Jan of the Windmill: A Story of the Plains

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.

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 manœuvre.  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 to-night.  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.”

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.

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.

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 to-day, 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.

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!”