Jan of the Windmill / Ewing, Juliana Horatia Gatty, 1841-1885

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Title: Jan of the Windmill

Author: Juliana Horatia Ewing

Release Date: May, 2004  [EBook #5601]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 18, 2002]

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, JAN OF THE WINDMILL ***




This etext was produced by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.




JAN OF THE WINDMILL (A Story of the Plains)
by JULIANA HORATIA EWING.




DEDICATED TO MY DEAR SISTER MARGARET.



CONTENTS.

Chapter I. The windmiller's wife.--Strangers.--Ten shillings a
week.--The little Jan.

Chapter II. The miller's calculations.--His hopes and fears.--The
nurse-boy.--Calm.

Chapter III. The windmiller's words come true.--The red shawl.--In
the clouds.--Nursing v. pig-minding.--The round-house.--The miller's
thumb.

Chapter IV. Black as slans.--Vair and voolish.--The miller and his
man.

Chapter V. The pocket-book and the family bible.--Five pounds'
reward.

Chapter VI. George goes courting.--George as an enemy.--George as a
friend.--Abel plays schoolmaster.--The love-letter.--Moerdyk.--The
miller-moth.--An ancient ditty.

Chapter VII. Abel goes to school again.--Dame Datchett.--A column of
spelling.--Abel plays moocher.--The miller's man cannot make up his
mind.

Chapter VIII. Visitors at the mill.--A windmiller of the third
generation.--Cure for whooping-cough.--Miss Amabel Adeline Ammaby.--
Doctors disagree.

Chapter IX. Gentry born.--Learning lost.--Jan's bedfellow.--Amabel.

Chapter X. Abel at home.--Jan objects to the miller's man.--The
alphabet.--The Cheap Jack.--"Pitchers".

Chapter XI. Scarecrows and men.--Jan refuses to "make Gearge."--
Uncanny.--"Jan's off."--The moon and the clouds.

Chapter XII. The white horse.--Comrogues.--Moerdyk.--George confides
in the Cheap Jack--with reservation.

Chapter XIII. George as a moneyed man.--Sal.--The "White Horse."--
The wedding.--The windmiller's wife forgets, and remembers too late.

Chapter XIV. Sublunary art.--Jan goes to school.--Dame Datchett at
home.--Jan's first school scrape.--Jan defends himself.

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.

Chapter XVI. The mop.--The shop.--What the Cheap Jack's wife had to
tell.--What George withheld.

Chapter XVII. The miller's man at the mop.--A lively companion.--Sal
loses her purse.--The recruiting sergeant.--The pocket-book twice
stolen.--George in the King's Arms.--George in the King's service.--
The letter changes hands, but keeps its secret.

Chapter XVIII. Midsummer holidays.--Child fancies.--Jan and the pig-
minder.--Master Salter at home.--Jan hires himself out.

Chapter XIX. The blue coat.--Pig-minding and tree-studying.--Leaf-
paintings.--A stranger.--Master Swift is disappointed.

Chapter XX. Squire Ammaby and his daughter.--The Cheap Jack does
business once more.--The white horse changes masters.

Chapter XXI. Master Swift at home.--Rufus.--The ex-pig-minder.--Jan
and the schoolmaster.

Chapter XXII. The parish church.--Rembrandt.--The snow scene.--
Master Swift's autobiography.

Chapter XXIII. The white horse in clover.--Amabel and her
guardians.--Amabel in the wood.--Bogy.

Chapter XXIV. The paint-box.--Master Linseed's shop.--The new sign-
board.--Master Swift as Will Scarlet.

Chapter XXV. Sanitary inspectors.--The pestilence.--The parson.--The
doctor.--The squire and the schoolmaster.--Desolation at the
windmill.--The second advent.

Chapter XXVI. The beasts of the village.--Abel sickens.--The good
shepherd.--Rufus plays the philanthropist.--Master Swift sees the
sun rise.--The death of the righteous.

Chapter XXVII. Jan has the fever.--Convalescence in Master Swift's
cottage.--The squire on demoralization.

Chapter XXVIII. Mr. Ford's client.--The history of Jan's father.--
Amabel and Bogy the Second.

Chapter XXIX. Jan fulfils Abel's charge.--Son of the mill.--The
large-mouthed woman.

Chapter XXX. Jan's prospects, and Master Swift's plans.--Tea and
Milton.--New parents.--Parting with Rufus.--Jan is kidnapped.

Chapter XXXI. Screeving.--An old song.--Mr. Ford's client.--The
penny gaff.--Jan runs away.

Chapter XXXII. The baker.--On and on.--The church bell.--A
digression.--A familiar hymn.--The Boys' Home.

Chapter XXXIII. The business man and the painter.--Pictures and pot
boilers.--Cimabue and Giotto.--The salmon-colored omnibus.

Chapter XXXIV. A choice of vocations.--Recreation hour.--The bow-
legged boy.--Drawing by heart.--Giotto.

Chapter XXXV.  "Without character?"--The widow.--The bow-legged boy
takes service.--Studios and painters.

Chapter XXXVI. The miller's letter.--A new pot boiler sold.

Chapter XXXVII.  Sunshine after storm.

Chapter XXXVIII. A painter's education.--Master Chuter's port.--A
farewell feast.--The sleep of the just.

Chapter XXXIX. George again.--The painter's advice.--"Home-brewed"
at the Heart of Oak.--Jan changes the painter's mind.

Chapter XL. D'arcy sees Bogy.--The academy.--The painter's picture.

Chapter XLI. The detective.--The "Jook".--Jan stands by his mother's
grave.--His after history.

Chapter XLII. Conclusion.




JAN OF THE WINDMILL.




CHAPTER I. THE WINDMILLER'S WIFE.--STRANGERS.--TEN SHILLINGS A
WEEK.--THE LITTLE JAN.

Storm without and within?

So the windmiller might have said, if he had been in the habit of
putting his thoughts into an epigrammatic form, as a groan from his
wife and a growl of thunder broke simultaneously upon his ear,
whilst the rain fell scarcely faster than her tears.

It was far from mending matters that both storms were equally
unexpected.  For eight full years the miller's wife had been the
meekest of women.  If there was a firm (and yet, as he flattered
himself, a just) husband in all the dreary straggling district, the
miller was that man.  And he always did justice to his wife's good
qualities,--at least to her good quality of submission,--and would,
till lately, have upheld her before any one as a model of domestic
obedience.  From the day when he brought home his bride, tall,
pretty, and perpetually smiling, to the tall old mill and the ugly
old mother who never smiled at all, there had been but one will in
the household.  At any rate, after the old woman's death.  For
during her life-time her stern son paid her such deference that it
was a moot point, perhaps, which of them really ruled.  Between
them, however, the young wife was moulded to a nicety, and her voice
gained no more weight in the counsels of the windmill when the harsh
tones of the mother-in-law were silenced for ever.

The miller was one of those good souls who live by the light of a
few small shrewdities (often proverbial), and pique themselves on
sticking to them to such a point, as if it were the greater virtue
to abide by a narrow rule the less it applied.  The kernel of his
domestic theory was, "Never yield, and you never will have to," and
to this he was proud of having stuck against all temptations from a
real, though hard, affection for his own; and now, after working so
smoothly for eight years, had it come to this?

The miller scratched his bead, and looked at his wife, almost with
amazement.  She moaned, though he bade her be silent; she wept, in
spite of words which had hitherto been an effectual styptic to her
tears; and she met the commonplaces of his common sense with such
wild, miserable laughter, that he shuddered as he heard her.

Weakness in human beings is like the strength of beasts, a power of
which fortunately they are not always conscious.  Unless positively
brutal, you cannot well beat a sickly woman for wailing and weeping;
and if she will not cease for any lesser consideration, there seems
nothing for an unbending husband to do but to leave her to herself.

This the miller had to do, anyhow.  For he could only spare a
moment's attention to her now and then, since the mill required all
his care.

In a coat and hat of painted canvas, he had been in and out ever
since the storm began; now directing the two men who were working
within, now struggling along the stage that ran outside the
windmill, at no small risk of being fairly blown away.

He had reefed the sails twice already in the teeth of the blinding
rain.  But he did well to be careful.  For it was in such a storm as
this, five years ago "come Michaelmas," that the worst of windmill
calamities had befallen him,--the sails had been torn off his mill
and dashed into a hundred fragments upon the ground.  And such a
mishap to a seventy feet tower mill means--as windmillers well know-
-not only a stoppage of trade, but an expense of two hundred pounds
for the new sails.

Many a sack of grist, which should have come to him had gone down to
the watermill in the valley before the new sails were at work; and
the huge debt incurred to pay for them was not fairly wiped out yet.
That catastrophe had kept the windmiller a poor man for five years,
and it gave him a nervous dread of storms.

And talking of storms, here was another unreasonable thing.  The
morning sky had been (like the miller's wedded life) without a
cloud.  The day had been sultry, for the time of year unseasonably
so.  And, just when the miller most grudged an idle day, when times
were hard, when he was in debt,--for some small matters, as well as
the sail business,--and when, for the first time in his life, he
felt almost afraid of his own hearthstone, and would fain have been
busy at his trade, not a breath of wind had there been to turn the
sails of the mill.  Not a waft to cool his perplexed forehead, not
breeze enough to stir the short grass that glared for miles over
country flat enough to mock him with the fullest possible view of
the cloudless sky.  Then towards evening, a few gray flecks had
stolen up from the horizon like thieves in the dusk, and a mighty
host of clouds had followed them; and when the wind did come, it
came in no moderate measure, but brought this awful storm upon its
wings, which now raged as if all the powers of mischief had got
loose, and were bent on turning every thing topsy-turvy indoors and
out.

What made the winds and clouds so perverse, the clerk of the weather
best knows; but there was a reason for the unreasonableness of the
windmiller's wife.

She had lost her child, her youngest born, and therefore, at
present, her best beloved.  This girl-babe was the sixth of the
windmiller and his wife's children, the last that God gave them, and
the first that it had pleased Him to take away.

The mother had been weak herself at the time that the baby fell ill,
and unusually ill-fitted to bear a heavy blow.  Then her watchful
eyes had seen symptoms of ailing in the child long before the
windmiller's good sense would allow a fuss to be made, and expense
to be incurred about a little peevishness up or down.  And it was
some words muttered by the doctor when he did come, about not having
been sent for soon enough, which were now doing as much as any thing
to drive the poor woman frantic.  They struck a blow, too, at her
blind belief in the miller's invariable wisdom.  If he had but
listened to her in this matter, were it only for love's sake!  There
was something, she thought, in what that woman had said who came to
help her with the last offices,--the miller discouraged "neighbors,"
but this was a matter of decency,--that it was as foolish for a man
to have the say over babies and housework as it would be for his
wife to want her word in the workshop or the mill.

Perhaps a state of subjection for grown-up people does not tend to
make them reasonable, especially in their indignations.  The
windmiller's wife dared not, for her life, have told him in so many
words that she thought it would be for their joint benefit if he
would give a little more consideration to her wishes and opinions;
but from this suppressed idea came many sharp and peevish words at
this time, which, apart from their true source, were quite as
unreasonable and perverse as the miller held them to be.  Nor is
being completely under the control of another, self-control.  It may
be doubted if it can even do much to teach it.  The thread of her
passive condition having been, for the time, broken by grief, the
bereaved mother moaned and wailed, and rocked herself, and beat her
breast, and turned fiercely upon all interference, like some poor
beast in anguish.

She had clung to her children with an almost morbid tenderness, in
proportion as she found her worthy husband stern and cold.  A hard
husband sometimes makes a soft mother, and it is perhaps upon the
baby of the family that her repressed affections outpoured
themselves most fully.  It was so in this case, at any rate.  And
the little one had that unearthly beauty which is seen, or imagined,
about children who die young.  And the poor woman had suffered and
striven so for it, to have it and to keep it.  The more critical
grew its illness, the intenser grew her strength and resolution by
watchfulness, by every means her instinct and experience could
suggest, to fight and win the battle against death.  And when all
was vain, the maddening thought tortured her that it might have been
saved.

The miller had made a mistake, and it was a pity that he made
another on the top of it, with the best intentions.  He hurried on
the funeral, hoping that when "all was over" the mother would
"settle down."

But it was this crowning insult to her agony, the shortening of the
too brief time when she could watch by all that remained to her of
her child, which drove her completely wild.  She reproached him now
plainly and bitterly enough.  She would neither listen to reason nor
obey; and when--with more truth than taste--he observed that other
people lost children, and that they had plenty left, she laughed in
his face that wild laugh which drove him back to the mill and to the
storm.

How it raged!  The miller's wife was an uneducated, commonplace
woman enough, but, in the excited state of her nervous system, she
was as sensible as any poet of a kind of comforting harmony in the
wild sounds without; though at another time they would have
frightened her.

They did not disturb the children, who were in bed.  Four in the old
press-bed in the corner, and one in a battered crib, and one in the
narrow bed over which the coverlet was not yet green.

The day's work was over for her, though it was only just beginning
for the miller, and the mother had nothing to do but weep, and her
tears fell and fell, and the rain poured and poured.  That last
outburst had somewhat relieved her, and she almost wished her
husband would come back, as a flash of lightning dazzled her eyes,
and the thunder rattled round the old mill, as if the sails had
broken up again, and were falling upon the roof of the round-house.
All her senses were acute to-night, and she listened for the
miller's footsteps, and so, listening, in the lull after the
thunder, she heard another sound.  Wheels upon the road.

A pang shot through her heart.  Thus had the doctor's gig sounded
the night he came,--alas, too late!  How long and how intensely she
had listened for that!  She first heard it just beyond the mile-
stone.  This one must be a good bit on this side of it; up the hill,
in fact.  She could not help listening.  It was so like, so terribly
like!  Now it spun along the level ground.  Ah, the doctor had not
hurried so!  Now it was at the mill, at the door, and--it stopped.

The miller's wife rose to run out, she hardly knew why.  But in a
moment she checked herself, and went back to her seat.

"I be crazed, surely," said the poor woman, sitting down again.
"There be more gigs than one in the world, and folk often stops to
ask their way of the maester."

These travellers were a long time about the putting of such a simple
question, especially as the night was not a pleasant one to linger
out in.  The murmur of voices, too, which the woman overheard,
betokened a close conversation, in which the familiar drawl of the
windmiller's dialect blended audibly with that kind of clean-clipt
speaking peculiar to gentlefolk.

"He've been talking to master's five minute an' more," muttered the
miller's wife.  "What can 'ee want with un?"  The talking ceased as
she spoke, and the windmiller appeared, followed by a woman carrying
a young baby in her arms.

He was a ruddy man for his age at any time, but there was an extra
flush on his cheeks just now, and some excitement in his manner,
making him look as his wife was not wont to see him more than once a
year, after the Foresters' dinner at the Heart of Oak.  There was a
difference, too.  A little too much drink made the windmiller
peevish and pompous, but just now he spoke in a kindly, almost
conciliating tone.

"See, missus!  Let this good lady dry herself a bit, and get warm,
and the little un too."

A woman--ill-favored, though there was no positive fault to be found
with her features, except that the upper lip was long and cleft, and
the lower one very large--came forward with the child, and began to
take off its wraps, and the miller's wife, giving her face a hasty
wipe, went hospitably to help her.

"Tst! tst! little love!" she cried, gulping down a sob, due to her
own sad memories, and moving the cloak more tenderly than the woman
in whose arms the child lay.  "What a pair of dark eyes, then!  Is't
a boy or girl, m'm?"

"A boy," said a voice from the door, and the miller's wife, with a
suppressed shriek of timidity, became aware of a man whose entrance
she had not perceived, and to whom she dropped a hasty courtesy.

He was a man slightly above the middle height, whose slenderness
made him seem taller.  An old cloak, intended as much to disguise as
to protect him, did not quite conceal a faultlessness of costume
beneath it, after the fashion of the day.  Waistcoats of three
kinds, one within the other, a frilled shirt, and a well-adjusted
stock, were to be seen, though he held the ends of the old cloak
tightly across him, as the wind would have caught them in the
doorway.  He wore a countryman's hat, which seemed to suit him as
little as the cloak, and from beneath the brim his dark eyes glared
with a restless, dissatisfied look, and were so dark and so fierce
and bright that one could hardly see any other details of his face,
unless it were his smooth chin, which, either from habit or from the
stiffness of his stock, he carried strangely up in the air.

"Indeed, sir," said the windmiller's wife, courtesying, and setting
a chair, with her eyes wandering back by a kind of fascination to
those of the stranger; "be pleased to take a seat, sir."

The stranger sat down for a moment, and then stood up again.  Then
he seemed to remember that he still wore his hat, and removed it,
holding it stiffly before him in his gloved hands.  This displayed a
high, narrow head, on which the natural hair was worn short and
without parting, and a face which, though worn, was not old.  And,
for no definable reason, an impression stole over the windmiller's
wife that he, like her husband, had some wish to conciliate, which
in his case struggled hard with a very different kind of feeling,
more natural to him.

Then he took out a watch of what would now be called the old turnip
shape, and said impatiently to the miller, "Our time is short, my
good man."

"To be sure, sir," said the windmiller.  "Missus! a word with you
here."  And he led the way into the round-house, where his wife
followed, wondering.  Her wonder was not lessened when he laid his
hand upon her shoulder, and, with flushed cheek and a tone of
excitement that once more recalled the Foresters' annual meeting,
said, "We've had some sore times, missus, of late, but good luck
have come our way to-night."

"And how then, maester?" faltered his wife.

"That child," said the windmiller, turning his broad thumb
expressively towards the inner room, "belongs to folk that want to
get a home for un, and can afford to pay for un, too.  And the place
being healthy and out of the way, and having heard of our trouble,
and you just bereaved of a little un" -

"No! no! no!" shrieked the poor mother, who now understood all.  "I
COULDN'T, maester, 'tis unpossible, I could NOT.  Oh dear! oh dear!
isn't it bad enough to lose the sweetest child that ever saw light,
without taking in an outcast to fill that dear angel's place?  Oh
dear! oh dear!"

"And we behindhand in more quarters than one," continued the miller,
prudently ignoring his wife's tears and remonstrances, "and a dear
season coming on, and an uncertain trade that keeps a man idle by
days together, and here's ten shillings a week dropped into our
laps, so to speak.  Ten shillings a week--regular and sartin.  No
less now, and no more hereafter, the governor said.  Them were his
words."

"What's ten shilling a week to me, and my child dead and gone?"
moaned the mother, in reply.

"WHAT'S TEN SHILLINGS A WEEK TO YOU?" cried the windmiller, who was
fairly exasperated, in tones so loud that they were audible in the
dwelling room, where the stranger, standing by the three-legged
table, stroked his lips twice or thrice with his hand, as if to
smooth out a cynical smile which strove to disturb their decorous
and somewhat haughty compression.  "What's ten shilling a week to
you?  Why, it's food to you, and drink to you, and firing to you,
and boots for the children's feet.  Look here, my woman.  You've had
a sore affliction, but that's not to say you're to throw good luck
in the dirt for a whimsey.  This matter's settled."

And the miller strode back into the inner room, whilst his wife sat
upon a sack of barley, wringing her hands, and moaning, "I couldn't
do my duty by un, maester, I couldn't do my duty by un."

This she repeated at intervals, with her apron over her face, as
before; and then, suddenly aware that her husband had left her, she
hurried into the inner room to plead her own cause.  It was too
late.  The strangers had gone.  The miller was not there, and the
baby lay on the end of the press bedstead, wailing as bitterly as
the mother herself.

It had been placed there, with a big bundle of clothes by it, before
the miller came back, and he had found it so.  He found the stranger
too, with his hat on his head, and his cloak fastened, glancing from
time to time at the child, and then withdrawing his glance hastily,
and looking forcedly round at the meagre furnishing of the miller's
room, and then back at the little bundle on the bed, and away again.
The woman stood with her back to the press-bed, her striped shawl
drawn tightly round her, and her hands folded together as closely as
her long lip pressed the heavy one below.

"Is it settled?" asked the man.

"It is, sir," said the miller.  "You'll excuse my missus being as
she is, but it's fretting for the child we've a lost" -

"I understand, I understand," said the stranger, hastily.  He was
pulling back the rings of a silk netted purse, which he had drawn
mechanically from his pocket, and which, from some sudden start of
his, fell chinking on to the floor.  Whatever the thought was which
startled him, he thought it so sharply that he looked up in fear
that he had said it aloud.  But he had not spoken, and the miller
had no other expression than that of an eager satisfaction on his
face as the stranger counted out the gold by the flaring light of
the tallow candle.

"A quarter's pay in advance," he said briefly.  "It will be paid
quarterly, you understand."  After which, and checking himself in a
look towards the child, he went out, followed by the woman.

In the round-house he paused however, and looked back into the
meagre, dimly lighted room, where the little bundle upon the bed lay
weeping.  For a moment, a storm of irresolution seemed to seize him,
and then muttering, "It can't be helped for the present, it can't be
helped," he hurried towards the vehicle, in the back seat of which
the woman was already seated.

The driver touched his hat to him as he approached, and turned the
cushion, which he had been protecting from the rain.  The stranger
stumbled over the cloak as he got in, and, cursing the step, bade
the man drive like something which had no connection with driving.
But, as they turned, the windmiller ran out and after them.

"Stop, sir!" he cried.

"Well, what now?" said the stranger, sharply, as the horse was
pulled back on his haunches.

"Is it named?" gasped the miller.

"Oh, yes, all that sort of thing," was the impatient reply.

"And what name?" asked the miller.

"Jan.  J, A, N," said the stranger, shouting against the blustering
wind.

"And--and--the other name?" said the windmiller, who was now
standing close to the stranger's ear.

"What is yours?" he asked, with a sharp look of his dark eyes.

"Lake--Abel," said the windmiller.

"It is his also, henceforth," said the stranger, waving his hand, as
if to close the subject,--"Jan Lake.  Drive on, will you?"

The horse started forward, and they whirled away down the wet, gray
road.  And before the miller had regained his mill, the carriage was
a distant speck upon the storm.



CHAPTER II. THE MILLER'S CALCULATIONS.--HIS HOPES AND FEARS.--THE
NURSE-BOY.--CALM.

The windmiller went back to his work.  He had risked something over
this business in leaving the mill in the hands of others, even for
so short a time.  Then the storm abated somewhat.  The wind went
round, and blew with less violence a fine steady breeze.  The miller
began to think of going into the dwelling-room for a bit of supper
to carry him through his night's work.  And yet he lingered about
returning to his wife in her present mood.

He stuck the sharp point of his windmiller's candlestick {1} into a
sack that stood near, and drawing up a yellow canvas "sample bag "--
which served him as a purse--from the depths of his pocket, he began
to count the coins by the light of the candle.  He counted them over
several times with increasing satisfaction, and made several slow
but sure calculations as to the sum of ten shillings a week by the
month, the quarter, the half, and the whole year.  He then began
another set of calculations of a kind less pleasant, especially to
an honest man,--his debts.

"There's a good bit to the doctor for both times," he murmured; "and
there's the coffin, and something at the Heart of Oak for the
bearers, and a couple of bottles red wine there, too, for the
missus, when she were so bad.  And both the boys had new shoes to
follow in,--she would have it they should follow"-- And so on, and
so on, the windmiller ran up the list of his petty debts, and saw
his way to paying them.  Then he put the money back into the sample
bag, and folded it very neatly, and stowed it away.  And then he
drew near the inner door, and peeped into the room.

His poor wife seemed to be in no better case than before.  She sat
on the old rocking-chair, swinging backwards and forwards, and
beating her hands upon her knees in silence, and making no movement
to comfort the wailing little creature on the bed.

For the first time there came upon the windmiller a sense of the
fact that it is an uncertain and a rather dangerous game to drive a
desperate woman into a corner.  His missus was as soft-hearted a
soul as ever lived, and for her to sit unmoved by the weeping of a
neglected child was a proof that something was very far wrong
indeed.  One or two nasty stories of what tender-hearted women had
done when "crazed" by grief haunted him.  The gold seemed to grow
hot at the bottom of his pocket.  He wished he had got at the
stranger's name and address, in case it should be desirable to annul
the bargain.  He wished the missus would cry again, that silence was
worse than any thing.  He wished it did not just happen to come into
his head that her grandmother went "melancholy mad" when she was
left a young widow, and that she had had an uncle in business who
died of softening of the brain.

He wished she would move across the room and take up the child, with
an intensity that almost amounted to prayer.  And, in the votive
spirit which generally comes with such moments, he mentally resolved
that, if his missus would but "take to" the infant, he would humor
her on all other points just now to the best of his power.

A strange fulfilment often treads on the heels of such vows.  At
this moment the wailing of the baby disturbed the miller's eldest
son as he lay in the press-bed.  He was only seven years old, but he
had been nurse-boy to his dead sister during the brief period of her
health,--the more exclusively so, that the miller's wife was then
weakly,--and had watched by her sick cradle with a grief scarcely
less than that of the mother.  He now crept out and down the
coverlet to the wailing heap of clothes, with a bright, puzzled look
on his chubby face.

"Mother," he said, "mother!  Is the little un come back?"

"No, no!" she cried.  "That's not our'n.  It's--it's another one."

"Have the Lord sent us another?" said the boy, lifting the peak of
the little hood from the baby's eye, into which it was hanging, and
then fairly gathering the tiny creature, by a great effort, into his
arms, with the daring of a child accustomed to playing nurse to one
nearly as heavy as himself.  "I do be glad of that, mother.  The
Lord sent the other one in the night, too, mother; that night we
slept in the round-house.  Do 'ee mind?  Whishty, whishty, love!
Eh, mother, what eyes!  Whishty, whishty, then!  I'M seeing to thee,
I am."

There was something like a sob in the miller's own throat, but his
wife rose, and, running to the bed, fell on her knees, and with such
a burst of weeping as is the thaw of bitter grief gathered her
eldest child and the little outcast together to her bosom.

At this moment another head was poked up from the bedclothes, and
the second child began to say its say, hoping, perhaps, thereby to
get a share of attention and kisses as well as the other.

"I seed a lady and genle'm," it broke forth, "and was feared of un.
They was going out of doors.  The genle'm look back at us, but the
lady went right on.  I didn' see her face."

Matters were now in a domestic and straightforward condition, and
the windmiller no longer hesitated to come in.  But he was less
disposed to a hard and triumphant self-satisfaction than was common
with him when his will ended well.  A poor and unsuccessful career
had, indeed, something to do with the hardness of his nature, and in
this flush of prosperity he felt softened, and resolved inwardly to
"let the missus take her time," and come back to her ordinary
condition without interference.

"Shall un have a bit of supper, missus?" was his cheerful greeting
on coming in.  "But take your time," he added, seeing her busy with
the baby, "take your time."

By-and-by the nurse-boy took the child, and the woman bustled about
the supper.  She was still but half reconciled, and slapped the
plates on to the table with a very uncommon irritability.

The windmiller ate a hearty supper and washed it well down with
home-made ale, under the satisfactory feeling that he could pay for
more when he wanted it.  And as he began to plug his pipe with
tobacco, and his wife rocked the new-comer at her breast, he said
thoughtfully, -

"Do 'ee think, missus, that woman 'ud be the mother of un?"

"Mother!" cried his wife, scornfully.  "She've never been a mother,
maester; of this nor any other one.  To see her handle it was enough
for me.  The boy himself could see she never so much as looked back
at un.  To bring an infant out a night like this, too, and leave it
with strangers.  Mother, indeed, says he!"

"Take your time, missus, take your time!" murmured the miller in his
head.  He did not speak aloud, he only puffed his pipe.

"Do you suppose the genle'm be the father, missus?" he suggested, as
he rose to go back to his work.

"Maybe," said his wife, briefly; "I can't speak one way or another
to the feelings of men-folk."

This blow was hit straight out, but the windmiller forbore reply.
He was not altogether ill-pleased by it, for the woman's unwonted
peevishness broke down in new tears over the child, whom she bore
away to bed, pouring forth over it half inarticulate indignation
against its unnatural parents.

"She've a soft heart, have the missus," said the windmiller,
thoughtfully, as he went to the outer door.  "I'm in doubts if she
won't take to it more than her own yet.  But she shall have her own
time."

The storm had passed.  The wolds lay glistening and dreary under a
watery sky, but all was still.  The windmiller looked upwards
mechanically.  To be weatherwise was part of his trade.  But his
thoughts were not in the clouds to-night.  He brought the sample
bag, without thinking of it, to the surface of his pocket, and
dropped it slowly back again, murmuring, "Ten shilling a week."

And as he turned again to his night's work he added, with a nod of
complete conviction, "It'll more'n keep HE."



CHAPTER III.

THE WINDMILLER'S WORDS COME TRUE.--THE RED SHAWL.--IN THE CLOUDS.--
NURSING V. PIG-MINDING.--THE ROUND-HOUSE.--THE MILLER'S THUMB.

Strange to say, the windmiller's idea came true in time,--the
foster-child was the favorite.

He was the youngest of the family, for the mother had no more
children.  This goes for something.

Then, when she had once got over her repugnance to adopting him, he
did do much to heal the old grief, and to fill the empty place in
her heart as well as in the cradle.

He was a frail, fretful little creature, with a very red face just
fading into yellow, about as much golden down on his little pate as
would furnish a moth with plumage, and eyes like sloe-berries.  It
was fortunate rather than otherwise that he was so ailing for some
weeks that the good wife's anxieties came over again, and, in the
triumph of being this time successful, much of the bitterness of the
old loss passed away.

In a month's time he looked healthy, if not absolutely handsome.
The windmiller's wife, indeed, protested that he was lovely, and she
never wearied of marvelling at the unnatural conduct of those who
had found it in their hearts to intrust so sweet a child to the care
of strangers; though it must be confessed that nothing would have
pleased her less than the arrival of two doting and conscientious
parents to reclaim him.

Indeed, pity had much to do with the large measure of love that she
gave to the deserted child.  A meaner sentiment, too, was not quite
without its influence in the predominance which he gradually gained
over his foster brothers and sisters.  There was little enough to be
proud of in all that could be guessed as to his parentage (the
windmiller knew nothing), but there was scope for any amount of
fancy; and if the child displayed any better manners or talents than
the other children, Mrs. Lake would purse her lips, and say, with a
somewhat shabby pride, -

"Anybody may see 'tis gentry born."

"I've been thinking," said the windmiller, one day, "that if that
there woman weren't the mother, 'tis likely the mother's dead."

"'Tis likely, too," said his wife; and her kindness abounded the
more towards the motherless child.  Little Abel was nurse-boy to it,
as he had been to his sister.  Not much more than a baby himself, he
would wrap an old shawl round the baby who was quite a baby, stagger
carefully out at the door, and drop dexterously--baby uppermost--on
to the short, dry grass that lay for miles about the mill.

The shawl was a special shawl, though old.  It was red, and the
bright color seemed to take the child's fancy; he was never so good
as when playing upon the gay old rag.  His black eyes would sparkle,
and his tiny fingers clutch at it, when the mother put it about him
as he swayed in Abel's courageous grasp.  And then Abel would spread
it for him, like an eastern prayer carpet, under the shadow of the
old mill.

Little need had he of any medicine, when the fresh strong air that
blew about the downs was filling his little lungs for most of the
day.  Little did he want toys, as he lay on his red shawl gazing
upwards hour by hour, with Abel to point out every change in their
vast field of view.

It is a part of a windmiller's trade to study the heavens, and Abel
may have inherited a taste for looking skywards.  Then, on these
great open downs there is so much sky to be seen, you can hardly
help seeing it, and there is not much else to look at.  Had they
lived in a village street, or even a lane, Abel and his charge might
have taken to other amusements,--to games, to grubbing in hedges, or
amid the endless treasures of ditches.  But as it was, they lay hour
after hour and looked at the sky, as at an open picture-book with
ever-changing leaves.

"Look 'ee here!" the nurse-boy would cry.  "See to the crows, the
pretty black crows!  Eh, there be a lapwing!  Lap-py, lap-py, lap-
py, there he go!  Janny catch un!"

And the baby would stretch his arms responsive to Abel's expressive
signs, and cry aloud for the vanishing bird.

If no living creature crossed the ether, there were the clouds.
Sometimes a long triangular mass of small white fleecy clouds would
stretch across half the heavens, having its shortest side upon the
horizon, and its point at the zenith, where one white fleece seemed
to be leading a gradually widening flock across the sky.

"See then!" the nurse-boy would cry.  "See to the pretty sheep up
yonder!  Janny mind un!  So! so!"

And if some small gray scud, floating lower, ran past the far-away
cirrus, Abel would add with a quaint seriousness, "'Tis the sheep-
dog.  How he runs then!  Bow-wow!"

At sunset such a flock wore golden fleeces, and to them, and to the
crimson hues about them, the little Jan stretched his fingers, and
crowed, as if he would have clutched the western sky as he clutched
his own red shawl.

But Abel was better pleased when, in the dusk, the flock became dark
gray.

"They be Master Salter's pigs now," said he.  For pigs in Abel's
native place were both plentiful and black; and he had herded Master
Salter's flock (five and twenty black, and three spotted) for a
whole month before his services were required as nurse-boy to his
sister.

But for the coming of the new baby, he would probably have gone back
to the pigs.  And he preferred babies.  A baby demands attention as
well as a herd of pigs, but you can get it home.  It does not run
off in twenty-eight different directions, just when you think you
have safely turned the corner into the village.

Master Salter's swine suffered neglect at the hands of several
successors to the office Abel had held, and Master Salter--whilst
alluding to these in indignant terms as "young varments," "gallus-
birds," and so forth--was pleased to express his regret that the
gentle and trustworthy Abel had given up pig-minding for nursing.

The pigs' loss was the baby's gain.  No tenderer or more careful
nurse could the little Jan have had.  And he throve apace.

The windmiller took more notice of him than he had been wont to do
of his own children in their babyhood.  He had never been a playful
or indulgent father, but he now watched with considerable interest
the child who, all unconsciously, was bringing in so much "grist to
the mill."

When the weather was not fine enough for them to be out of doors,
Abel would play with his charge in the round-house, and the
windmiller never drove him out of the mill, as at one time he would
have done.  Now and then, too, he would pat the little Jan's head,
and bestow a word of praise on his careful guardian.

It may be well, by-the-by, to explain what a round-house is.  Some
of the brick or tower mills widen gradually and evenly to the base.
Others widen abruptly at the lowest story, which stands out all
round at the bottom of the mill, and has a roof running all round
too.  The projection is, in fact, an additional passage, encircling
the bottom story of the windmill.  It is the round-house.  If you
take a pill-box to represent the basement floor of a tower-mill, and
then put another pill-box two or three sizes larger over it, you
have got the circular passage between the two boxes, and have added
a round-house to the mill.  The round-house is commonly used as a
kind of store-room.

Abel Lake's windmill had no separate dwelling-house.  His
grandfather had built the windmill, and even his father had left it
to the son to add a dwelling-house, when he should perhaps have
extended his resources by a bit of farming or some other business,
such as windmillers often add to their trade proper.  But that
calamity of the broken sails had left Abel Lake no power for further
outlay for many years, and he had to be content to live in the mill.

The dwelling-room was the inner part of the basement floor.  Near
the door which led from this into the round-house was the ladder
leading to the next story, and close by that the opening through
which the sacks of grain were drawn up above.  The story above the
basement held the millstones and the "smutting" machine, for
cleaning dirty wheat.  The next above that held the dressing
machine, in which the bran was separated from the flour.  In the
next above that were the corn-bins.  To the next above that the
grain was drawn up from the basement in the first instance.  The top
story of all held the machinery connected with the turning of the
sails.  Ladders led from story to story, and each room had two
windows on opposite sides of the mill.

Use is second nature, and all the sounds which haunt a windmill were
soon as familiar and as pleasant to the little Jan as if he had been
born a windmiller's son.  Through many a windy night he slept as
soundly as a sailor in a breeze which might disturb the nerves of a
land-lubber.  And when the north wind blew keen and steadily, and
the chains jangled as the sacks of grist went upwards, and the
millstones ground their monotonous music above his head, these
sounds were only as a lullaby to his slumbers, and disturbed him no
more than they troubled his foster-mother, to whom the revolving
stones ground out a homely and welcome measure:  "Dai-ly bread, dai-
ly bread, dai-ly bread."

For another sign of his being a true child of the mill, his nurse
Abel anxiously watched.

Though Abel preferred nursing to pig-minding, he had a higher
ambition yet, which was to begin his career as a windmiller.  It was
not likely that he could be of use to his father for a year or two,
and the fact that he was of very great use to his mother naturally
tended to delay his promotion to the mill.

Mrs. Lake was never allowed to say no to her husband, and she seemed
to be unable, and was certainly unwilling, to say it to her
children.  Happily, her eldest child was of so sweet and docile a
temper that spoiling did him little harm; but even with him her
inability to say no got the mother into difficulties.  She was
obliged to invent excuses to "fub off," when she could neither
consent nor refuse.

So, when Abel used to cling about her, crying, "Mother dear, when'll
I be put t'help father in the mill?  Do 'ee ask un to let me come in
now!  I be able to sweep 's well as Gearge.  I sweeps the room for
thee,"--she had not the heart or the courage to say, "I want thee,
and thy father doesn't," but she would take the boy's hand tenderly
in hers, and making believe to examine his thumbs with a purpose,
would reply, "Wait a bit, love.  Thee's a sprack boy, and a good un,
but thee's not rightly got the miller's thumb."

And thus it came about that Abel was for ever sifting bits of flour
through his finger and thumb, to obtain the required flatness and
delicacy which marks the latter in a miller born; and playing
lovingly with little Jan on the floor of the round-house, he would
pass some through the baby's fingers also, crying, -

"Sift un, Janny! sift un!  Thee's a miller's lad, and thee must have
a miller's thumb."



CHAPTER IV.

BLACK AS SLANS.--VAIR AND VOOLISH.--THE MILLER AND HIS MAN.

It was a great and important time to Abel when Jan learned to walk;
but, as he was neither precocious nor behindhand in this respect,
his biographer may be pardoned for not dwelling on it at any length.

He had a charming demure little face, chiefly differing from the
faces of the other children of the district by an overwhelming
superiority in the matter of forehead.

Mrs. Lake had had great hopes that he would differ in another
respect also.

Most of the children of the neighborhood were fair.  Not fair as so
many North-country children are, with locks of differing, but
equally brilliant, shades of gold, auburn, red, and bronze; but
white-headed, and often white-faced, with white-lashed inexpressive
eyes, as if they had been bleaching through several generations.

Now, when the dark bright eyes of the little Jan first came to be of
tender interest with Mrs. Lake, she fully hoped, and constantly
prophesied, that he would be "as black as a rook;" a style of
complexion to which she gave a distinct preference, though the
miller was fair by nature as well as white by trade.  Jan's eyes
seemed conclusive.

"Black as slans they be," said his foster-mother.  And slans meant
sloe-berries where Mrs. Lake was born.

An old local saying had something perhaps to do with her views:  -

     "Lang and lazy,
        Black and proud;
      Vair and voolish,
        Little and loud."

"Fair and foolish" youngsters certainly abounded in the neighborhood
to an extent which justified a wish for a change.

As to pride, meek Mrs. Lake was far from regarding it as a failing
in those who had any thing to be proud of, such as black hair and a
possible connection with the gentry.  And fate having denied to her
any chance of being proud or aggressive on her own account, she
derived a curious sort of second-hand satisfaction from seeing these
qualities in those who belonged to her.  It did to some extent
console her for the miller's roughness to herself, to hear him
rating George.  And she got a sort of reflected dignity out of being
able to say, "My maester's a man as will have his way."

But her hopes were not realized.  That yellow into which the
beefsteak stage of Jan's infant complexion had faded was not
destined to deepen into gipsy hues.  It gave place to the tints of
the China rose, and all the wind and sunshine on the downs could not
tan, though they sometimes burnt, his cheeks.  The hair on his
little head became more abundant, but it kept its golden hue.  His
eyes remained dark,--a curious mixture; for as to hair and
complexion he was irredeemably fair.

The mill had at least one "vair and voolish" inmate, by common
account, though by his own (given in confidence to intimate friends)
he was "not zuch a vool as he looked."

This was George Sannel, the miller's man.

Master Lake had had a second hand in to help on that stormy night
when Jan made his first appearance at the mill; but as a rule he
only kept one man, whom he hired for a year at a time, at the mop or
hiring fair held yearly in the next town.

George, or Gearge as he was commonly called, had been more than two
years in the windmill, and was looked upon in all respects as "one
of the family."  He slept on a truckle-bed in the round-house,
which, though of average size, would not permit him to stretch his
legs too recklessly without exposing his feet to the cold.

For "Gearge" was six feet one and three-quarters in his stockings.

He had a face in some respects like a big baby's.  He had a turn-up
nose, large smooth cheeks, a particularly innocent expression, a
forehead hardly worth naming, small dull eyes, with a tendency to
inflammation of the lids which may possibly have hindered the lashes
from growing, and a mouth which was generally open, if he were
neither eating nor sucking a "bennet."  When this countenance was
bathed in flour, it might be an open question whether it were
improved or no.  It certainly looked both "vairer" and more
"voolish!"

There is some evidence to show that he was "lazy," as well as
"lang," and yet he and Master Lake contrived to pull on together.

Either because his character was as childlike as his face, and
because--if stupid and slothful by nature--he was also of so
submissive, susceptible, and willing a temper that he disarmed the
justest wrath; or because he was, as he said, not such a fool as he
looked, and had in his own lubberly way taken the measure of the
masterful windmiller to a nicety, George's most flagrant acts of
neglect had never yet secured his dismissal.

Indeed, it really is difficult to realize that any one who is lavish
of willingness by word can wilfully and culpably fail in deed.

"I be a uncommon vool, maester, sartinly," blubbered George on one
occasion when the miller was on the point of turning him off, as a
preliminary step on the road to the "gallus," which Master Lake
expressed his belief that he was "sartin sure to come to."  And, as
he spoke, George made dismal daubs on his befloured face with his
sleeve, as he rubbed his eyes with his arm from elbow to wrist.

"Sech a governor as you be, too!" he continued.  "Poor mother! she
allus said I should come to no good, such a gawney as I be!  No more
I shouldn't but for you, Master Lake, a-keeping of me on.  Give un
another chance, sir, do 'ee!  I be mortal stoopid, sir, but I'd work
my fingers to the bwoan for the likes of you, Master Lake!"

George stayed on, and though the very next time the windmiller was
absent his "voolish" assistant did not get so much as a toll-dish of
corn ground to flour, he was so full of penitence and promises that
he weathered that tempest and many a succeeding one.

On that very eventful night of the storm, and of Jan's arrival,
George's neglect had risked a recurrence of the sail catastrophe.
At least if the second man's report was to be trusted.

This man had complained to the windmiller that, during his absence
with the strangers, George, instead of doubling his vigilance now
that the men were left short-handed, had taken himself off under
pretext of attending to the direction of the wind and the position
of the sails outside, a most important matter, to which he had not,
after all, paid the slightest heed; and what he did with himself,
whilst leaving the mill to its fate and the fury of the storm, his
indignant fellow-servant professed himself "blessed if he knew."

But few people are as grateful as they should be when informed of
misconduct in their own servants.  It is a reflection on one's
judgment.

And unpardonable as George's conduct was, if the tale were true, the
words in which he couched his self-defence were so much more
grateful to the ears of the windmiller than the somewhat free and
independent style in which the other man expressed his opinion of
George's conduct and qualities, that the master took his servant's
part, and snubbed the informer for his pains.

In justice to George, too, it should be said that he stoutly and
repeatedly denied the whole story, with many oaths and imprecations
of horrible calamities upon himself if he were lying in the smallest
particular.  And this with reiteration so steady, and a countenance
so guileless and unmoved, as to contrast favorably with the face of
the other man, whose voice trembled and whose forehead flushed,
either with overwhelming indignation or with a guilty consciousness
that he was bearing false witness.

Master Lake employed him no more, and George stayed on.

But, for that matter, Master Lake's disposition was not one which
permitted him to profit by the best qualities of those connected
with him.  He was a bit of a tyrant, and more than one man, six
times as clever, and ten times as hard-working as George, had gone
when George would have stayed, from crossing words with the
windmiller.  The safety of the priceless sails, if all were true,
had been risked by the man he kept, and secured by the man he sent
away, but Master Lake was quite satisfied with his own decision.

"I bean't so fond myself of men as is so mortal sprack and fussy in
a strange place," the miller observed to Mrs. Lake in reference to
this matter.

Mrs. Lake had picked up several of her husband's bits of proverbial
wisdom, which she often flattered him by retailing to his face.

"Too hot to hold, mostly," was her reply, in knowing tones.

"Ay, ay, missus, so a be," said the windmiller.  And after a while
he added, "Gearge is slow, sartinly, mortal slow; but Gearge is
sure."



CHAPTER V.

THE POCKET-BOOK AND THE FAMILY BIBLE.--FIVE POUNDS' REWARD.

Of the strange gentleman who brought Jan to the windmill, the Lakes
heard no more, but the money was paid regularly through a lawyer in
London.

From this lawyer, indeed, Master Lake had heard immediately after
the arrival of his foster-son.

The man of business wrote to say that the gentleman who had visited
the mill on a certain night had, at that date, lost a pocket-book,
which he thought might have been picked up at the mill.  It
contained papers only valuable to the owner, and also a five-pound
note, which was liberally offered to the windmiller if he could find
the book, and forward it at once.

Master Lake began to have a kind of reckless, gambling sort of
feeling about luck.  Here would be an easily earned five pounds, if
he could but have the luck to find the missing property!  That ten
shillings a week had come pretty easily to him.  When all is said,
there ARE people into whose mouths the larks fall ready cooked!

The windmiller looked inside the mill and outside the mill, and
wandered a long way along the chalky road with his eyes downwards,
but he was no nearer to the five-pound note for his pains.  Then he
went to his wife, but she had seen nothing of the pocket-book; on
which her husband somewhat unreasonably observed that, "A might a
been zartin THEE couldn't help un!"

He next betook himself to George, who was slowly, and it is to be
hoped surely, sweeping out the round-house.

"Gearge, my boy," said the windmiller, in not too anxious tones,
"have 'ee seen a pocket-book lying about anywheres?"

George leaned upon his broom with one hand, and with the other
scratched his white head.

"What be a pocket-book, then, Master Lake?" said he, grinning, as if
at his own ignorance.

"Thee's eerd of a pocket-book before now, thee vool, sure-ly!" said
the impatient windmiller.

"I'se eerd of a pocket of hops, Master Lake," said George, after an
irritating pause, during which he still smiled, and scratched his
poll as if to stimulate recollection.

"Book--book--book! pocket-BOOK!" shouted the miller.  "If thee can't
read, thee knows what a book is, thee gawney!"

"What a vool I be, to be sure!" said George, his simple countenance
lighted up with a broader smile than before.  "I knows a book,
sartinly, Master Lake, I knows a book.  There's one," George
continued, speaking even slower than before,--"there's one inzide,
sir,--a big un.  On the shelf it be.  A Vamly Bible they calls un.
And I'm sartin sure it be there," he concluded, "for a hasn't been
moved since the last time you christened, Master Lake."

The miller turned away, biting his lip hard, to repress a useless
outburst of rage, and George, still smiling sweetly, spun the broom
dexterously between his hands, as a man spins the water out of a
stable mop.  Just before Master Lake had got beyond earshot, George
lowered the broom, and began to scratch his head once more.  "I be a
proper vool, sartinly," said he; and when the miller heard this, he
turned back.  "Mother allus said I'd no more sense in my yead than a
dumbledore," George candidly confessed.  And by a dumbledore he
meant a humble-bee.  "It do take me such a time to mind any thing,
sir."

"Well, never mind, Gearge," said the miller; "if thee's slow, thee's
sure.  What do 'ee remember about the book, now, Gearge?  A don't
mind giving thee five shilling, if thee finds un, Gearge."

"A had un down at the burying, I 'member quite well now, sir.  To
put the little un's name in 'twas.  I thowt a hadn't been down zince
christening, I be so stoopid sartinly."

"What are you talking about, ye vool?" roared the miller.

"The book, sir, sartinly," said George, his honest face beaming with
good-humor.  "The Vamly Bible, Master Lake."

And as the windmiller went off muttering something which the Family
Bible would by no means have sanctioned, George returned chuckling
to a leisurely use of his broom on the round-house floor.

Master Lake did not find the pocket-book, and after a day or two it
was advertised in a local paper, and a reward of five pounds offered
for it.

George Sannel was seated one evening in the "Heart of Oak" inn,
sipping some excellent home-brewed ale, which had been warmed up for
his consumption in a curious funnel-shaped pipkin, when his long
lop-ears caught a remark made by the inn-keeper, who was reading out
bits from the local paper to a small audience, unable to read it for
themselves.

"Five pound reward!" he read.  "Lor massy!  There be a sum to be
easily earned by a sharp-eyed chap with good luck on 's side."

"And how then, Master Chuter?" said George, pausing, with the
steaming mug half-way to his lips.

"Haw, haw!" roared the inn-keeper:  "you be a sharp-eyed chap, too!
Do 'ee think 'twould suit thee, Gearge?  Thee's a sprack chap,
sartinly, Gearge!"

"Haw, haw, haw!" roared the other members of the company, as they
slowly realized Master Chuter's irony at the expense of the
"voolish" Gearge.

George took their rough banter in excellent part.  He sipped his
beer, and grinned like a cat at his own expense.  But after the
guffaws had subsided, he said, "Thee's not told un about that five
pound yet, Master Chuter."

The curiosity of the company was by this time aroused, and Master
Chuter explained:  "'Tis a gentleman by the name of Ford as is
advertising for a pocket-book, a seems to have lost on the downs,
near to Master Lake's windmill.  'Tis thy way, too, Gearge, after
all.  Thee must get up yarly, Gearge.  'Tis the yarly bird catches
the worm.  And tell Master Lake from me, 'll have all the young
varments in the place a driving their pigs up to his mill, to look
for the pocket-book, while they makes believe to be minding their
pigs."

"Tis likely, too," said George.  And the two or three very aged
laborers in smocks, and one other lubberly boy, who composed the
rest of the circle, added, severally and collectively, "'Tis likely,
too."

But, as George beat his way home over the downs in the dusk, he said
aloud, under cover of the roaring wind, and in all the security of
the open country, -

"Vive pound! vive pound!  And a offered me vive shilling for un.
Master Lake, you be dog-ged cute; but Gearge bean't quite such a
vool as a looks."

After a short time the advertisement was withdrawn.



CHAPTER VI.

GEORGE GOES COURTING.--GEORGE AS AN ENEMY.--GEORGE AS A FRIEND.--
ABEL PLAYS SCHOOL-MASTER.--THE LOVE-LETTER.--MOERDYK.--THE MILLER-
MOTH.--AN ANCIENT DITTY.

One day George Sannel asked and obtained leave for a holiday.

On the morning in question, he dressed himself in the cleanest of
smocks, greased his boots, stuck a bloody warrior, or dark-colored
wallflower, in his bosom, put a neatly folded, clean cotton
handkerchief into his pocket,--which, even if he did not use it, was
a piece of striking dandyism,--and scrubbed his honest face to such
a point of cleanliness that Mrs. Lake was almost constrained to
remark that she thought he must be going courting.

George did not blush,--he never blushed,--but he looked "voolish"
enough to warrant the suspicion that his errand was a tender one,
and he had no other reason to give for his spruce appearance

It was, perhaps, in his confusion that he managed to convey a
mistaken notion of the place to which he was going to Mrs. Lake.
She was under the impression that he went to the neighboring town,
whereas he went to one in an exactly opposite direction, and some
miles farther away.

He went to the bank, too, which seems an unlikely place for tender
tryst; but George's proceedings were apt to be less direct than the
simplicity of his looks and speech would have led a stranger to
suppose.  When he reached home, the windmiller and his family were
going to bed, for the night was still, and the mill idle.  George
betook himself at once to where his truckle-bed stood in the round-
house, and proceeded to light his mill-candlestick, which was stuck
into the wall.

From the chink into which it was stuck he then counted seven bricks
downwards, and the seventh yielded to a slight effort and came out.
It was the door, so to speak, of a hole in the wall of the mill,
from which he drew a morocco-bound pocket-book.  After an uneasy
glance over his shoulder, to make sure that the long dark shadow
which stretched from his own heels, and shifted with the draught in
which the candle flared, was not the windmiller creeping up behind
him, he took a letter out of the book and held it to the light as if
to read it.  But he never turned the page, and at last replaced it
with a sigh.  Then he put the pocket-book back into the hole, and
pushed in after it his handkerchief, which was tied round something
which chinked as he pressed it in.  Then he replaced the brick, and
went to bed.  He said nothing about the bank in the morning nor
about the hole in the mill-wall; and he parried Mrs. Lake's
questions with gawky grins and well-assumed bashfulness.

Abel overheard his mother's jokes on the subject of "Gearge's young
'ooman," and they recurred to him when he and George formed a
curious alliance, which demands explanation.

It was not solely because the windmiller looked favorably upon the
little Jan that he and Abel were now allowed to wander in the
business parts of the windmill, when they could not be out of doors,
to an extent never before permitted to the children.  Part of the
change was due to a change in the miller's man.

However childlike in some respects himself, George was not fond of
children, and he had hitherto seemed to have a particular spite
against Abel.  He, quite as often as the miller, would drive the boy
from the round-house, and thwart his fancy for climbing the ladders
to see the processes of the different floors.

Abel would have been happy for hours together watching the great
stones grind, or the corn poured by golden showers into the hopper
on its way to the stones below.  Many a time had he crept up and
hidden himself behind a sack; but George seemed to have an impish
ingenuity in discovering his hiding-places, and would drive him out
as a dog worries a cat, crying, "Come out, thee little varment!
Master Lake he don't allow thee hereabouts."

The cleverness of the miller's man in discovering poor Abel's
retreats probably arose from the fact that he had so rooted a
dislike for the routine work of his daily duties that he would
rather employ himself about the mill in any way than by attending to
the mill-business, and that his idleness and stupidity over work
were only equalled by his industry and shrewdness in mischief.

Poor Abel had a dread of the great, gawky, mischievous-looking man,
which probably prevented his complaining to his mother of many a sly
pinch and buffet which he endured from him.  And George took some
pains to keep up this wholesome awe of himself, by vague and
terrifying speeches, and by a trick of what he called "dropping on"
poor Abel in the dusk, with hideous grimaces and uncouth sounds.

He once came thus upon Abel in an upper floor, and the boy fled from
him so hastily that he caught his foot in the ladder and fell
headlong.  Though it must have been quite uncertain for some moments
whether Abel had not broken his neck, the miller's man displayed no
anxiety.  He only clapped his hands upon his knees, in a sort of
uncouth ecstasy of spite, saying, "Down a comes vlump, like a twoad
from roost.  Haw, haw, haw!"

Happily, Abel fell with little more damage to himself than the mill-
cats experienced in many such a tumble, as they fled before the
tormenting George.

But, after all this, it was with no small surprise that Abel found
himself the object of attentions from the miller's man, which bore
the look of friendliness.

At first, when George made civil speeches, and invited Abel to "see
the stwones a-grinding," he only felt an additional terror, being
convinced that mischief was meant in reality.  But, when days and
weeks went by, and he wandered unmolested from floor to floor, with
many a kindly word from George, and not a single cuff or nip, the
sweet-tempered Abel began to feel gratitude, and almost an
affection, for his quondam tormentor.

George, for his part, had hitherto done some violence to his own
feelings by his constant refusal to allow Abel to help him to sweep
the mill or couple the sacks for lifting.  He would have been only
too glad to put some of his own work on the shoulders of another,
had it not been for the vexatious thought that he would be giving
pleasure by so doing where he only wanted to annoy.  And in his very
unamiable disposition malice was a stronger quality even than
idleness.

But now, when for some reason best known to himself, he wished to
win Abel's regard, it was a slight recompense to him for restraining
his love of tormenting that he got a good deal of work out of Abel
at odd moments when the miller was away.  So well did he manage
this, that a marked improvement in the tidiness of the round-house
drew some praise from his master.

"Thee'll be a sprack man yet, Gearge," said the windmiller,
encouragingly.  "Thee takes the broom into the corners now."

"So I do," said George, unblushingly, "so I do.  But lor, Master
Lake, what a man you be to notice un!"  George's kinder demeanor
towards Abel began shortly after the coming of the little Jan, and
George himself accounted for it in the following manner:  -

"You do be kind to me now, Gearge," said Abel, gratefully, as he
stood one day, with the baby in his arms, watching the miller's man
emptying a sack of grain into the hopper.

"I likes to see thee with that babby, Abel," said George, pausing in
his work.  "Thee's a good boy, Abel, and careful.  I likes to do any
thing for thee, Abel."

"I wish I could do any thing for thee, Gearge," said Abel; "but I be
too small to help the likes of you, Gearge."

"If you're small, you're sprack," said the miller's man.  "Thee's a
good scholar, too, Abel.  I'll be bound thee can read, now?  And a
poor gawney like I doesn't know's letters."

"I can read a bit, Gearge," said Abel, with pride; "but I've been at
home a goodish while; but mother says she'll send I to school again
in spring, if the little un gets on well and walks."

"I wish I could read," said George, mournfully; "but time's past for
me to go to school, Abel; and who'd teach a great lummakin vool like
I his letters?"

"I would, Gearge, I would!" cried Abel, his eyes sparkling with
earnestness.  "I can teach thee thy letters, and by the time thee's
learned all I know, maybe I'll have been to school again, and
learned some more."

This was the foundation of a curious kind of friendship between Abel
and the miller's man.

On the same shelf with the "Vamly Bible," before alluded to, was a
real old horn-book, which had belonged to the windmiller's
grandmother.  It was simply a sheet on which the letters of the
alphabet, and some few words of one syllable, were printed, and it
was protected in its frame by a transparent front of thin horn,
through which the letters could be read, just as one sees the prints
through the ground-glass of "drawing slates."

From this horn-book Abel labored patiently in teaching George his
letters.  It was no light task.  George had all the cunning and
shrewdness with which he credited himself; but a denser head for any
intellectual effort could hardly have been found for the seeking.
Still they struggled on, and as George went about the mill he might
have been heard muttering, -

"A B C G.  No!  Cuss me for a vool!  A B C _D_.  Why didn't they
whop my letters into I when a was a boy?  A B C"--and so persevering
with an industry which he commonly kept for works of mischief.

One evening he brought home a newspaper from the Heart of Oak, and
when Mrs. Lake had taken the baby, he persuaded Abel to come into
the round-house and give him a lesson.  Abel could read so much of
it that George was quite overwhelmed by his learning.

"Thee be's mortal larned, Abel, sartinly.  But I'll never read like
thee," he added, despairingly.  "Drattle th' old witch; why didn't
she give I some schooling?"  He spoke with spiteful emphasis, and
Abel, too well used to his rough language to notice the uncivil
reference to his mother, said with some compassion, -

"Were you never sent to school then, Gearge?"

"They should ha' kept me there," said George, self-defensively.  "I
played moocher," he continued,--by which he meant truant,--"and then
they whopped I, and a went home to mother, and she kept un at home,
the old vool!"

"Well, Gearge, thee must work hard, and I'll teach thee, Gearge,
I'll teach thee!" said little Abel, proudly.  "And by-and-by,
Gearge, we'll get a slate, and I'll teach thee to write too, Gearge,
that I will!"

George's small eyes gave a slight squint, as they were apt to do
when he was thinking profoundly.

"Abel," said he, "can thee read writing, my boy?"

"I think I could, Gearge," said Abel, "if 'twas pretty plain."

"Abel, my boy," said George, after a pause, with a broad sweet smile
upon his "voolish" face, "go to the door and see if the wind be
rising at all; us mustn't forget th' old mill, Abel, with us
larning.  Sartinly not, Abel, mun."

Proud of the implied partnership in the care of the mill, Abel
hastened to the outer door.  As he passed the inner one, leading
into the dwelling-room, he could hear his mother crooning a strange,
drony, old local ditty, as she put the little Jan to sleep.  As Abel
went out, she was singing the first verse:  -

     "The swallow twitters on the barn,
      The rook is cawing on the tree,
      And in the wood the ringdove coos,
      But my false love hath fled from me."

Abel opened the door, and looked out.  One of those small white
moths known as "millers" went past him.  The night was still,--so
utterly still that no sound of any sort whatever broke upon the ear.
In dead silence and loneliness stood the mill.  Even the miller-moth
had gone; and a cat ran in by Abel's legs, as if the loneliness
without were too much for her.  The sky was gray.

Abel went back to the round-house, where George was struggling to
fix the candlestick securely in the wall.

"Cuss the thing!" he exclaimed, whilst the skin of his face took a
mottled hue that was the nearest approach he ever made to a blush.
"The tallow've been a dropping, Abel, my boy.  I think 'twas the
wind when you opened the door, maybe.  And I've been a trying to fix
un more firmly.  That's all, Abel; that's all."

"There ain't no signs of wind," said Abel.  "It's main quiet and
unked too outside, Gearge.  And I do think it be like rain.  There
was a miller-moth, Gearge; do that mean any thing?"

"I can't say," said George.  "I bean't weatherwise myself, Abel.
But if there be no wind, there be no work, Abel; so us may go back
to our larning.  Look here, my boy," he added, as Abel reseated
himself on the grain-sack which did duty as chair of instruction,
and drawing, as he spoke, a letter forth to the light; "come to the
candle, Abel, and see if so be thee can read this, but don't tell
any one I showed it thee, Abel."

"Not me, Gearge," said Abel, warmly; and he added,--"Be it from thy
young 'ooman, Gearge?"

No rustic swain ever simpered more consciously or looked more
foolish than George under this accusation, as he said, "Be quiet,
Abel, do 'ee."

"She be a good scholar, too!" said Abel, looking admiringly at the
closely written sheet.

George could hardly disguise the sudden look of fury in his face,
but he hastily covered up the letter with his hands in such a manner
as only to leave the first word on the page visible.  There was a
deeply cunning reason for this clever manoeuvre.  George held
himself to be pretty "cute," and he reckoned that, by only showing
one word at a time, he could effectually prevent any attempt on
Abel's part to read the letter himself without giving its contents
to George.  Like many other cunning people, George overreached
himself.  The first word was beyond Abel's powers, though he might
possibly have satisfied George's curiosity on one essential point,
by deciphering a name or two farther on.  But the clever George
concluded that he had boasted beyond his ability, so he put the
letter away.  Abel tried hard at the one word which George
exhibited, and gazed silently at it for some time with a puzzled
face.  "Spell it, mun, spell it!" cried the miller's man,
impatiently.  It was a process which he had seen to succeed, when a
long word had puzzled his teacher in the newspaper, before now.

"M O E R, mower; D Y K, dik," said Abel.  But he looked none the
wiser for the effort.

"Mower dik!  What be that?" said George, peering at the word.
"Do'ee think it be Mower dik, Abel?"

"I be sure," said Abel.

"Or do 'ee think 'tis 'My dear Dick'?" suggested George, anxiously,
and with a sort of triumph in his tone, as if that were quite what
he expected.

"No, no.  'Tis an O, Gearge, that second letter.  Besides, twould be
My dear Gearge to thee, thou knows."

Again the look with which the miller's man favored Abel was far from
pleasant.  But he controlled his voice to its ordinary drawl (always
a little slower and more simple sounding, when he specially meant
mischief).

"So 'twould, Abel.  So 'twould.  What a vool I be, to be sure!  But
give it to I now.  We'll look at it another time, Abel."

"I be very sorry, Gearge," said Abel, who had a consciousness that
the miller's man was ill-pleased in spite of his civility.  "It be
so long since I was at school, and it be such a queer word.  Do 'ee
think she can have spelt un wrong, Gearge?"

"'Tis likely she have," said George, regaining his composure.

"Abel!  Abel!  Abel!" cried the mother from the dwelling-room.
"Come to bed, child!"

"Good-night, Gearge.  I'm main sorry to be so stupid, Gearge," said
Abel, and off he ran.

Mrs. Lake was walking up and down, rocking the little Jan in her
arms, who was wailing fretfully.

"I be puzzled to know what ails un," said Mrs. Lake, in answer to
Abel's questions.  "He be quite in a way tonight.  But get thee to
bed, Abel."

And though Abel begged hard to be allowed to try his powers of
soothing with the little Jan, Mrs. Lake insisted upon keeping the
baby herself; and Abel undressed, and crept into the press-bed.  He
fell asleep in spite of a somewhat disturbed mind.  That mysterious
word and George's evident displeasure worried him, and he was
troubled also by the unusual fretfulness of the little Jan, and the
sound of sorrow in his baby wail.  His last waking thoughts were a
strange mixture, passing into stranger dreams.

The word Moerdyk danced before his eyes, but brought no meaning with
it.  Jan's cries troubled him, and with both there blended the
droning of the ancient plaintive ditty, which the foster-mother sang
over and over again as she rocked the child in her arms.  That wail
of the baby's must have in some strange manner recalled the first
night of his arrival, when Abel found him wailing on the bed.  For
the fierce eyes of the strange gentleman haunted Abel's dreams, but
in the face of the miller's man.

The poor boy dreamed horribly of being "dropped on" by George, with
fierce black eyes added to the terrors of his uncouth grimaces.  He
seemed to himself to fly blindly and vainly through the mill from
his tormentor, till George was driven from his thoughts by his
coming suddenly upon the little Jan, wailing as he really did wail,
round whose head a miller-moth was sailing slowly, and singing in a
human voice:  -

     "The swallow twitters on the barn,
      The rook is cawing on the tree,
      And in the wood the ringdove coos,
      But my false love hath fled from me.

      Like tiny pipe of wheaten straw,
      The wren his little note doth swell,
      And every living thing that flies,
      Of his true love doth fondly tell.

      But I alone am left to pine,
      And sit beneath the withy tree;
      For truth and honesty be gone,
      And my false love hath fled from me."



CHAPTER VII.

ABEL GOES TO SCHOOL AGAIN.--DAME DATCHETT.--A COLUMN OF SPELLING.--
ABEL PLAYS MOOCHER.--THE MILLER'S MAN CANNOT MAKE UP HIS MIND.

Abel went to school again in the spring, and, though George would
have been better pleased had he forgotten the whole affair, he
remembered the word in George's young woman's love-letter which had
puzzled him; and never was a spelling-lesson set him among the M's
that he did not hope to come across it and to be able to demand the
meaning of Moerdyk from his Dame.

Without the excuse of its coming in the column of spelling set by
herself, Abel dared not ask her to solve his puzzle; for never did
teacher more warmly resent questions which she was unable to answer
than Dame Datchett.

Abel could not fully make up his mind whether it should be looked up
among two-syllabled or three-syllabled words.  He decided for the
former, and one day brought his spelling-book to George in the
round-house.

"I've been a looking for that yere word, Gearge," said he.  "There's
lots of Mo's, but it bean't among 'em.  Here they be.  Words of two
syllables; M, Ma, Me, Mi; here they be, Mo."  And Abel began to
rattle off the familiar column at a good rate, George looking
earnestly over his shoulder, and following the boy's finger as it
moved rapidly down the page.  "Mocking, Modern, Mohawk, Molar,
Molly, Moment, Money, Moping, Moral, Mortal, Moses, Motive,
Movement."

"Stop a bit, mun," cried George; "what do all they words mean?  They
bothers me."

"I knows some of 'em," said Abel, "and I asked Dame Datchett about
the others, but she do be so cross; and I thinks some of 'em
bothered she too.  There's mocking.  I knows that.  'What's a
modern, Dame?' says I.  'A muddle-headed fellow the likes of you,'
says she.  'What's a mohawk, Dame?' says I.  'It's what you'll come
to before long, ye young hang-gallus,' says she.  I was feared on
her, Gearge, I can tell 'ee; but I tried my luck again.  'What's a
molar, Dame?' says I.  ''Tis a wus word than t'other,' says she;
'and, if 'ee axes me any more voolish questions, I'll break thee
yead for 'ee.'  Do 'ee think 'tis a very bad word, Gearge?" added
Abel, with a rather indefensible curiosity.

"I never heard un," said George.  And this was perhaps decisive
against the Dame's statement.  "And I don't believe un neither.  I
think it bothered she.  I believe 'tis a genteel word for a man as
catches oonts.  They call oonts MOLES in some parts, so p'r'aps they
calls a man as catches moles a molar, as they calls a man as drives
a mill a miller."

"'Tis likely too, Gearge," said Abel.  "Well!  Molly we knows.  And
moment, and moping, and moral."

"What's moral?" inquired George.

"'Tis what they put at the end of Vables, Gearge.  There's Vables at
the end of the spelling-book, and I've read un all.  There's the
Wolf and the Lamb, and" -

"I knows now," said George.  "'Tis like the last verse of that song
about the Harnet and the Bittle.  Go on, Abel."

"Mortal.  That's swearing.  Moses.  That's in the Bible, Gearge.
Motive.  I thought I'd try un just once more.  'What's a motive,
Dame?' says I.  'I've got un here,' says she, quite quiet-like.  But
I seed her feeling under 's chair, and I know'd 'twas for the strap,
and I ran straight off, spelling-book and all, Gearge."

"So thee've been playing moocher, eh?" said George, with an
unpleasant twinkle in his eyes.  "What'll Master Lake say to that?"

"Don't 'ee tell un, Gearge!" Abel implored; "and, O Gearge! let I
tell mother about the word.  Maybe she've heard tell of it.  Let I
show her the letter, Gearge.  She'll read it for 'ee.  She's a
scholard, is mother."

There was no mistaking now the wrath in George's face.  The fury
that is fed by fear blazes pretty strongly at all times.

"Look 'ee, Abel, my boy," said he, pinching Abel's shoulder till he
turned red and white with pain.  "If thee ever speaks of that letter
and that word to any mortal soul, I'll tell Master Lake thee plays
moocher, and I'll half kill thee myself.  Thee shall rue the day
ever thee was born!" he added, almost beside himself with rage and
terror.  And as, after a few propitiating words, Abel fled from the
mill, George ground his hands together and muttered, "Motive!  I
wish the old witch had motived every bone in thee body, or let me do
't!"

Master George Sannel was indeed a little irritable at this stage of
his career.  Like the miller, he had had one stroke of good luck,
but capricious fortune would not follow up the blow.

He had made five pounds pretty easily.  But how to turn some other
property of which he had become possessed to profit for himself was,
after months of waiting, a puzzle still.

He was well aware that his own want of education was the great
hindrance to his discovering for himself the exact worth of what he
had got.  And to his suspicious nature the idea of letting any one
else into his secret, even to gain help, was quite intolerable.

Abel seemed to be no nearer even to the one word that George had
showed him, after weeks of "schooling," and George himself
progressed so slowly in learning to read that he was at times
tempted to give up the effort in despair.

Of his late outburst against Abel he afterwards repented, as
impolitic, and was soon good friends again with his very placable
teacher.

Much of the time when he should have been at work did George spend
in "puzzling" over his position.  Sometimes, as from an upper window
of the mill he saw the little Jan in Abel's arms, he would mutter, -

"If a body were to kidnap un, would they advertise he, I wonders?"
and after some consideration would shake his white head doubtfully,
saying, "No, they wants to get rid of un, or they wouldn't have
brought un here."

Happily for poor little Jan, the unscrupulous rustic rejected the
next idea which came to him as too doubtful of success.

"I wonder if they'd come down something handsome to them as could
tell 'em the young varmint was off their hands for good and all.
'Twould save un ten shilling a week.  Ten shilling a week!  I heard
un with my own ears.  I'd a kep' un for five, if they'd asked me.  I
wonders now.  Little uns like that does get stole by gipsies
sometimes.  Varmer Smith's son were, and never heard on again.  They
falls into a mill-race too sometimes.  They be so venturesome.  But
I doubt 'twouldn't do.  Them as it belongs to might be glad enough
to get rid of un, and save their credit and their money too by
turning upon I after all."

The miller's man puzzled himself in vain.  He could think of no mode
of action at once safe and certain of success.  He did not even know
whether what he possessed had any value, or how or where to make use
of it.  But a sort of dim hope of seeing his way yet kept him about
the mill, and he persevered in the effort to learn to read, and kept
his big ears open for any thing that might drop from the miller or
his wife to throw light on the history of Jan, with whom his hopes
were bound up.

Meanwhile, with a dogged patience, he bided his time.



CHAPTER VIII.

VISITORS AT THE MILL.--A WINDMILLER OF THE THIRD GENERATION.--CURE
FOR WHOOPING-COUGH.--MISS AMABEL ADELINE AMMABY.--DOCTORS DISAGREE.

One of the earliest of Jan's remembrances--of those remembrances, I
mean, which remained with him when childhood was past--was of little
Miss Amabel, from the Grange, being held in the hopper of the
windmill for whooping cough.

Jan was between three and four years old at this time, the idol of
his foster-mother, and a great favorite with his adopted brothers
and sisters.  A quaint little fellow he was, with a broad,
intellectual-looking face, serious to old-fashionedness, very fair,
and with eyes "like slans."

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