ma'am," said the windmiller, who had all a man's dislike for shirking at the last moment what had once been decided upon; and, as the nurse afterwards expressed it, before she had time to scream, he had tucked Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby's finery well round her, and had dipped her into the hopper and out again.

In that moment of suspense both the women had been silent, and the little Jan had gazed steadily at the operation. As it safely ended, they both broke simultaneously into words.

"You might have knocked me down with a feather, mum!" gasped Mrs. Lake. "I couldn't look, mum. I couldn't have looked to save my life. I turned my back."

"I'd back 'ee allus to do the silliest thing as could be done, missus," said the miller, who had a pleasant husbandly way of commenting upon his wife's conversation to her disparagement, when she talked before him.

"As for me, ma'am," the nurse said, "I couldn't take my eyes off the dear child's hood. But move,—no thank you, ma'am,—I couldn't have moved hand or foot for a five-pound note, paid upon the spot."

The baby got well. Whether the mill charm worked the cure, or whether the fine fresh breezes of that healthy district made a change for the better in the child's state, could not be proved.

Nor were these the only possible causes of the recovery.

The kind-hearted butler blessed the day when he laid out three and eightpence in a box of the bone-setter's ointment, to such good purpose.

Lady Louisa's mamma triumphantly hoped that it would be a lesson to her dear daughter never again to set a London doctor's advice (however expensive) above a mother's (she meant a grandmother's) experience.

The cook said, "Goose-grease and kitchen physic for her!"

And of course the doctor very properly, as well as modestly, observed that "he had confidently anticipated permanent beneficial results from a persevering use of the embrocation."

And only to the nurse and the windmiller's family was it known that Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby had been dipped in the mill-hopper.



CHAPTER IX.

GENTRY BORN.—LEARNING LOST.—JAN'S BEDFELLOW.—AMABEL.

After the nurse and baby had left the mill, Mrs. Lake showered extra caresses upon the little Jan. It had given her a strange pleasure to see him in contact with the Squire's child. She knew enough of the manners and customs, the looks and the intelligence of the children of educated parents, to be aware that there were "makings" in those who were born heirs to developed intellects, and the grace that comes of discipline, very different from the "makings" to be found in the "voolish" descendants of ill-nurtured and uneducated generations. She had no philosophical—hardly any reasonable or commendable—thoughts about it. But she felt that Jan's countenance and his "ways" justified her first belief that he was "gentry born."

She was proud of his pretty manners. Indeed, curiously enough, she had recalled her old memories of nursery etiquette under a first- rate upper nurse in "her young days," to apply them to the little Jan's training.

Why she had not done this with her own children is a question that cannot perhaps be solved till we know why so many soldiers, used for, it may be, a quarter of a century to personal cleanliness as scrupulous as a gentleman's, and to enforced neatness of clothes, rooms, and general habits, take back to dirt and slovenliness with greediness when they leave the service; and why many a nurse, whose voice and manners were beyond reproach in her mistress's nursery, brings up her own children in after life on the village system of bawling, banging, threatening, cuddling, stuffing, smacking, and coarse language, just as if she had never experienced the better discipline attainable by gentle firmness and regular habits.

Mrs. Lake had a small satisfaction in Jan's brief and limited intercourse with so genteel a baby, and after it was all over she amused herself with making him repeat the baby's very genteel (and as she justly said "uncommon") name.

When Abel came back from school, he resumed his charge, and Mrs. Lake went about other work. She was busy, and the nurse-boy put Jan to bed himself. The sandy kitten waited till Jan was fairly established, so as to receive her comfortably, and then she dropped from the roof of the press-bed, and he cuddled her into his arms, where she purred like a kettle just beginning to sing.

Outside, the wind was rising, and, passing more or less through the outer door, it roared in the round-house; but they were well sheltered in the dwelling-room, and could listen complacently to the gusts that whirled the sails, and made the heavy stones fly round till they shook the roof. Just above the press-bed a candle was stuck in the wall, and the dim light falling through the gloom upon the children made a scene worthy of the pencil of Rembrandt, that great son of a windmiller.

When Mrs. Lake found time to come to the corner where the old press- bed stood, the kitten was asleep, and Jan very nearly so; and by them sat Abel, watching every breath that his foster-brother drew. And, as he watched, his trustworthy eyes and most sweet smile lighting up a face to which his forefathers had bequeathed little beauty or intellect, he might have been the guardian angel of the nameless Jan, scarcely veiled under the likeness of a child.

His mother smiled tenderly back upon him. He was very dear to her, and not the less so for his tenderness to Jan.

Then she stooped to kiss her foster-child, who opened his black eyes very wide, and caught the sleeping kitten round the head, in the fear that it might be taken from him.

"Tell Abel the name of pretty young lady you see today, love," said Mrs. Lake.

But Jan was well aware of his power over the miller's wife, and was apt to indulge in caprice. So he only shook his head, and cuddled the kitten more tightly than before.

"Tell un, Janny dear. Tell un, there's a lovey!" said Mrs. Lake. "Who did daddy put in the hopper?" But still Jan gazed at nothing in particular with a sly twinkle in his black eyes, and continued to squeeze poor Sandy to a degree that can have been little less agonizing than the millstone torture; and obdurate he would probably have remained, but that Abel, bending over him, said, "Do 'ee tell poor Abel, Jan."

The child fixed his bright eyes steadily on Abel's well-loved face for a few seconds, and then said quite clearly, in soft, evenly accented syllables, -

"Amabel."

And the sandy kitten, having escaped with its life, crept back into Jan's bosom and purred itself to rest.



CHAPTER X.

ABEL AT HOME.—JAN OBJECTS TO THE MILLER'S MAN.—THE ALPHABET.—THE CHEAP JACK.—"PITCHERS."

Poor Abel was not fated to get much regular schooling. He particularly liked learning, but the interval was all too brief between the time when his mother was able to spare him from housework and the time when his father began to employ him in the mill.

George got more lazy and stupid, instead of less so, and though in some strange manner he kept his place, yet when Master Lake had once begun to employ his son, he found that he would get along but ill without him.

To Jan, Abel's being about the windmill gave the utmost satisfaction. He played with his younger foster-brothers and sisters contentedly enough, but his love for Abel, and for being with Abel, was quite another thing.

Mrs. Lake, too, had no confidence in any one but Abel as a nurse for her darling; the consequence of which was, that the little Jan was constantly trotting at his foster-brother's heels through the round- house, attempting valiant escalades on the ladders, and covering himself from head to foot with flour in the effort to cultivate a miller's thumb.

One day Mrs. Lake, having sent the other children off to school, was bent upon having a thorough cleaning-out of the dwelling-room, during which process Jan was likely to be in her way; so she caught him up in her arms and went to seek Abel in the round-house.

She had the less scruple in availing herself of his services, that there was no wind, and business was not brisk in the windmill.

"Maester!" she cried, "can Abel mind Jan a bit? I be going to clean the house."

"Ay, ay," said the windmiller, "Abel can mind un. I be going to the village myself, but there's Gearge to start, if so be the wind rises. And then if he want Abel, thee must take the little un again."

"Sartinly I will," said his wife; and Abel willingly received his charge and carried him off to play among the sacks.

George joined them once, but Jan had a rooted and unconquerable dislike to the miller's man, and never replied to his advances with any thing more friendly than anger or tears. This day was no exception to others in this respect; and after a few fruitless attempts to make himself acceptable, in the course of which he trod on the sandy kitten's tail, who ran up Jan's back and spat at her enemy from that vantage-ground, George went off muttering in terms by no means complimentary to the little Jan. Abel did his best to excuse the capricious child to George, besides chiding him for his rudeness—with very little effect. Jan dried his black eyes as the miller's man made off, but he looked no more ashamed of himself than a good dog looks who has growled or refused the paw of friendship to some one for excellent reasons of his own.

After George had gone, they played about happily enough, Jan riding on Abel's back, and the sandy kitten on Jan's, in and out among the corn-sacks, full canter as far as the old carved meal-chest, and back to the door again.

Poor Abel, with his double burden, got tired at last, and they sat down and sifted flour for the education of their thumbs. Jan was pinching and flattening his with a very solemn face, in the hope of attaining to a miller's thumb by a shorter process than the common one, when Abel suddenly said, -

"I tell thee what, then, Jan: 'tis time thee learned thy letters. And I'll teach thee. Come hither."

Jan jumped up, thereby pitching the kitten headlong from his shoulders, and ran to Abel, who was squatting by some spilled flour near a sack, and was smoothing it upon the floor with his hands. Then very slowly and carefully he traced the letter A in the flour, keenly watched by Jan.

"That's A," said he. "Say it, Jan. A."

"A," replied Jan, obediently. But he had no sooner said it, than, adding hastily, "Let Jan do it," he traced a second A, slightly larger than Abel's, in three firm and perfectly proportioned strokes.

His moving finger was too much for the kitten's feelings, and she sprang into the flour and pawed both the A's out of existence.

Jan slapped her vigorously, and having smoothed the surface once more, he drew A after A with the greatest rapidity, scrambling along sideways like a crab, and using both hands indifferently, till the row stretched as far as the flour would permit.

Abel's pride in his pupil was great, and he was fain to run off to call his mother to see the performances of their prodigy, but Jan was too impatient to spare him.

"Let Jan do more!" he cried.

Abel traced a B in the flour. "That's B, Jan," said he.

"Jan do it," replied Jan, confidently.

"But say it," said his teacher, restraining him. "Say B, Jan."

"B," said Jan, impatiently; and adding, "Jan do it," he began a row of B's. He hesitated slightly before making the second curve, and looked at his model, after which he went down the line as before, and quite as successfully. And the kitten went down also, pawing out each letter as it was made, under the impression that the whole affair was a game of play with herself.

"There bean't a letter that bothers him," cried Abel, triumphantly, to the no less triumphant foster-mother.

Jan had, indeed, gone through the whole alphabet, with the utmost ease and self-confidence; but his remembrance of the names of the letters he drew so readily proved to be far less perfect than his representations of them on the floor of the round-house.

Abel found his pupil's progress hindered by the very talent that he had displayed. He was so anxious to draw the letters that he would not learn them, and Abel was at last obliged to make one thing a condition of the other.

"Say it then, Jan," he would cry, "and then thee shall make 'em."

Mrs. Lake commissioned Abel to buy a small slate and pencil for Jan at the village shop, and these were now the child's favorite toys. He would sit quiet for any length of time with them. Even the sandy kitten was neglected, or got a rap on its nose with the slate- pencil, when to toy with the moving point had been too great a temptation to be resisted. For a while Jan's taste for wielding the pencil was solely devoted to furthering his learning to read. He drew letters only till the day that the Cheap Jack called.

The Cheap Jack was a travelling pedler, who did a good deal of business in that neighborhood. He was not a pedler pure, for he had a little shop in the next town. Nature had not favored him. He was a hunchback. He was, or pretended to be, deaf. He had a very ugly face, made uglier by dirt, above which he wore a mangy hair cap. He sold rough pottery, cheap crockery and glass, mock jewelry, low song-books, framed pictures, mirrors, and quack medicines. He bought old bottles, bones, and rags. And what else he bought or sold, or dealt with, was dimly guessed at by a few, but fully known to none.

Where he was born, what was his true name or age, whether on any given occasion he was speaking less than lies, and what was the ultimate object of his words and deeds,—at these things no one even guessed. That his conscience was ever clean, that his dirty face once masked no vile or petty plots for evil in the brain behind, that at some past period he was a child,—these things it would have tasked the strongest faith to realize.

He was not so unpopular with children as the miller's man.

The instinct of children is like the instinct of dogs, very true and delicate as a rule. But dogs, from Cerberus downwards, are liable to be biassed by sops. And four paper-covered sails, that twirl upon the end of a stick as the wind blows, would warp the better judgment of most little boys, especially (for a bargain is more precious than a gift) when the thing is to be bought for a few old bones.

Jan was a little afraid of the Cheap Jack, but he liked his whirligigs. They went when the mill was going, and sometimes when the mill wouldn't go, if you ran hard to make a breeze.

But it so happened that the first day on which the Cheap Jack came round after Jan had begun to learn his letters, he brought forth some wares which moved Jan's feelings more than the whirligigs did.

"Buy a nice picter, marm?" said the Cheap Jack to Mrs. Lake, who, with the best intentions not to purchase, felt that there could be no harm in seeing what the man had got.

"You shall have 'Joseph and his Bretheren' cheap," roared the hunchback, becoming more pressing as the windmiller's wife seemed slow to be fascinated, and shaking "Joseph and his Brethren," framed in satin-wood, in her face, as he advanced upon her with an almost threatening air. "Don't want 'em? Take 'Antony and Cleopatterer.' It's a sweet picter. Too dear? Do you know what sech picters costs to paint? Look at Cleopatterer's dress and the jewels she has on. I don't make a farthing on 'em. I gets daily bread out of the other things, and only keeps the picters to oblige one or two ladies of taste that likes to give their rooms a genteel appearance."

The long disuse of such powers of judgment as she had, and long habit of always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake's naturally weak will and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any pressure from without. To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, and every instant she became more and more convinced that wares she neither wanted nor approved of were necessary to her, and good bargains, because the man who sold them said so.

The Cheap Jack was a knave, but he was no fool. In a crowded market-place, or at a street door, no oilier tongue wagged than his. But he knew exactly the moment when a doubtful bargain might be clinched by a bullying tone and a fierce look on his dirty face, at cottage doors, on heaths or downs, when the good wife was alone with her children, and the nearest neighbor was half a mile away.

No length of experience taught Mrs. Lake wisdom in reference to the Cheap Jack.

Each time that his cart appeared in sight she resolved to have nothing to do with him, warned by the latest cracked jug, or the sugar-basin which, after three-quarters of an hour wasted in chaffering, she had beaten down to three-halfpence dearer than what she afterwards found to be the shop price in the town. But proof to the untrained mind is "as water spilled upon the ground." And when the Cheap Jack declared that she was quite free to look without buying, and that he did not want her to buy, Mrs. Lake allowed him to pull down his goods as before, and listened to his statements as if she had never proved them to be lies, and was thrown into confusion and fluster when he began to bully, and bought in haste to be rid of him, and repented at leisure—to no purpose as far as the future was concerned.

"Look here!" yelled the hunchback, as he waddled with horrible swiftness after the miller's wife, as she withdrew into the mill; "which do you mean to have? I gets nothing on 'em, whichever you takes, so please yourself. Take 'Joseph and his Bretheren.' The frame's worth twice the money. Take the other, too, and I'll take sixpence off the pair, and be out of pocket to please you."

"Nothing to-day, thank you!" said Mrs. Lake, as loudly as she could.

"Got any other sort, you say?" said the Cheap Jack. "I've got all sorts, but some parties is so difficult to please.

"Wait a bit, wait a bit," he continued, as Mrs. Lake again tried to make him (willing to) hear that she wanted none of his wares; and, vanishing with the uncanny quickness common to him, he waddled swiftly back again to his cart, and returned, before Mrs. Lake could secure herself from intrusion, laden with a fresh supply of pictures, the weight of which it seemed marvellous that he could support.

"Now you've got your choice, marm," he said. "It's no trouble to me to oblige a good customer. There's picters for you!"

"PITCHERS!" said Jan, admiringly, as he crept up to them.

"So they are, my little man. Now then, help your mammy to choose. Most of these is things you can't get now, for love nor money. Here you are,—'Love and Beauty.' That's a sweet thing. 'St Joseph,' 'The Robber's Bride,' 'Child and Lamb,' 'Melan-choly.' Here's an old" -

"Pitcher!" exclaimed Jan once more, gazing at an old etching in a dirty frame, which the Cheap Jack was holding in his hand. "Pitcher, pitcher! let Jan look!" he cried.

It was of a water-mill, old, thatched, and with an unprotected wheel, like the one in the valley below. Some gnarled willows stretched across the water, whose trunks seemed hardly less time- worn and rotten than the wheel below. This foreground subject was in shadow, and strongly drawn, but beyond it, in the sunlight, lay a bit of delicate distance, on the rising ground of which stood one of those small wooden windmills known as Post-mills. An old woman and a child were just coming into the shade, and passing beneath a wayside shrine. What in the picture took Jan's fancy it is impossible to say, but he gazed at it with exclamations of delight.

The Cheap Jack saw that it was certain to be bought, and he raised the price accordingly.

Mrs. Lake felt the same conviction, and began to try at least to get a good bargain.

"'Tis a terr'ble old frame," said she. "There be no gold left on't." And no more there was.

"What do you say?" screamed the Cheap Jack, with his hand to his ear, and both a great deal too close to Mrs. Lake's face to be pleasant.

"'Tis such an old frame," she shouted, "and the gold be all gone."

"Old!" cried the hunchback, scowling; "who says I sell old things? Every picter in that lot's brand new and dirt cheap."

"The gold be rubbed off," screamed Mrs. Lake in his ear.

"Brighten it up, then," said the Cheap Jack. "Gold ain't paint; gold ain't paper; rub it up!" and, suiting the action to the word, he rubbed the dirty old frame vigorously with the dirty sleeve of his smock.

"It don't seem to brighten it, nohow," said Mrs. Lake, looking nervously round; but neither the miller nor George was to be seen.

"Real gold allus looks like this in damp weather," said the Cheap Jack. "Hang it up in a warm room, dust it lightly every morning with a dry handkerchief, an' it'll come out that shining you'll see your face in it. And when summer comes, cover it up in yaller gauze to keep off the flies."

Mrs. Lake looked wistfully at the place the Cheap Jack had rubbed, but she had no redress, and saw no way out of her hobble but to buy the picture.

When the bargain was completed, the Cheap Jack fell back into his oiliest manner; it being part of his system not only to bully at the critical moment, but to be very civil afterwards, so as to leave an impression so pleasant on the minds of his lady customers that they could hardly do other than thank him for his promise to call again shortly with "bargains as good as ever."

The Cheap Jack was a man of many voices. The softness of his parting words to Mrs. Lake, "I'd go three mile out of my road, ma'am, to call on a lady like you," had hardly died away, when he woke the echoes of the plains by addressing his horse in a very different tone.

The Wiltshire carters and horses have a language between them which falls darkly upon the ear of the unlearned therein; but the uncouth yell which the Cheap Jack addressed to his beast was not of that dialect. The sound he made on this occasion was not, Ga oot! Coom hedder! or, There right! but the horse understood it.

It is probable that it never heard the Cheap Jack's softer intonations, for its protuberant bones gave a quiver beneath the scarred skin as he yelled. Then its drooping ears pricked faintly, the quavering forelegs were braced, one desperate jog of the tottering load of oddities, and it set slowly and silently forward.

The Cheap Jack did not follow his wares; he scrambled softly round the mill, like a deformed cat, looking about him on all sides. Then he made use of another sound,—a sharp, suggestive sound, whistled between two of his fingers.

Then he looked round again.

No one appeared. The wheels of the distant cart scraped slowly along the road, but this was the only sound the Cheap Jack heard.

He whistled softly again.

And as the cart took the sharp turn of the road, and was lost to sight, the miller's man appeared, and the Cheap Jack greeted him in the softest tone he had yet employed. "Ah, there you are, my dear!"

Meanwhile, Mrs. Lake sat within, and looked ruefully at the damaged frame, and wished that the master, or at least the man, had happened to be at home.

It is to be feared that our self-reproach for having done wrong is not always so certain, or so keen, as our self-reproach for having allowed ourselves to suffer wrong—in a bad bargain.

Whether this particular picture was a bad bargain it is not easy to decide.

It was scandalously dear for its condition, and for what it had cost the hunchback, but it was cheap for the pleasure it gave to the little Jan.



CHAPTER XI.

SCARECROWS AND MEN.—JAN REFUSES TO "MAKE GEARGE."—UNCANNY.—"JAN'S OFF."-THE MOON AND THE CLOUDS.

The picture gave Jan great pleasure, but it proved a stumbling-block on the road to learning.

To "make letters" on his slate had been the utmost of his ambition, and as he made them he learned them. But after the Cheap Jack's visit his constant cry was, "Jan make pitchers." And when Abel tried to confine his attention to the alphabet, he would, after a most perfunctory repetition of a few letters that he knew, and hap- hazard blunders over fresh ones, fling his arms round Abel's neck and say coaxingly, "Abel dear, make Janny PITCHERS on his slate."

Abel's pictures, at the best, were of that style of wall decoration dear to street boys.

"Make a pitcher of a man," Jan would cry. And Abel did so, bit by bit, to Jan's dictation. Thus "Make's head. Make un round. Make two eyes. Make a nose. Make a mouth. Make's arms. Make's fingers," etc. And, with some "free-handling," Abel would strike the five fingers off, one by one, in five screeching strokes of the slate-pencil. But his art was conventional, and when Jan said, "Make un a miller's thumb," he was puzzled, and could only bend the shortest of the five strokes slightly backwards to represent the trade-mark of his forefathers.

And when a little later Jan said one day, "'Tis a galley crow, that is. NOW make a pitcher of a MAN, Abel dear!" Abel found that the scarecrow figure was the limit of his artist powers, and thenceforward it was Jan who "made pitchers."

He drew from dawn to dusk upon the little slate which he wore tied by a bit of string to the belt of his pinafore. He drew his foster- mother, and Abel, and the kitten, and the clock, and the flower-pots in the window, and the windmill itself, and every thing he saw or imagined. And he drew till his slate was full on both sides, and then in very primitive fashion he spat and rubbed it all out and began again. And whenever Jan's face was washed, the two faces of his slate were washed too; and with this companion he was perfectly happy and constantly employed.

Now it was Abel who gave the subjects for the pictures, and Jan who made them, and it was good Abel also who washed the slate, and rubbed the well-worn stumps of pencil to new points upon the round- house floor.

They often went together to a mound at some little distance, where, seated side by side, they "made a mill" upon the slate, Jan drawing, and Abel dictating the details to be recorded.

"Put in the window, Jan," he would say; "and another, and another, and another, and another. Now put the sails. Now put the stage. Now put daddy by the door."

On one point Jan was obstinate. He steadily refused to "make Gearge" upon his slate in any capacity whatever. Perhaps it was in this habit of constantly gazing at all things about him, in order to commit them to his slate, which gave a strange, dreamy expression to Jan's dark eyes. Perhaps it was sky-gazing, or the windmiller's trick of watching the clouds, or perhaps it was something else, from which Jan derived an erectness of carriage not common among the children about him, and a quaint way of carrying his little chin in the air as if he were listening to voices from a higher level than that of the round-house floor.

If he had lived farther north, he could hardly have escaped the suspicion of uncanniness. He was strangely like a changeling among the miller's children.

To gratify that old whim of his about the red shawl, his doting foster-mother made him little crimson frocks; and as he wandered over the downs in his red dress and a white pinafore, his yellow hair flying in the breeze, his chin up, his black eyes wide open, with slate in one hand, his pencil in the other, and the sandy kitten clinging to his shoulder (for Jan never lowered his chin to help her to balance herself), he looked more like some elf than a child of man.

He had queer, independent ways of his own, too; freaks,—not naughty enough for severe punishment, but sufficiently out of the routine and unexpected to cause Mrs. Lake some trouble.

He was no sooner firmly established on his own legs, with the power of walking, or rather toddling, independent of help, than he took to making expeditions on the downs by himself. He would watch his opportunity, and when his foster-mother's back was turned, and the door of the round-house opened by some grist-bringer, he would slip out and toddle off with a swiftness decidedly dangerous to a balance so lately acquired.

Sometimes Mrs. Lake would catch sight of him, and if her hands were in the wash-tub, or otherwise engaged, she would cry to the nurse- boy, "Abel, he be off! Jan's off." A comic result of which was that Jan generally announced his own departure in the same words, though not always loud enough to bring detection upon himself.

When his chance came and the door was open, he would pause for half a moment on the threshold to say, in a tone of intense self- satisfaction, "He be off. Abel! Janny's off!" and forthwith toddle out as hard as he could go. As he grew older, he dropped this form; but the elfish habit of appearing and disappearing at his own whim was not cured.

It was a puzzle as well as a care to Mrs. Lake. All her own children had given trouble in their own way,—a way much the same with all of them. They squalled for what they wanted, and, like other mothers of her class, she served them whilst her patience lasted, and slapped them when it came to an end. They clung about her when she was cooking, in company with the cats, and she put tit- bits into their dirty paws, and threw scraps to the clean paws of the cats, till the nuisance became overwhelming, and she kicked the cats and slapped the children, who squalled for both. They dirted their clothes, they squabbled, they tore the gathers out of her dresses, and wailed and wept, and were beaten with a hazel-stick by their father, and pacified with treacle-stick by the mother; and so tumbled up, one after the other, through childish customs and misdemeanors, almost as uniform as the steps of the mill-ladders.

But the customs and misdemeanors of the foster-child were very different.

His appetite to be constantly eating, drinking, or sucking—if it were but a bennet or grass-stalk—was less voracious than that of the other children. Mrs. Lake gave him Benjamin's share of treacle- stick, but he has been known to give some of it away, and to exchange peppermint-drops for a slate-pencil rather softer than his own. He would have had Benjamin's share of "bits" from the cupboard, but that the other children begged so much oftener, and Mrs. Lake was not capable of refusing any thing to a steady tease. He could walk the whole length of a turnip-field without taking a munch, unless he were hungry, though even dear old Abel invariably exercised his jaws upon a "turmut." And he made himself ill with hedge-fruits and ground-roots seldomer than any other member of the family.

So far, Jan gave less trouble than the rest. But then he had a spirit of enterprise which never misled them. From the effects of this, Abel saved his life more than once. On one occasion he pulled him out of the wash-tub, into which he had plunged head-foremost, in a futile endeavor to blow soap-bubbles through a fragment of clay- pipe, which he had picked up on the road, and which made his lips sore for a week, besides nearly causing his death by drowning.

From diving into the deepest recesses of the windmill it became hopeless to try to hinder him, and when Abel was fairly taken into the business Mrs. Lake relied upon his care for his foster-brother. And Jan was wary and nimble, for his own part, and gave little trouble. His great delight was to gaze first out of one window, and then out of the opposite one; either blinking as the great sails drove by, as if they would strike him in the face, or watching the shadows of them invisible, as they passed like noon-day ghosts over the grass.

His habit of taking himself off on solitary expeditions neither the miller's hazel-stick nor Mrs. Lake's treacle-stick could cure by force or favor.

One November evening, just after tea, Jan disappeared, and the yellow kitten also. When his bed-time came, Mrs. Lake sought him high and low, and Abel went carefully, mill-candlestick in hand, through every floor, from the millstones to the machinery, but in vain. Neither he nor the kitten was to be found.

It was when the kitten, in chase of her own tail, tumbled in sideways through the round-house door, that Mrs. Lake remembered that Jan might possibly have gone out, and she ran out after him.

The air was chill and fresh, but not bitterly cold. The moon rode high in the dark heavens, and a flock of small white clouds passed slowly before its face and spread over the sky. The shadows of the driving sails fell clearly in the moonlight, and flitted over the grass more quickly than the clouds went by the moon.

Mrs. Lake was not susceptible to effects of scenery, and she was thinking of Jan. As she ran round the windmill, she struck her foot against what proved to be his body, and, stooping, saw that he was lying on his face. But when she snatched him up with a cry of terror, she found that he was not dead, nor even hurt, but only weeping pettishly.

In the first revulsion of feeling from her fright, she was rather disposed to shake her recovered treasure, as a relief to her own excitement. But Abel, whose first sight of Jan was as the light of the mill-candle fell on his tear-stained face, said tenderly, "What be amiss, Janny?"

"Jan can't make un," sobbed his foster-brother.

"What can't Janny make? Tell Abel, then," said the nurse-boy.

Jan stuck his fists into his eyes, which were drying fast, and replied, "Jan can't make the moon and the clouds, Abel dear!"

And Abel's candle being at that moment blown out by a gust of wind, he could see Jan's slate and pencil lying at some distance apart upon the short grass.

On the dark ground of the slate he had made a round, white, full moon with his soft slate-pencil, and had tried hard to draw each cloud as it passed. But the rapid changes had baffled him, and the pencil-marks were gray compared with the whiteness of the clouds and the brightness of the moon, and the slate, though dark, was a mockery of the deep, deep depths of the night-sky.

And in his despair he had flung the slate one way and the pencil another, and there they lay under the moonlight; and the sandy kitten, who could see more clearly on this occasion than any one else, was dancing a fandango upon poor Jan's unfinished sketch.



CHAPTER XII.

THE WHITE HORSE.—COMROGUES.—MOERDYK.—GEORGE CONFIDES IN THE CHEAP JACK—WITH RESERVATION.

When the Cheap Jack's horse came to the brow of the hill, it stopped, and with drooping neck stood still as before. The Cheap Jack was busy with George, and it was at no word from him that the poor beast paused. It knew at what point to wait, and it waited. There was little temptation to go on. The road down the hill had just been mended with flints; some of these were the size of an average turnip, and the hill was steep. So the old horse poked out his nose, and stood almost dozing, till the sound of the Cheap Jack's shuffling footsteps caused him to prick his ears, and brace his muscles for a fresh start.

The miller's man came also, who was sulky, whilst the Cheap Jack was civil. He gave his horse a cut across the knees, to remind him to plant his feet carefully among the sharp boulders; and then, choosing a smooth bit by the side of the road, he and George went forward together.

"You've took to picters, I see," said George, nodding towards the cart.

"So I have, my dear," said the Cheap Jack; "any thing for a livelihood; an HONEST livelihood, you know, George." And he winked at the miller's man, who relaxed his sulkiness for a guffaw.

"YOU'VE had so little in my way lately, George," the hunchback continued, looking sharply sideways up at his companion. "Sly business has been slack, my dear, eh?"

But George made no answer, and the Cheap Jack, after relieving his feelings by another cut at the horse, changed the subject.

"That's a sharp little brat of the miller's," said he, alluding to Jan. "And he ain't much like the others. Old-fashioned, too. Children mostly likes the gay picters, and worrits their mothers for 'em, bless 'em! But he picked out an ancient-looking thing,—came from a bankrupt pawnshop, my dear, in a lot. I almost think I let it go too cheap; but that's my failing. And a beggarly place like this ain't like London. In London there's a place for every thing, my dear, and shops for old goods as well as new, and customers too; and the older and dirtier some things is, the more they fetches."

There was a pause, for George did not speak; and the Cheap Jack, bent upon amiability, repeated his remark,—"A sharp little brat, too!"

"What be 'ee harping on about him for?" asked George, suspiciously. "I knows what I knows about un, but that's no business of yours."

"You know about most things, my dear," said the Cheap Jack, flatteringly. "They'll have to get up very early that catch you napping. But what about the child, George?"

"Never you mind," said George. "But he ain't none of the miller's, I'll tell 'ee that; and he ain't the missus's neither."

"What is he to YOU, my dear?" asked the dwarf, curiously, and, getting no answer, he went on: "He'd be useful in a good many lines. He'd not do bad in a circus, but he'd draw prime as a young prodigy."

George looked round, "You be thinking of stealing HE then, as well as" -

"Hush, my dear," said the dwarf. "No, no, I don't want him. But there was a good deal of snatching young kids done in my young days; for sweeps, destitute orphans, juvenile performers, and so on."

"HE wouldn't suit you," grinned George. "A comes of genteel folk, and a's not hard enough for how you'd treat un."

"You're out there, George," said the dwarf. "Human beings is like 'osses; it's the genteelest as stands the most. 'Specially if they've been well fed when they was babies."

At this point the Cheap Jack was interrupted by his horse stumbling over a huge, jagged lump of flint, that, with the rest of the road- mending, was a disgrace to a highway of a civilized country. A rate-payer or a horse-keeper might have been excused for losing his temper with the authorities of the road-mending department; but the Cheap Jack's wrath fell upon his horse. He beat him over the knees for stumbling, and across the hind legs for slipping, and over his face for wincing, and accompanied his blows with a torrent of abuse.

What a moment that must have been for Balaam's ass, in which she found voice to remonstrate against the unjust blows, which have, nevertheless, fallen pretty thickly ever since upon her descendants and their fellow-servants of ungrateful man! From how many patient eyes that old reproach, of long service ill-requited, yet speaks almost as plainly as the voice that "rebuked the madness of the prophet!"

The Cheap Jack's white horse had a point of resemblance to the "genteel human beings" of whom he had been speaking. It had "come of a good stock," and had seen better and kinder days; and to it, also, in its misfortunes, there remained that nobility of spirit which rises in proportion to the ills it meets with. The poor old thing was miserably weak, and sore and jaded, and the flints were torture. But it rallied its forces, gave a desperate struggle, and got the cart safely to the bottom of the hill. Here the road turned sharply, and the horse went on. But after a few paces it stopped as before; this time in front of a small public-house, where trembling, and bathed in perspiration, it waited for its master.

The public-house was a small dark, dingy-looking hovel, with a reputation fitted to its appearance.

A dirty, grim-looking man nodded to the Cheap Jack and George as they entered, and a girl equally dirty, but much handsomer, brought glasses of spirits, to which the friends applied themselves, at the Cheap Jack's expense. George grew more sociable, and the Cheap Jack reproached him with want of confidence in his friends.

"You're so precious sharp, my dear," said the hunchback, who knew well on what point George liked to be flattered, "that you overreaches yourself. I don't complain—after all the business we've done together—that it's turned slack all of a sudden. You says they're down on you, and that's enough for me. I don't complain that you've got your own plans and keeps 'em as secret as the grave, but I says you'll regret it. If you was a good scholar, George, you could do without friends, you're so precious sharp. But you're no scholar, my dear, and you'll be let in yet, by a worse friend than Cheap John."

George so bitterly regretted his want of common learning, and the stupidity which made him still slow to decipher print, and utterly puzzled by writing, that the Cheap Jack's remarks told strongly. These, and the conversation they had had on the hill, recalled to his mind a matter which was still a mystery to the miller's man.

"Look here, Jack," said he, leaning across the dirty little table; "if you be such a good scholar, what do M O E R D Y K spell?"

"Say it again, George," said the dwarf. But when, after that, he still looked puzzled, George laughed long and loudly.

"You be a good scholar!" he cried. "You be a fine friend, too, for a iggerant man. If a can't tell the first word of a letter, 'tis likely 'ee could read the whole, too!"

"The first word of a LETTER, eh?" said the dwarf.

"The very first," said George. "'Tis a long way you'd get in it, and stuck at the start!"

"Up in the corner, at the top, eh?" said the dwarf.

"So it be," said George, and he laughed no longer.

"It's the name of a place, then," said the Cheap Jack; "and it ain't to be expected I should know the names of all the places in the world, George, my dear."

It was a great triumph for the Cheap Jack, as George's face betrayed. If George had trusted him a little more, he might have known the meaning of the mysterious word years ago. The name of a place! The place from which the letter was written. The place where something might be learned about the writer of the letter, and of the gentleman to whom it was written. For George knew so much. It was written to a gentleman, and to a gentleman who had money, and who had secrets; and, therefore, a gentleman from whom money might be got, by interfering in his secrets.

The miller's man was very ignorant and very stupid, in spite of a certain low cunning not at all incompatible with gross ignorance. He had no knowledge of the world. His very knowledge of malpractices and mischief was confined to the evil doings of one or two other ill-conditioned country lads like himself, who robbed their neighbors on dark nights, and disposed of the spoil by the help of such men as the Cheap Jack and the landlord of the public- house at the bottom of the hill.

But by loitering about on that stormy night years ago, when he should have been attending to the mill, he had picked up enough to show him that the strange gentleman had no mind to have his proceedings as to the little Jan generally known. This and some sort of traditional idea that "sharp," though penniless men had at times wrung a great deal of money from rich people, by threatening to betray their secrets, was the sole foundation of George's hopes in connection with the letter. It was his very ignorance which hindered him from seeing the innumerable chances against his getting to know any thing important enough, even if he could use his information, to procure a bribe.

He had long given up the idea as hopeless, though he had kept the letter, but it revived when the Cheap Jack solved the puzzle which Abel could not explain, and George finally promised to let his friend read the whole letter for him. He also allowed that it concerned Jan, or that he supposed it to do so. He related Jan's history, and confessed that he had picked up the letter, which was being blown about near the mill, on the night of Jan's arrival.

In this statement there was some truth, and some falsehood; for in the opinion of the miller's man, if your own interest obliged you to confide in a friend, it was at least wise to hedge the confidence by not telling all the truth, or by qualifying it with lies.

This mental process was, however, at least equally familiar to the Cheap Jack, and he did not hesitate, in his own mind, to feel sure that the letter had not been found, but stolen. In which he was farther from the truth than if he had simply believed George.

But then he was not in the neighborhood five years back, and, as it happened, he had never heard of the lost pocket-book.



CHAPTER XIII.

GEORGE AS A MONEYED MAN.—SAL.—THE "WHITE HORSE."— THE WEDDING.— THE WINDMILLER'S WIFE FORGETS, AND REMEMBERS TOO LATE.

Excitement, the stifling atmosphere of the public-house, and the spirits he had drunk at his friend's expense, had somewhat confused the brains of the miller's man by the time that the Cheap Jack rose to go. George was, as a rule, sober beyond the wont of the rustics of the district, chiefly from parsimony. When he could drink at another man's expense, he was not always prudent.

"So you've settled to go, my dear?" said the dwarf, as they stood together by the cart. "Business being slack, and parties unpleasantly suspicious, eh?"

"Never you mind," said George, who felt very foolish, and hoped himself successful in looking very wise; "I be going to set up for myself; I'm tired of slaving for another man."

"Quite right, too," said the dwarf; "but all businesses takes money, of which, my dear, I doesn't doubt you've plenty. You always took care of Number One, when you did business with Cheap John."

At that moment, George felt himself a sort of embodiment of shrewd wisdom; he had taken another sip from the glass, which was still in his hand, and the only drawback to the sense of magnified cunning by which his ideas seemed to be illumined was a less pleasant feeling that they were perpetually slipping from his grasp. To the familiar idea of outwitting the Cheap Jack he held fast, however.

"It be nothin' to thee what a have," he said slowly; "but a don't mind 'ee knowin' so much, Jack, because 'ee can't get at un; haw, haw! Not unless 'ee robs the savings-bank."

The dwarf's eyes twinkled, and he affected to secure some pictures that hung low, as he said carelessly, -

"Savings-banks be good places for a poor man to lay by in. They takes small sums, and a few shillings comes in useful to a honest man, George, my dear, if they doesn't go far in business."

"Shillings!" cried George, indignantly; "pounds!" And then, doubtful if he had not said too much, he added, "A don't so much mind 'ee knowing, Jack, because 'ee can't get at 'em!"

"It's a pity you're such a poor scholar, George," said the Cheap Jack, turning round, and looking full at his friend; "you're so sharp, but for that, my dear. You don't think you counts the money over in your head till you makes it out more than it is, now, eh?"

"A can keep things in my yead," said George, "better than most folks can keep a book; I knows what I has, and what other folks can't get at. I knows how I put un in. First, the five-pound bill" -

"They must have stared to see you bring five pound in a lump, George, my dear!" said the hunchback. "Was it wise, do you think?"

"Gearge bean't such a vool as a looks," replied the miller's man. "A took good care to change it first, Cheap John, and a put it in by bits."

"You're a clever customer, George," said his friend. "Well, my dear? First, the five-pound bill, and then?"

George looked puzzled, and then, suddenly, angry. "What be that to you?" he asked, and forthwith relapsed into a sulky fit, from which the Cheap Jack found it impossible to rouse him. All attempts to renew the subject, or to induce the miller's man to talk at all, proved fruitless. The Cheap Jack insisted, however, on taking a friendly leave.

"Good-by, my dear," said he, "till the mop. You knows my place in the town, and I shall expect you."

The miller's man only replied by a defiant nod, which possibly meant that he would come, but had some appearance of expressing only a sarcastic wish that the Cheap Jack might see him on the occasion alluded to.

In obedience to a yell from its master, the white horse now started forward, and it is not too much to say that the journey to town was not made more pleasant for the poor beast by the fact that the Cheap Jack had a good deal of long-suppressed fury to vent upon somebody.

It was perhaps well for the bones of the white horse that, just as they entered the town, the Cheap Jack brushed against a woman on the narrow foot-path, who having turned to remonstrate in no very civil terms, suddenly checked herself, and said in a low voice, "Juggling Jack!"

The dwarf started, and looked at the woman with a puzzled air.

She was a middle-aged woman, in the earlier half of middle age; she was shabbily dressed, and had a face that would not have been ill- looking, but that the upper lip was long and cleft, and the lower one unusually large. As the Cheap Jack still stared in silence, she burst into a noisy laugh, saying, "More know Jack the Fool than Jack the Fool knows." But, even as she spoke, a gleam of recognition suddenly spread over the hunchback's face, and, putting out his hand, he said, "Sal! YOU HERE, my dear?"

"The air of London don't agree with me just now," was the reply; "and how are you, Jack?"

"The country air's just beginning to disagree with me, my dear," said the hunchback; "but I'm glad to see you, Sal. Come in here, my dear, and let's have a talk, and a little refreshment."

The place of refreshment to which the dwarf alluded was another public-house, the White Horse by name. There was no need to bid the Cheap Jack's white horse to pause here; he stopped of himself at every public-house; nineteen times out of twenty to the great convenience of his master, for which he got no thanks; the twentieth time the hunchback did not want to stop, and he was lavish of abuse of the beast's stupidity in coming to a standstill.

The white horse drooped his soft white nose and weary neck for a long, long time under the effigy of his namesake swinging overhead, and when the Cheap Jack did come out, he seemed so preoccupied that the tired beast got home with fewer blows than usual.

He unloaded his cart mechanically, as if in a dream; but when he touched the pictures, they seemed to awaken a fresh train of thought. He stamped one of his little feet spitefully on the ground, and, with a pretty close imitation of George's dialect, said bitterly, "Gearge bean't such a vool as a looks!" adding, after a pause, "I'd do a deal to pay HIM off!"

As he turned into the house, he said thoughtfully, "Sal's precious sharp; she allus was. And a fine woman, too, is Sal!"

Not long after the incidents just related, it happened that business called Mrs. Lake to the neighboring town. She seldom went out, but a well-to-do aunt was sick, and wished to see her; and the miller gave his consent to her going.

She met the milk-cart at the corner of the road, and so was driven to the town, and she took Jan with her.

He had begged hard to go, and was intensely amused by all he saw. The young Lakes were so thoroughly in the habit of taking every thing, whether commonplace or curious, in the same phlegmatic fashion, that Jan's pleasure was a new pleasure to his foster- mother, and they enjoyed themselves greatly.

As they were making their way towards the inn where they were to pick up a neighbor, in whose cart they were to be driven home, their progress was hindered by a crowd, which had collected near one of the churches.

Mrs. Lake was one of those people who lead colorless lives, and are without mental resources, to whom a calamity is almost delightful, from the stimulus it gives to the imagination, and the relief it affords to the monotony of existence.

"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" she cried, peering through the crowd: "I wonder what it is. 'Tis likely 'tis a man in a fit now, I shouldn't wonder, or a cart upset, and every soul killed, as it might be ourselves going home this very evening. Dear, dear! 'tis a venturesome thing to leave home, too!"

"'Ere they be! 'ere they be!" roared a wave of the crowd, composed of boys, breaking on Mrs. Lake and Jan at this point.

"'Tis the body, sure as death!" murmured the windmiller's wife; but, as she spoke, the street boys set up a lusty cheer, and Jan, who had escaped to explore on his own account, came running back, crying, -

"'Tis the Cheap Jack, mammy! and he's been getting married."

If any thing could have rivalled the interest of a sudden death for Mrs. Lake, it must have been such a wedding as this. She hurried to the front, and was just in time to catch sight of the happy couple as they passed down the street, escorted by a crowd of congratulating boys.

"Well done, Cheap John!" roared one. "You've chose a beauty, you have," cried another. "She's 'arf a 'ead taller, anyway," added a third. "Many happy returns of the day, Jack!" yelled a fourth.

Jan was charmed, and again and again he drew Mrs. Lake's attention to the fact that it really WAS the Cheap Jack.

But the windmiller's wife was staring at the bride. Not merely because the bride is commonly considered the central figure of a wedding-party, but because her face seemed familiar to Mrs. Lake, and she could not remember where she had seen her. Though she could remember nothing, the association seemed to be one of pain. In vain she beat her brains. Memory was an almost uncultivated quality with her, and, like the rest of her intellectual powers, had a nervous, skittish way of deserting her in need, as if from timidity.

Mrs. Lake could sometimes remember things when she got into bed, but on this occasion her pillow did not assist her; and the windmiller snubbed her for making "such a caddle" about a woman's face she might have seen anywhere or nowhere, for that matter; so she got no help from him.

And it was not till after the Cheap Jack and his wife had left the neighborhood, that one night (she was in bed) it suddenly "came to her," as she said, that the dwarf's bride was the woman who had brought Jan to the mill, on the night of the great storm.



CHAPTER XIV.

SUBLUNARY ART.—JAN GOES TO SCHOOL.—DAME DATCHETT AT HOME.—JAN'S FIRST SCHOOL SCRAPE.—JAN DEFENDS HIMSELF.

Even the hero of a tale cannot always be heroic, nor of romantic or poetic tastes.

The wonderful beauty of the night sky and the moon had been fully felt by the artist-nature of the child Jan; but about this time he took to the study of a totally different subject,—pigs.

It was the force of circumstances which led Jan to "make pigs" on his slate so constantly, instead of nobler subjects; and it dated from the time when his foster-mother began to send him with the other children to school at Dame Datchett's.

Dame Datchett's cottage was the last house on one side of the village main street. It was low, thatched, creeper-covered, and had only one floor, and two rooms,—the outer room where the Dame kept her school, and the inner one where she slept. Dame Datchett's scholars were very young, and it is to be hoped that the chief objects of their parents in paying for their schooling were to insure their being kept safely out of the way for a certain portion of each day, and the saving of wear and tear to clothes and shoes. It is to be hoped so, because this much of discipline was to some extent accomplished. As to learning, Dame Datchett had little enough herself, and was quite unable to impart even that, except to a very industrious and intelligent pupil.

Her school appurtenances were few and simple. From one of them arose Jan's first scrape at school. It was a long, narrow blackboard, on which the alphabet had once been painted white, though the letters were now so faded that the Dame could no longer distinguish them, even in spectacles.

The scrape came about thus.

As he stood at the bottom of the little class which gathered in a semicircle around the Dame's chair, his young eyes could see the faded letters quite clearly, though the Dame's could not.

"Say th' alphabet, childern!" cried Dame Datchett; and as the class shouted the names of the letters after her, she made a show of pointing to each with a long "sallywithy" wand cut from one of the willows in the water-meadows below. She ran the sallywithy along the board at what she esteemed a judicious rate, to keep pace with the shouted alphabet, but, as she could not see the letters, her tongue and her wand were not in accord. Little did the wide- mouthed, white-headed youngsters of the village heed this, but it troubled Jan's eyes; and when—in consequence of her rubbing her nose with her disengaged hand—the sallywithy slipped to Q as the Dame cried F, Jan brought the lore he had gained from Abel to bear upon her inaccuracy.

"'Tis a Q, not a F," he said, boldly and aloud.

A titter ran through the class, and the biggest and stupidest boy found the joke so overwhelming that he stretched his mouth from ear to ear, and doubled himself up with laughter, till it looked as if his corduroy-breeched knee were a turnip, and he about to munch it.

The Dame dropped her sallywithy and began to feel under her chair.

"Which be the young varment as said a F was a Q?" she rather unfairly inquired.

"A didn't say a F was a Q"— began Jan; but a chorus of cowardly little voices drowned him, and curried favor with the Dame by crying, "Tis Jan Lake, the miller's son, missus."

And the big boy, conscious of his own breach of good manners, atoned for it by officiously dragging Jan to Dame Datchett's elbow.

"Hold un vor me," said the Dame, settling her spectacles firmly on her nose.

And with infinite delight the great booby held Jan to receive his thwacks from the strap which the Dame had of late years substituted for the birch rod. And as Jan writhed, he chuckled as heartily as before, it being an amiable feature in the character of such clowns that, so long as they can enjoy a guffaw at somebody's expense, the subject of their ridicule is not a matter of much choice or discrimination.

After the first angry sob, Jan set his teeth and bore his punishment in a proud silence, quite incomprehensible by the small rustics about him, who, like the pigs of the district, were in the habit of crying out in good time before they were hurt as a preventive measure.

Strangely enough, it gave the biggest boy the impression that Jan was "poor-spirited," and unable to take his own part,—a temptation to bully him too strong to be resisted.

So when the school broke up, and the children were scattering over the road and water-meads, the wide-mouthed boy came up to Jan and snatched his slate from him.

"Give Jan his slate!" cried Jan, indignantly.

He was five years old, but the other was seven, and he held the slate above his head.

"And who be JAN, then, thee little gallus-bird?" said he, tauntingly.

"I be Jan!" answered the little fellow, defiantly. "Jan Lake, the miller's son. Give I his slate!"

"Thee's not a miller's son," said the other; and the rest of the children began to gather round.

"I be a miller's son," reiterated Jan. "And I've got a miller's thumb, too;" and he turned up his little thumb for confirmation of the fact.

"Thee's not a miller's son," repeated the other, with a grin. "Thee's nobody's child, thee is. Master Lake's not thy vather, nor Mrs. Lake bean't thy mother. Thee was brought to the mill in a sack of grist, thee was."

In saying which, the boy repeated a popular version of Jan's history.

If any one had been present outside Dame Datchett's cottage at that moment who had been in the windmill when Jan first came to it, he would have seen a likeness so vivid between the face of the child and the face of the man who brought him to the mill as would have seemed to clear up at least one point of the mystery of his parentage.

Pride and wrath convulsed every line of the square, quaint face, and seemed to narrow it to the likeness of the man's, as, with his black eyes blazing with passion, Jan flew at his enemy.

The boy still held Jan's slate on high, and with a derisive "haw! haw!" he brought it down heavily above Jan's head. But Jan's eye was quick, and very true. He dodged the blow, which fell on the boy's own knees, and then flew at him like a kitten in a tiger fury.

They were both small and easily knocked over, and in an instant they were sprawling on the road, and cuffing, and pulling, and kicking, and punching with about equal success, except that the bigger boy prudently roared and howled all the time, in the hope of securing some assistance in his favor.

"Dame Datchett! Missus! Murder! Yah! Boohoo! The little varment be a throttling I."

But Mrs. Datchett was deaf. Also, she not unnaturally considered that, in looking after "the young varments" in school-hours, she fully earned their weekly pence, and was by no means bound to disturb herself because they squabbled in the street.

Meanwhile Jan gradually got the upper hand of his lubberly and far from courageous opponent, whose smock he had nearly torn off his back. He had not spent any of his breath in calling for aid, but now, in reply to the boy's cries for mercy and release, he shouted, "What be my name, now, thee big gawney? Speak, or I'll drottle 'ee."

"Jan Lake," said his vanquished foe. "Let me go! Yah! yah!"

"Whose son be I?" asked the remorseless Jan.

"Abel Lake's, the miller! Boohoo, boohoo!" sobbed the boy.

"And what be this, then, Willum Smith?" was Jan's final question, as he brought his thumb close to his enemy's eye.

"It be the miller's thumb thee's got, Jan Lake," was the satisfactory answer.



CHAPTER XV.

WILLUM GIVES JAN SOME ADVICE.—THE CLOCK FACE.—THE HORNET AND THE DAME.—JAN DRAWS PIGS.—JAN AND HIS PATRONS.—KITTY CHUTER.—THE FIGHT.—MASTER CHUTER'S PREDICTION.

Jan went back to school. Though his foster-mother was indignant, and ready to do battle both with Dame Datchett and with William Smith's aunt (with whom, in lieu of parents, the boy lived), and though Abel expressed his anxiety to go down and "teach Willum to vight one of his own zize," Jan steadily rejected their help, and said manfully, "Jan bean't feared of un. I whopped un, I did."

So Mrs. Lake doctored his bruises, and sent him off to school again. She yielded the more readily that she felt certain that the windmiller would not take the child's part against the Dame.

No further misfortune befell him. William, if loutish and a bit of a bully on occasion, was not an ill-natured child; and, having a turn for humor of a broad, unintellectual sort, he and Jan became rather friendly on the common, but reprehensible ground of playing pranks, which kept the school in a titter and the Dame in doubt. And, if detected, they did not think a dose of the strap by any means too high a price to pay for their fun.

For William's sufferings under that instrument of discipline were not to be measured by his doleful howlings and roarings, nor even by his ready tears.

"What be 'ee so voolish for as to say nothin' when her wollops 'ee?" he asked of Jan, in a very friendly spirit, one day. "Thee should holler as loud as 'ee can. Them that hollers and cries murder she soon stops for, does Dame Datchett. She be feared of their mothers hearing 'em, and comin' after 'em."

Jan could not lower himself to accept such base advice; but his superior adroitness did much to balance the advantage William had over him, in a less scrupulous pride.

As to learning, I fear that, after the untoward consequences of his zeal for the alphabet, Jan made no effort to learn any thing but cat's-cradle from his neighbors.

On one other occasion, indeed, he was somewhat over-zealous, and only escaped the strap for his reward by a friendly diversion on the part of his friend. The Dame had a Dutch clock in the corner of her kitchen, the figures on the face of which were the common Arabic ones, and not Roman. And as one of the few things the Dame professed was to "teach the clock," she would, when the figures had been recited after the fashion in which her scholars shouted over the alphabet, set those who had advanced to the use of slates to copy the figures from the clock-face.

Slowly and sorrowfully did William toil over this lesson. Again and again did he rub out his ill-proportioned fives, with so greasy a finger and such a superabundance of moisture as to make a sort of puddle, into which he dug heavily, and broke two pencils.

"A vive be such an akkerd vigger," he muttered, in reply to Jan, who had looked up inquiringly as the second pencil snapped. "'Twill come aal right, though, when a dries."

It did dry, but any thing but right. Jan rubbed out the mass of thick and blotted strokes, and when the Dame was not looking, he made William's figures for him. Jan was behindhand in spelling, but to copy figures was no difficulty to him.

Having helped his friend thus, he pulled his smock, to draw attention to his own slate. The other children wrote so slowly that time had hung heavy on his hands; and, instead of copying the figures in a row, he had made a drawing of the clock-face, with the figures on it; but instead of the hands, he had put eyes, nose, and mouth, and below the mouth a round gray blot, which William instantly recognized for a portrait of the mole on Dame Datchett's chin. This brilliant caricature so tickled him, that he had a fit of choking from suppressed laughter; and he and Jan, being detected "in mischief," were summoned with their slates to the Dame's chair.

William came off triumphant; but when the Dame caught sight of Jan's slate, without minutely examining his work, she said, "Zo thee's been scraaling on thee slate, instead of writing thee figures," and at once began to fumble beneath her chair.

But William had slightly moved the strap with his foot, as he stood with a perfectly unmoved and vacant countenance beside the Dame, which made some delay; and as Mrs. Datchett bent lower on the right side of her chair, William began upon the left a "hum," which, with a close imitation of the crowing of a cock, the grunting of a pig, and the braying of a donkey, formed his chief stock of accomplishments.

"Drat the thing! Where be un?" said the Dame, endangering her balance in the search.

"B-z-z-z-z!" went William behind the chair; and he added, sotto voce, to Jan, "She be as dunch as a bittle."

At last the Dame heard, and looked round. "Be that a harnet, missus, do 'ee think?" said William, with a face as guileless as a babe's.

Dame Datchett rose in terror. William bent to look beneath her chair for the hornet, and of course repeated his hum. As the hornet could neither be found nor got rid of, the alarmed old lady broke up the school, and went to lay a trap of brown sugar outside the window for her enemy. And so Jan escaped a beating.

But this and the story of his first fight are digressions. It yet remains to be told how he took to drawing pigs.

Dame Datchett's cottage was the last on one side of the street; but it did not face the street, but looked over the water-meadows, and the little river, and the bridge.

As Jan sat on the end of the form, he could look through the Dame's open door, the chief view from which was of a place close by the bridge, and on the river's bank, where the pig-minders of the village brought their pigs to water. Day after day, when the tedium of doing nothing under Dame Datchett's superintendence was insufficiently relieved to Jan's active mind by pinching "Willum" till he giggled, or playing cat's-cradle with one of his foster- brothers, did he welcome the sight of a flock of pigs with their keeper, scuttling past the Dame's door, and rushing snorting to the stream.

Much he envied the freedom of the happy pig-minder, whilst the vagaries of the pigs were an unfailing source of amusement.

The degree and variety of expression in a pig's eye can only be appreciated by those who have studied pigs as Morland must have studied them. The pertness, the liveliness, the humor, the love of mischief, the fiendish ingenuity and perversity of which pigs are capable, can be fully known to the careworn pig-minder alone. When they are running away,—and when are they not running away?—they have an action with the hind legs very like a donkey in a state of revolt. But they have none of the donkey's too numerous grievances. And if donkeys squealed at every switch, as pigs do, their undeserved sufferings would have cried loud enough for vengeance before this.

Jan's opportunities for studying pigs were good. As the smallest and swiftest of the flock, his tail tightly curled, and indescribable jauntiness in his whole demeanor, came bounding to the river's brink, followed by his fellows, driving, pushing, snuffing, winking, and gobbling, and lastly by a small boy in a large coat, with a long switch, Jan was witness of the whole scene from Dame Datchett's door. And, as he sat with his slate and pencil before him, he naturally took to drawing the quaint comic faces and expressive eyes of the herd, and their hardly less expressive backs and tails; and to depicting the scenes which took place when the pigs had enjoyed their refreshment, and with renewed vigor led their keeper in twenty different directions, instead of going home. Back, up the road, where he could hardly drive them at the point of the switch a few hours before; by sharp turns into Squire Ammaby's grounds, or the churchyard; and helter-skelter through the water- meadows.

The fame of Jan's "pitcher-making" had gone before him to Dame Datchett's school by the mouths of his foster-brothers and sisters, and he found a dozen little voices ready to dictate subjects for his pencil.

"Make a 'ouse, Janny Lake." "Make thee vather's mill, Janny Lake." "Make a man. Make Dame Datchett. Make the parson. Make the Cheap Jack. Make Daddy Angel. Make Master Chuter. Make a oss—cow— ship—pig!"

But the popularity obtained by Jan's pigs soon surpassed that of all his other performances.

"Make pigs for I, Janny Lake!" and "Make pigs for I, too!" was a sort of whispering chorus that went on perpetually under the Dame's nose. But when she found that it led to no disturbance, that the children only huddled round the child Jan and his slate like eager scholars round a teacher, Dame Datchett was wise enough to be thankful that Jan possessed a power she had never been able to acquire,—that he could "keep the young varments quiet."

"He be most's good's a monitor," thought the Dame; and she took a nap, and Jan's genius held the school together.

The children tried other influences besides persuasion.

"Jan Lake, I've brought thee an apple. Draa out a pig for I on a's slate."

Jan had a spirit of the most upright and honorable kind. He never took an unfair advantage, and to the petty cunning which was "Willum's" only idea of wisdom he seemed by nature incapable of stooping. But in addition to, and alongside of, his artistic temperament, there appeared to be in him no small share of the spirit of a trader. The capricious, artistic spirit made him fitful in his use even of the beloved slate; but, when he was least inclined to draw, the offer of something he very much wanted would spur him to work; and in the spirit of a true trader, he worked well.

He would himself have made a charming study for a painter, as he sat surrounded by his patrons, who watched him with gaping mouths of wonderment, as his black eyes moved rapidly to and fro between the river's brink and his slate, and his tiny fingers steered the pencil into cunning lines which "made pigs." "The very moral!" as William declared, smacking his corduroy breeches with delight.

Sometimes Jan hardly knew that they were there, he was so absorbed in his work. His eyes glowed with that strong pleasure which comes in the very learning of any art, perhaps of any craft. Now and then, indeed, his face would cloud with a different expression, and in fits of annoyance, like that in which his foster-mother found him outside the windmill, he would break his pencils, and ruthlessly destroy sketches with which his patrons would have been quite satisfied. But at other moments his face would twinkle with a very sunshine of smiles, as he was conscious of having caught exactly the curve which expressed obstinacy in this pig's back, or the air of reckless defiance in that other's tail.

And so he learned little or nothing, and improved in his drawing, and kept the school quiet, and had always a pocket well filled with sweet things, nails, string, tops, balls, and such treasures, earned by his art.

One day as he sat "making pigs" for one after another of the group of children round him, a pig of especial humor having drawn a murmur of delight from the circle, this murmur was dismally echoed by a sob from a little maid on the outside of the group. It was Master Chuter's little daughter, a pretty child, with an oval, dainty- featured face, and a prim gentleness about her, like a good little girl in a good little story. The intervening young rustics began to nudge each other and look back at her.

"Kitty Chuter be crying!" they whispered.

"What be amiss with 'ee, then, Kitty Chuter?" said Jan, looking up from his work; and the question was passed on with some impatience, as her tears prevented her reply. "What be amiss with 'ee?"

"Janny Lake have never made a pig for I," sobbed the little maid, with her head dolefully inclined to her left shoulder, and her oval face pulled to a doubly pensive length. "I axed my vather to let me get him a posy, and a said I might. And I got un some vine Bloody Warriors, and a heap of Boy's Love off our big bush, that smelled beautiful. And vather says a can have some water-blobs off our pond when they blows. But Tommy Green met I as a was coming down to school, and a snatched my vlowers from me, and I begged un to let me keep some of un, and a only laughed at me. And I daren't go back, for I was late; and now I've nothin' to give Janny Lake to make a draft of a pig for I." And, having held up for the telling of her tale, the little maid broke down in fresh tears.

Jan finished off the tail of the pig he was drawing with a squeak of the pencil that might have come from the pig itself and, stuffing the slate into its owner's hands, he ran up to Kitty Chuter and kissed her wet cheeks, saying, "Give I thee slate, Kitty Chuter, and I'll make thee the best pig of all. I don't want nothing from thee for 't. And when school's done, I'll whop Tommy Green, if I sees him."

And forthwith, without looking from the door for studies, Jan drew a fat sow with her little ones about her; the other children clustering round to peep, and crying, "He've made Kitty Chuter one, two, three, vour, VIVE pigs!"

"Ah, and there be two more you can't see, because the old un be lying on 'em," said Jan.

"Six, seven!" William counted; and he assisted the calculation by sticking up first a thumb and then a forefinger as he spoke.

Some who had not thought half a ball of string, or a dozen nails as good as new, too much to pay for a single pig drawn on one side of their slates, and only lasting as long as they could contrive to keep the other side in use without quite smudging that one, were now disposed to be dissatisfied with their bargains. But as the school broke up, and Tom Green was seen loitering on the other side of the road, every thing was forgotten in the general desire to see Jan carry out his threat, and "whop" a boy bigger than himself for bullying a little girl.

Jan showed no disposition to shirk, and William acted as his friend, and held his slate and book.

Success is not always to the just, however; and poor Jan was terribly beaten by his big opponent, though not without giving him some marks of the combat to carry away.

Kitty Chuter wept bitterly for Jan's bloody nose; but he comforted her, saying, "Never mind, Kitty; if he plagues thee again, 'll fight un again and again, till I whops he."

But his valor was not put to the proof, for Tommy Green molested her no more.

Jan washed his face in the water-meadows, and went stout-heartedly home, where Master Lake beat him afresh, as he ironically said, "to teach him to vight young varments like himself instead of minding his book."

But upon Master Chuter, of the Heart of Oak, the incident made quite a different impression. He was naturally pleased by Jan's championship of his child, and, added to this, he was much impressed by the sketch on the slate. It was, he said, the "living likeness" of his own sow; and, as she had seven young pigs, the portrait was exact, allowing for the two which Jan had said were out of sight.

He gave Kitty a new slate, and kept the sketch, which he showed to all in-comers. He displayed it one evening to the company assembled round the hearth of the little inn, and took occasion to propound his views on the subject of Jan's future life.

(Master Chuter was fond of propounding his views,—a taste which was developed by always being sure of an audience.)

"It's nothing to me," said Master Chuter, speaking of Jan, "who the boy be. It be no fault of his'n if he's a fondling. And one thing's sure enough. Them that left him with Master Lake left something besides him. There was that advertisement,—you remember that about the five-pound bill in the paper, Daddy Angel?"

"Ay, ay, Master Chuter," said Daddy Angel; "after the big storm, five year ago. Sartinly, Master Chuter."

"Was it ever found, do ye think?" said Master Linseed, the painter and decorator.

"It must have been found," said the landlord; "but I bean't so sure about it's having been given up, the notice was in so long. And whoever did find un must have found un at once. But what I says is, five-pound notes lost as easy as that comes from where there's more of the same sort. And, if Master Lake be paid for the boy, he can 'fford to 'prentice him when his time comes. He've boys enough of his own to take to the mill, and Jan do seem to have such an uncommon turn for drawing things out, I'd try him with painting and varnishing, if he was mine. And I believe he'd come to signs, too! Look at that, now! It be small, and the boy've had no paint to lay on, but there's the sign of the Jolly Sow for you, as natteral as life. You know about signs, Master Linseed," continued the landlord. For there was a tradition that the painter could "do picture-signs," though he had only been known to renew lettered ones since he came to the neighborhood. "Master Lake should 'prentice him with you when he's older," Master Chuter said in conclusion.