MASTER SWIFT AT HOME.—RUFUS.—THE EX-PIG-MINDER.—JAN AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.

It was a lovely autumn evening the same year, when the school having broken up for the day, Master Swift returned to his home for tea.  He lived in a tiny cottage on the opposite side of the water-meadows to that on which Dame Datchett dwelt, and farther down towards the water-mill.  He had neither wife nor child, but a red dog with a plaintive face, and the name of Rufus, kept his house when he was absent, and kept him company when he was at home.

Rufus was a mongrel.  He was not a red setter, though his coloring was similar.  A politely disposed person would have called him a retriever, and his curly back and general appearance might have carried this off, but for his tail, which, instead of being straight and rat-like, was as plumy as the Prince of Wales’s feathers, and curled unblushingly over his back, sideways, like a pug’s.  “It was a good one to wag,” his master said, and, apart from the question of high breeding, it was handsome, and Rufus himself seemed proud of it.

Since half-past three had Rufus sat in the porch, blinking away positive sleep, with his pathetic face towards the road down which Master Swift must come.  Unnecessarily pathetic, for there was every reason for his being the most jovial of dogs, and not one for that imposing melancholy which he wore.  His large level eyelids shaded the pupils even when he was broad awake; an intellectual forehead, and a very long Vandykish nose, with the curly ears, which fell like a well-dressed peruke on each side of his face, gave him an air of disinherited royalty.  But he was in truth a mongrel, living on the fat of the land; who, from the day that this wistful dignity had won the schoolmaster’s heart, had never known a care, wanted a meal, or had any thing whatever demanded of him but to sit comfortably at home and watch with a broken-hearted countenance for the schoolmaster’s return from the labors which supported them both.  The sunshine made Rufus sleepy, but he kept valiantly watchful, propping himself against the garden-tools which stood in the corner.  Flowers and vegetables for eating were curiously mixed in the little garden that lay about Master Swift’s cottage.  Not a corner was wasted in it, and a thick hedge of sweet-peas formed a fragrant fence from the outer world.

Rufus was nodding, when he heard a footstep.  He pulled himself up, but he did not wag his tail, for the step was not the schoolmaster’s.  It was Jan’s.  Rufus growled slightly, and Jan stood outside, and called, “Master Swift!”  He and Rufus both paused and listened, but the schoolmaster did not appear.  Then Rufus came out and smelt Jan exhaustively, and excepting a slight flavor of being acquainted with cats, to whom Rufus objected, he smelt well.  Rufus wagged his tail, Jan patted him, and they sat down to wait for the master.

The clock in the old square-towered church had struck a quarter-past four when Master Swift came down the lane, and Rufus rushed out to meet him.  Though Rufus told him in so many barks that there was a stranger within, and that, as he smelt respectable, he had allowed him to wait, the schoolmaster was startled by the sight of Jan.

“Why, it’s the little pig-minder!” said he.  On which Jan’s face crimsoned, and tears welled up in his black eyes.

“I bean’t a pig-minder now, Master Swift,” said he.

“And how’s that?  Has Master Salter turned ye off?”

“I gi’ed him notice!” said Jan, indignantly.  “But I shan’t mind pigs no more, Master Swift.”

“And why not, Master Skymaker?”

“Don’t ’ee laugh, sir,” said Jan.  “Master Salter he laughs.  ‘What’s pigs for but to be killed?’ says he.  But I axed him not to kill the little black un with the white spot on his ear.  It be such a nice pig, sir, such a very nice pig!”  And the tears flowed copiously down Jan’s cheeks, whilst Rufus looked abjectly depressed.  “It would follow me anywhere, and come when I called,” Jan continued.  “I told Master Salter it be ’most as good as a dog, to keep the rest together.  But a says ’tis the fattest, and ’ull be the first to kill.  And then I telled him to find another boy to mind his pigs, for I couldn’t look un in the face now, and know ’twas to be killed next month, not that one with the white spot on his ear.  It do be such a very nice pig!”

Rufus licked up the tears as they fell over Jan’s smock, and the schoolmaster took Jan in and comforted him.  Jan dried his eyes at last, and helped to prepare for tea.  The old man made some very good coffee in a shaving-pot, and put cold bacon and bread upon the table, and the three sat down to their meal.  Jan and his host upon two rush-bottomed chairs, whilst Rufus scrambled into an armchair placed for his accommodation, from whence he gazed alternately at the schoolmaster and the victuals with sad, not to say reproachful, eyes.

“I thought that would be your chair,” said Jan.

THE PARISH CHURCH.—REMBRANDT.—THE SNOW SCENE.—MASTER SWIFT’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

In most respects, Jan’s conduct and progress were very satisfactory.  He quickly learned to read, and his copy-books were models.

The good clerk developed another talent in him.  Jan learned to sing, and to sing very well; and he was put into the choir-seats in the old church, where he sang with enthusiasm hymns which he had learned by heart from the schoolmaster.

No wild weather that ever blustered over the downs could keep Jan now from the services.  The old church came to have a fascination for him, from the low, square tower without, round which the rooks wheeled, to the springing pillars, the solemn gray tints of the stone, and the round arches that so gratified the eye within.  And did he not sit opposite to the one stained window the soldiers of the Commonwealth had spared to the parish!  It was the only colored picture Jan knew, and he knew every line, every tint of it, and the separate expression on each of the wan, quaint faces of the figures.  When the sun shone, they seemed to smile at him, and their ruby dresses glowed like garments dyed in blood.  When the colors fell upon Abel’s white head, Jan wished with all his heart that he could have gathered them as he gathered leaves, to make pictures with.  Sometimes he day-dreamed that one of the figures came down out of the window, and brought the colors with him, and that he and Jan painted pictures in the other windows, filling them with gorgeous hues, and pale, devout faces.  The fancy, empty as it was, pleased him, and he planned how every window should be done, and told Abel, to whom the ingenious fancy seemed as marvellous as if the work had been accomplished.

Abel was in the choir too, not so much because of his voice as of his great wish for it, and of the example of his good behavior.  It was he who persuaded Mrs. Lake to come to church, and having once begun she came often.  She tried to persuade her husband to go, and told him how sweetly the boys’ voices sounded, led by Master Swift’s fine bass, which he pitched from a key which he knocked upon his desk.  But Master Lake had a proverb to excuse him.  “The nearer the church, the further from God.”  Not that he pretended to maintain the converse of the proposition.

Jan learned plenty of poetry; hymns, which Abel learned again from him, some of Herbert’s poems, and bits of Keats.  But his favorites were martial poems by Mrs. Hemans, which he found in an old volume of collected verses, till the day he came upon “Marmion,” and gave himself up to Sir Walter Scott.  He spouted poetry to Abel in imitation of Master Swift, and they enjoyed all, and understood about half.

And yet Jan’s progress was not altogether satisfactory to his teacher.

To learn long pieces of poetry was easy pastime to him, but he was dull or inattentive when the schoolmaster gave him some elementary lessons in mechanics.  He wrote beautifully, but was no prodigy in arithmetic.  He drew trees, windmills, and pigs on the desks, and admirable portraits of the schoolmaster, Rufus, and other local worthies, on the margins of the tables of weights and measures.

Much of his leisure was spent at Master Swift’s cottage, and in reading his books.  The schoolmaster had marked an old biographical dictionary at pages containing lives of “self-made” men, who had risen as inventors or improvers in mechanics or as discoverers of important facts of natural science.  Jan had not hitherto studied their careers with the avidity Master Swift would have liked to see, but one day he found him reading the fat volume with deep interest.

“And whose life are ye at now, laddie?” he asked, with a smile.

Jan lifted his face, which was glowing.  “’Tis Rembrandt the painter I be reading about.  Eh, Master Swift, he lived in a windmill, and he was a miller’s son!”

“Maybe he’d a miller’s thumb,” Jan added, stretching out his own, and smiling at the droll idea.  “Do ’ee know what etchings be, then, Master Swift?”

“A kind of picture that’s scratched on a piece of copper with needles, and costs a lot of money to print,” said Master Swift, dryly; and he turned his broad back and went out.

It was one day in the second winter of Jan’s learning under Master Swift that matters came to a climax.  The schoolmaster loved punctuality, but Jan was not always punctual.  He was generally better in this respect in winter than in summer, as there was less to distract his attention on the road to school.  But one winter’s day he loitered to make a sketch on his slate, and made matters worse by putting finishing touches to it after he was seated at the desk.

It was not a day to suggest sketching, but, turning round when he was about half way to the village, the view seemed to Jan to be exactly suitable for a slate sketch.  The long slopes of the downs were white with snow; but it was a dull grayish white, for there was no sunshine, and the gray-white of the slate-pencil did it justice enough.  In the middle distance rose the windmill, and a thatched cattle shed and some palings made an admirable foreground.  On the top and edges of these lay the snow, outlining them in white, which again the slate-pencil could imitate effectively.  There only wanted something darker than the slate itself to do those parts of the foreground and the mill which looked darker than the sky, and for this Jan trusted to pen and ink when he reached his desk.  The drawing was very successful, and Jan was so absorbed in admiring it that he did not notice the schoolmaster’s approach, but feeling some one behind him, he fancied it was one of the boys, and held up the slate triumphantly, whispering, “Look ’ee here!”

It was Master Swift who looked, and snatching the slate he brought it down on the sharp corner of the desk, and broke it to pieces.  Then he went back to his place, and spoke neither bad nor good to Jan for the rest of the school-time.  Jan would much rather have been beaten.  Once or twice he made essay to go up to Master Swift’s desk, but the old man’s stern countenance discouraged him, and he finally shrank into a corner and sat weeping bitterly.  He sat there till every scholar but himself had gone, and still the schoolmaster did not speak.  Jan slunk out, and when Master Swift turned homewards Jan followed silently in his footsteps through the snow.  At the door of the cottage, the old man looked round with a relenting face.

“I suppose Rufus’ll insist on your coming in,” said he; and Jan rushing in hid his face in Rufus’s curls, and sobbed heavily.

“Tut, tut!” said the schoolmaster.  “No more of that, child.  There’s bitters enough in life, without being so prodigal of your tears.”

“Come and sit down with ye,” he went on.  “You’re very young, lad, and maybe I’m foolish to be angry with ye that you’re not wise.  But yet ye’ve more sense than your years in some respects, and I’m thinking I’ll try and make ye see things as I see ’em.  I’m going to tell ye something about myself, if ye’d care to hear it.”

“I’d be main pleased, Master Swift,” said Jan, earnestly.

“I’d none of your advantages, lad,” said the old man.  “When I was your age, I knew more mischief than you need ever know, and uncommon little else.  I’m a self-educated man,—I used to hope I should live to hear folk say a self-made Great Man.  It’s a bitter thing to have the ambition without the genius, to smoulder in the fire that great men shine by!  However, it’s something to have just the saving sense to know that ye’ve not got it, though it’s taken a wasted lifetime to convince me, and I sometimes think the deceiving serpent is more scotched than killed yet.  However, ye seem to me to be likelier to lack the ambition than the genius, so we may let that bide.  But there’s a snare of mine, Jan, that I mean your feet to be free of, and that’s a mischosen vocation.  I’m not a native of these parts, ye must know.  I come from the north, and in those mining and manufacturing districts I’ve seen many a man that’s got an education, and could keep himself sober, rise to own his house and his works, and have men under him, and bring up his children like the gentry.  For mark ye, my lad.  In such matters the experiences of the early part of an artisan’s life are all so much to the good for him, for they’re in the working of the trade, and the finest young gentleman has got it all to learn, if he wants to make money in that line.  I got my education, and I was sober enough, but—Heaven help me—I must be a poet, and in that line a gentleman’s son knows almost from the nursery many a thing that I had to teach myself with hard labor as a man.  It was just a madness.  But I read all the poetry I could lay my hands on, and I wrote as well.”

“Did you write poetry, Master Swift?” said Jan.

“Ay, Jan, of a sort.  At one time I worshipped Burns.  And then I wrote verses in the dialect of my native place, which, ye must know, I can speak with any man when I’ve a mind,” said Master Swift, unconscious that he spoke it always.  “And then it was Wordsworth, for the love of nature is just a passion with me, and it’s that that made the poet Keats a new world to me.  Well, well, now I’m telling you how I came here.  It was after my wife.  She was lady’s-maid to Squire Ammaby’s mother, and the old Squire got me the school.  Ah, those were happy days!  I was a godless, rough sort of a fellow when she married me, but I became a converted man.  And let me tell ye, lad, when a man and wife love God and each other, and live in the country, a bit of ground like this becomes a very garden of Eden.”

“Did your wife like your poetry, sir?” said Jan, on whom the idea that the schoolmaster was a poet made a strong impression.

“Ay, ay, Jan.  She was a good scholar.  I wrote a bit about that time called Love and Ambition, in the style of the poet Wordsworth.  It was as much as to say that Love had killed Ambition, ye understand?  But it wasn’t dead.  It had only shifted to another object.

“We had a child.  I remember the first day his blue eyes looked at me with what I may call sense in ’em.  He was in his cradle, and there was no one but me with him.  I went on like a fool.  ‘See thee, my son,’ I said, ‘thy father’s been a bad ’un, but he’ll keep thee as pure as thy mother.  Thy father’s a poor scholar, but he’s not that dull but what he’ll make thee as learned as the parson.  Thy father’s a needy man, a man in a small way, but he and thy mother’ll stick here in this dull bit of a village, content, ay, my lad, right happy, so thou’rt a rich man, and can see the world!’  I give ye my word, Jan, the child looked at me as if he understood it all.  You’re wondering, maybe, what made me hope he’d do different to what I’d done.  But, ye see, his mother was just an angel, and I reckoned he’d be half like her.  Then she’d lived with gentlefolks from a child, and knew manners and such like that I never learned.  And for as little as I’d taught myself, he’d at any rate begin where his father left off.  He was all we had.  There seemed no fault in him.  His mother dressed him like a little prince, and his manners were the same.  Ah, we were happy!  Then”—

“Well, Master Swift?” said Jan, for the schoolmaster had paused.

“Can’t ye see the place is empty?” he answered sharply.  “Who takes bite or sup with me but Rufus?  She died.

“I’d have gone mad but for the boy.  All my thought was to make up her loss to him.  A child learns a man to be unselfish, Jan.  I used to think, ‘God may well be the very fount of unselfish charity, when He has so many children, so helpless without Him!’  I think He taught me how to do for that boy.  I dressed him, I darned his socks: what work I couldn’t do I put out, but I had no one in.  When I came in from school, I cleaned myself, and changed my boots, to give him his meals.  Rufus and I eat off the table now, but I give ye my word when he was alive we’d three clean cloths a week, and he’d a pinny every day; and there’s a silver fork and spoon in yon drawer I saved up to buy him, and had his name put on.  I taught him too.  He loved poetry as well as his father.  He could say most of Milton’s ‘Lycidas.’  It was an unlucky thing to have learned him too!  Eh, Jan! we’re poor fools.  I lay awake night after night reconciling my mind to troubles that were never to come, and never dreaming of what was before me.  I thought to myself, ‘John Swift, my lad, you’re making yourself a bed of thorns.  As sure as you make your son a gentleman, so sure he’ll look down on his old father when he gets up.  Can ye bear that, John Swift, and her dead, and him all that ye have?’  I didn’t ask myself twice, Jan.  Of course I could bear it.  Would any parent stop his child from being better than himself because he’d be looked down on?  I never heard of one.  ‘I want him to think me rough and ignorant,’ says I, ‘for I want him to know what’s better.  And I shan’t expect him to think on how I’ve slaved for him, till he’s children of his own, and their mother a lady.  But when I’m dead,’ I says, ‘and he stands by my grave, and I can’t shame him no more with my common ways, he’ll say, “The old man did his best for me,” for he has his mother’s feelings.’  I tell ye, Jan, I cried like a child to think of him standing at my burying in a good black coat and a silk scarf like a gentleman, and I no more thought of standing at his than if he was bound to live for ever.  And, mind ye, I did all I could to improve myself.  I learned while I was teaching, and read all I could lay my hands on.  Books of travels made me wild.  I was young still, and I’d have given a deal to see the world.  But I was saving every penny for him.  ‘He’ll see it all,’ says I, ‘and that’s enough,—Italy and Greece, and Egypt, and the Holy Land.  And he’ll see the sea (which I never saw but once, and that was at Cleethorpes), and he’ll go to the tropics, and see flowers that ’ud just turn his old father’s head, and he’ll write and tell me of ’em, for he’s got his mother’s feelings.’ . . .  My God!  He never passed the parish bounds, and he’s lain alongside of her in yon churchyard for five and thirty years!”

Master Swift’s head sank upon his breast, and he was silent, as if in a trance, but Jan dared not speak.  The silence was broken by Rufus, who got up and stuffed his nose into the schoolmaster’s hand.

“Poor lad!” said his master, patting him.  “Thou’rt a good soul, too!  Well, Jan, I’m here, ye see.  It didn’t kill me.  I was off my head a bit, I believe, but they kept the school for me, and I got to work again.  I’m rough pottery, lad, and take a deal of breaking.  I’ve took up with dumb animals, too, a good deal.  At least, they’ve took up with me.  Most of ’em’s come, like Rufus, of themselves.  Mangy puppies no one would own, cats with kettles to their tails, and so on.  I’ve always had a bit of company to my meals, and that’s the main thing.  Folks has said to me, ‘Master Swift, I don’t know how you can keep on schooling.  I reckon you can hardly abide the sight of boys now you’ve lost your own.’  But they’re wrong, Jan: it seemed to give me a kind of love for every lad I lit upon.

“Are ye thinking ambition was dead in the old man at last?  It came to life again, Jan.  After a bit, I says to myself, ‘In a dull place like this there’s doubtless many a boy that might rise that never has the chance that I’d have given to mine.  For what says the poet Gray?—

“But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of Time, did ne’er unroll.”’

“I think, Jan, sometimes, I’m like Rachel, who’d rather have taken to her servant’s children than have had none.  I thought, ‘If there’s a genius in obscurity here, I’ll come across the boy, being schoolmaster, and I’ll do for him as I’d have done for my own.’  Jan, I’ve seen nigh on seven generations of lads pass through this school, but he’s never come!  Society’s quit of that blame.  There’s been no ’mute, inglorious Miltons’ here since I come to this place.  There’s been many a nice-tempered lad I’ve loved, for I’m fond of children, but never one that yearned to see places he’d never seen, or to know things he’d never heard of.  There’s no fool like an old one, and I think I’ve been more disappointed as time went on.  I submitted myself to the Lord’s will years ago; but I have prayed Him, on my knees, since He didn’t see fit to raise me and mine, to let me have that satisfaction to help some other man’s son to knowledge and to fame.

“Jan Lake,” said Master Swift, “when I found you in yon wood, I found what I’ve looked for in vain for thirty-five years.  Have I been schoolmaster so long, d’ye think, and don’t know one boy’s face from another?  Lad? is it possible ye don’t care to be a great man?”

Jan cared very much, but he was afraid of Master Swift; and it was by an effort that he summoned up courage to say,—

“Couldn’t I be a great painter, Master Swift, don’t ’ee think?”

The old man frowned impatiently.  “What have I been telling ye?  The Fine Arts are not the road to fame for working-men.  Jan, Jan, be guided by me.  Learn what I bid ye.  And when ye’ve made name and fortune the way I show ye, ye can buy paints and paintings at your will, and paint away to please your leisure hours.”

It did not need the gentle Abel’s after-counsel to persuade Jan to submit himself to the schoolmaster’s direction.

“I’ll do as ye bid me, Master Swift; indeed, I will, sir,” said he.

But, when the pleased old man rambled on of fame and fortune, it must be confessed that Jan but thought of them as the steps to those hours of wealthy leisure in which he could buy paints and indulge the irrepressible bent of his genius without blame.

THE WHITE HORSE IN CLOVER.—AMABEL AND HER GUARDIANS.—AMABEL IN THE WOOD.—BOGY.

The white horse lived to see good days.  He got safely home, and spent the winter in a comfortable stable, with no work but being exercised for the good of his health by the stable-boy.  It was expensive, but expense was not a first consideration with the Squire, and when he had once decided a matter, he was not apt to worry himself with regrets.  As to Amabel the very narrowness of the white horse’s escape from death exalted him at once to the place of first favorite in her tender heart, even over the head (and ears) of the new donkey.

“Miss Amabel’s” interest in the cart-horse offended her nurse’s ideas of propriety, and met with no sympathy from her mother or grandmother.  But she was apt to get her own way; and from time to time she appeared suddenly, like a fairy-imp, in the stable, where she majestically directed the groom to hold her up whilst she plied a currycomb on the old horse’s back.  This over, she would ask with dignity, “Do you take care of him, Miles?”  And Miles, touching his cap, would reply, “Certainly, miss, the very greatest of care.”  And Amabel would add, “Does he get plenty to eat, do you think?”  “Plenties to heat, miss,” the groom would reply.  And she generally closed the conversation with, “I’m very glad.  You’re a good man, Miles.”

In spring the white horse was turned out into the paddock, where Amabel had begged that he might die comfortably.  He lived comfortably instead; and Amabel visited him constantly, and being perfectly fearless would kiss his white nose as he drooped it into her little arms.  Her visits to the stable had been discovered and forbidden, but the scandal was even greater when she was found in the paddock, standing on an inverted bucket, and grooming the white horse with Lady Louisa’s tortoise-shell dressing-comb.

“They wouldn’t let me have the currycomb,” said Amabel, who was very hot, and perfectly self-satisfied.  Lady Louisa was in despair, but the Squire laughed.  The ladies of his family had been great horsewomen for generations.

In the early summer, some light carting being required by the gardener, he begged leave to employ “Miss Amabel’s old horse,” who came at last to trot soberly to the town with a light cart for parcels, when the landlord of the Crown would point him out in proof of the Squire’s sagacity in horse-flesh.

But it was not by her attachment to the cart-horse alone that Amabel disturbed the composure of the head-nurse and of Louise the bonne.  She was a very Will-o’-the-wisp for wandering.  She grew rapidly, and the stronger she grew the more of a Tom-boy she became.  Beyond the paddock lay another field, whose farthest wall was the boundary of a little wood,—the wood where Jan had herded pigs.  Into this wood it had long been Amabel’s desire to go.  But nurses have a preference for the high road, and object to climbing walls, and she had not had her wish.  She had often peeped through a hole in the wall, and had smelt honeysuckle.  Once she had climbed half way up, and had fallen on her back in the ditch.  Louise uttered a thousand and one exclamations when Amabel came home after this catastrophe; and Nurse, distrusting the success of any real penalties in her power, fell back upon imaginary ones.

“I’m sure it’s a mercy you have got back, Miss Amabel,” said she; “for Bogy lives in that wood; and, if you’d got in, it’s ten to one he’d have carried you off.”

“You said Bogy lived in the cellar,” said Amabel.

Nurse was in a dilemma which deservedly besets people who tell untruths.  She had to invent a second one to help out her first.

“That’s at night,” said she: “he lives in the wood in the daytime.”

“Then I can go into the cellar in the day, and the wood at night,” retorted Amabel; but in her heart she knew the latter was impossible.

For some days Nurse’s fable availed.  Amabel had suffered a good deal from Bogy; and, though the fear of him did not seem so terrible by daylight, she had no wish to meet him.  But one lovely afternoon, wandering round the field for cowslips, Amabel came to the wall, and could not but peep over to see if there were any flowers to be seen.  She was too short to do this without climbing, and it ended in her struggling successfully to the top.  There were violets on the other side, and Amabel let down one big foot to a convenient hole, whence she hoped to be able to stoop and catch at the violets without actually treading in Bogy’s domain.  But once more she slipped and rolled over,—this time into the wood.  Bogy lingered, and she got on to her feet; but the wall was deeper on this side than the other, and she saw with dismay that it was very doubtful if she could get back.

I think, as a rule, children are very brave.  But a light heart goes a long way towards courage.  At first Amabel made desperate and knee-grazing efforts to reclimb the wall, and, failing, burst into tears, and danced, and called aloud on all her protectors, from the Squire to Miles.  No one coming, she restrained her tears, and by a real effort of that “pluck” for which the Ammaby race is famous began to run along the wall to find a lower point for climbing.  In doing so, she startled a squirrel, and whizz!—away he went up a lanky tree.  What a tail he had!  Amabel forgot her terrors.  There was at any rate some living thing in the wood besides Bogy; and she was now busy trying to coax the squirrel down again by such encouraging noises as she had found successful in winning the confidence of kittens and puppies.  Amabel was the victim of that weakness for falling in love with every fussy, intelligent, or pitiable beast she met with, which besets some otherwise reasonable beings, leading to an inconvenient accumulation of pets in private life, though doubtless invaluable in the public services of people connected with the Zoölogical Gardens.

The squirrel sat under the shadow of his own tail, and winked.  He had not the remotest intention of coming down.  Amabel was calmer now, and she looked about her.  The eglantine bushes were shoulder-high, but she had breasted underwood in the shrubberies, and was not afraid.  Up, up, stretched the trees to where the sky shone blue.  The wood itself sloped downwards; the spotted arums pushed boldly through last year’s leaves, which almost hid the violets; there were tufts of primroses, which made Amabel cry out, and about them lay the exquisite mauve dog-violets in unplucked profusion.  And hither and thither darted the little birds; red-breasts and sparrows, and yellow finches and blue finches, and blackbirds and thrushes, with their cheerful voices and soft waistcoats, and, indeed, every good quality but that of knowing how glad one would be to kiss them.  In a few steps, Amabel came upon a path going zig-zag down the steep of the wood, and, nodding her hooded head determinedly, she said, “Amabel is going a walk.  I don’t mind Bogy,” and followed her nose.

It is a pity that one’s skirt, when held up, does not divide itself into compartments, like some vegetable dishes.  One is so apt to get flowers first, and then lumps of moss, which spoil the flowers, and then more moss, which, earth downwards (as bread and butter falls), does no good to the rest.  Amabel had on a nice, new dress, and it held things beautifully.  But it did not hold enough, for at each step of the zig-zag path the moss grew lovelier.  She had got some extinguisher-moss from the top of the wall, and this now lay under all the rest, which flattened the extinguishers.  About half way down the dress was full, and some cushion-moss appeared that could not be passed by.  Amabel sat down and reviewed her treasures.  She could part with nothing, and she had just caught sight of some cup-moss lichen for dolls’ wine-glasses.  But, by good luck, she was provided with a white sun-bonnet, as clean and whole as her dress; and this she took off and filled.  It was less fortunate that the scale-mosses and liverworts, growing nearer to the stream, came last, and, with the damp earth about them, lay a-top of every thing, flowers, dolls’ wine-glasses, and all.  It was a noble collection—but heavy.  Amabel’s face flushed, and she was slightly overbalanced, but she staggered sturdily along the path, which was now level.

She had quite forgotten Nurse’s warning, when she came suddenly upon a figure crouched in her path, and gazing at her with large, black eyes.  Her fat cheeks turned pale, and with a cry of, “It’s Bogy!” she let down the whole contents of her dress into one of Jan’s leaf-pictures.

“Don’t hurt me!  Don’t take me away!  Please, please don’t!” she cried, dancing wildly.

“I won’t hurt you, Miss.  I be going to help you to pick ’em up,” said Jan.  By the time he had returned her treasures to her skirt, Amabel had regained confidence, especially as she saw no signs of the black bag in which naughty children are supposed to be put.

“What are you doing, Bogy?” said she.

THE PAINT-BOX.—MASTER LINSEED’S SHOP.—THE NEW SIGN-BOARD.—MASTER SWIFT AS WILL SCARLET.

On Sunday morning Jan took his place in church with unusual feelings.  He looked here, there, and everywhere for the little damsel of the wood, but she was not to be seen.  Meanwhile she had not sent the paint box, and he feared it would never come.  He fancied she must be the Squire’s little daughter, but he was not sure, and she certainly was not in the big pew, where the back of the Squire’s red head and Lady Louisa’s aquiline nose were alone visible.  She was a dear little soul, he thought.  He wondered why she called him Bogy.  Perhaps it was a way little ladies had of addressing their inferiors.

Jan did not happen to guess that, Amabel being very young, the morning services were too long for her.  In the afternoon he had given her up, but she was there.

The old Rector had reached the third division of his sermon, and Lady Craikshaw was asleep, when Amabel, mounting the seat with her usual vigor, pushed her Sunday hood through the bombazine curtains, and said,—

“Bogy!”

Jan looked up, and then started to his feet as Amabel stuffed the paint-box into his hands.  “I pushed it under my frock,” she said in a stage whisper.  “It made me so tight?  But grandmamma is such”—

Jan heard and saw no more.  Amabel’s footing was apt to be insecure; she slipped upon the cushions and disappeared with a crash.

Jan trembled as he clasped the shallow old cedar-wood box.  He wondered if the colors would prove as bright as those in the window.  He fancied the wan, ascetic faces there rejoiced with him.  When he got home, he sat under the shadow of the mill, and drew back the sliding lid of the box.  Brushes, and twelve hard color cakes.  They were Ackermann’s, and very good.  Cheap paint-boxes were not made then.  He read the names on the back of them: Neutral Tint, Prussian Blue, Indian Red, Yellow Ochre, Brown Madder, Brown Pink, Burnt Umber, Vandyke Brown, Indigo, King’s Yellow, Rose Madder, and Ivory Black.

It says much for Jan’s uprightness of spirit, and for the sense of duty in which the schoolmaster was training him, that he did not neglect school for his new treasure.  Happily for him the sun rose early, and Jan rose with it, and taking his paint-box to the little wood, on scraps of parcel paper and cap paper, on bits of wood and smooth white stones, he blotted-in studies of color, which he finished from memory at odd moments in the windmill.

In the summer holidays, Jan had more time for sketching.  But the many occasions on which he could not take his paints with him led him to observe closely, and taught him to paint from memory with wonderful exactness.  He was also obliged to reduce his outlines and condense his effects to a very small scale to economize paper.

About this time he heard that Master Chuter was going to have a new sign painted for the inn.  Master Linseed was to paint it.

Master Linseed’s shop had been a place of resort for Jan in some of his leisure time.  At first the painter and decorator had been churlish enough to him, but, finding that Jan was skilful with a brush, he employed him again and again to do his work, for which he received instead of giving thanks.  Jan went there less after he got a paint-box, and could produce effects with good materials of his own, instead of making imperfect experiments in color on bits of wood in the painter’s shop.

But in this matter of the new sign-board he took the deepest interest.  He had a design of his own for it, which he was most anxious the painter should adopt.  “Look ’ee, Master Linseed,” said he.  “It be the Heart of Oak.  Now I know a oak-tree with a big trunk and two arms.  They stretches out one on each side, and the little branches closes in above till ’tis just like a heart.  ’Twould be beautiful, Master Linseed, and I could bring ’ee leaves of the oak so that ’ee could match the yellows and greens.  And then there’d be trees beyond and beyond, smaller and smaller, and all like a blue mist between them, thee know.  That blue in the paper ’ee’ve got would just do, and with more white to it ’twould be beautiful for the sky.  And”—

“And who’s to do all that for a few shillings?” broke in the painter, testily.  “And Master Chuter wants it done and hung up for the Foresters’ dinner.”

Since the pressing nature of the commission was Master Linseed’s excuse for not adopting his idea for the sign, it seemed strange to Jan that he did not set about it in some fashion.  But he delayed and delayed, till Master Chuter was goaded to repeat the old rumor that real sign-painting was beyond his powers.

It was within a week of the dinner that the little innkeeper burst indignantly into the painter’s shop.  Master Linseed was ill in bed, and the sign-board lay untouched in a corner.

“It be a kind of fever that’s on him,” said his wife.

“It be a kind of fiddlestick!” said the enraged Master Chuter; and turning round his eye fell on Jan, who was looking as disconsolate as himself.  Day after day had he come in hopes of seeing Master Linseed at work, and now it seemed indefinitely postponed.  But the innkeeper’s face brightened, and, seizing Jan by the shoulder, he dragged him from the shop.

“Look ’ee here, Jan Lake,” said he.  “Do ’ee thenk thee could paint the sign?  I dunno what I’d give ’ee if ’ee could, if ’twere only to spite that humbugging old hudmedud yonder.”

Jan felt as if his brain were on fire.  “If ’ee’ll get me the things, Master Chuter,” he gasped, “and’ll let me paint it in your place, I’ll do it for ’ee for nothin’.”

The innkeeper was not insensible to this consideration, but his chief wish was to spite Master Linseed.  He lost no time in making ready, and for the rest of the week Jan lived between the tallet (or hay-loft) of the inn and the wood where he had first studied trees.  Master Chuter provided him with sheets of thick whitey-brown paper, on which he made water-color studies, from which he painted afterwards.  By his desire no one was admitted to the tallet, though Master Chuter’s delight increased with the progress of the picture till the secret was agony to him.  Towards the end of the week they were disturbed by a scuffling on the tallet stairs, and Rufus bounced in, followed at a slower pace by the schoolmaster, crying, “Unearthed at last!”

“Come in, come in!  That’s right!” shouted Master Chuter.  “Let Master Swift look, Jan.  He be a scholar, and’ll tell us all about un.”

But Jan shrank into the shadow.  The schoolmaster stood in the light of the open shutter, towards which the painting was sloped, and Rufus sat by him on his haunches, and blinked with all the gravity of a critic; and in the half light between them and the stairs stood the fat little innkeeper, with his hands on his knees, crying, “There, Master Swift!  Did ’ee ever see any thing to beat that?  Artis’ or ammytoor!”

Jan’s very blood seemed to stand still.  As Master Swift put on his spectacles, each fault in the painting sprang to the front and mocked him.  It was indeed a wretched daub!

But Jan had been studying the scene under every lovely light of heaven from dawn to dusk for a week of summer days: Master Swift carried no such severe test in his brain.  As he raised his head, the tears were in his eyes, and he held out his hand, saying, “My lad, it’s just the spirit of the woods.

“But d’ye not think a figure or so would enliven it?” he continued.  “One of Robin Hood’s foresters ‘chasing the flying roe’?”

“Foresters!  To be sure!” said Master Chuter.  “What did I say?  Have the schoolmaster in, says I.  He be a scholar, and knows what’s what.  Put ’em in, Jan, put ’em in! there’s plenty of room.”

What Jan had already suffered from the innkeeper’s suggestions, only an artist can imagine, and his imagination will need no help!

“I’d be main glad to get a bit of red in there,” said Jan, in a low voice, to Master Swift; “but Robin Hood must be in green, sir, mustn’t he?”

“There’s Will Scarlet.  Put Will in,” said Master Swift, who, pleased to be appealed to, threw himself warmly into the matter.  “He can have just drawn his bow at a deer out of sight.”  And with a charming simplicity the old schoolmaster flung his burly figure into an appropriate attitude.

“Stand so a minute!” cried Jan, and seizing a lump of charcoal, with which he had made his outlines, he rapidly sketched Master Swift’s figure on the floor of the tallet.  Thinned down to what he declared to have been his dimensions in youth, it was transferred to Jan’s picture, and the touch of red was the culminating point of the innkeeper’s satisfaction.

On the day of the dinner the new sign swung aloft.  “It couldn’t dry better anywhere,” said Master Chuter.

Jan “found himself famous.”  The whole parish assembled to admire.  The windmiller, in his amazement, could not even find a proverb for the occasion, whilst Abel hung about the door of the Heart of Oak, as if he had been the most confirmed toper, saying to all incomers, “Have ’ee seen the new sign, sir?  ’Twas our Jan did un.”

His fame would probably have spread more widely, but for a more overwhelming interest which came to distract the neighborhood, and which destroyed a neat little project of Master Chuter’s for running up a few tables amongst his kidney-beans, as a kind of “tea garden” for folk from outlying villages, who, coming in on Sunday afternoons to service, should also want to see the work of the boy sign-painter.

It is a curious instance of the inaccuracy of popular impressions that, when Master Linseed died three days after the Foresters’ dinner, it was universally believed that he had been killed by vexation at Jan’s success.  Nor was this tradition the less firmly fixed in the village annals, that the disease to which he had succumbed spread like flames in a gale.  It produced a slight reaction of sentiment against Jan.  And his achievement was absolutely forgotten in the shadow of the months that followed.

For it was that year long known in the history of the district as the year of the Black Fever.

SANITARY INSPECTORS.—THE PESTILENCE.—THE PARSON.—THE DOCTOR.—THE SQUIRE AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.—DESOLATION AT THE WINDMILL.—THE SECOND ADVENT.

I remember a “cholera year” in a certain big village.  The activity of the sanitary authorities (and many and vain had been the efforts to rouse them to activity before) was, for them, remarkable.  A good many heads of households died with fearful suddenness and not less fearful suffering.  Several nuisances were “seen to,” some tar-barrels were burnt, and the scourge passed by.  Not long ago a woman, whose home is in a court where some of the most flagrant nuisances existed, in talking to me, casually alluded to one of them.  It had been ordered to be removed, she said, in the cholera year when the gentlemen were going round; but the cholera went away, and it remained among those things which were not “seen to,” and for aught I know flourishes still.  She was a sensible and affectionate person.  Living away from her home at that time, she became anxious at once for the welfare of her relatives if they neglected to write to her.  But she had never an anxiety on the subject of that unremedied abomination which was poisoning every breath they drew.  That “the gentlemen who went round” felt it superfluous to have their orders carried out when strong men were no longer sickening and dying within two revolutions of the hands of the church clock will surprise no one who has had to do with local sanitary officers.  They are like the children of Israel, and will only do their duty under the pressure of a plague.  The people themselves are more like the Egyptians.  Plagues won’t convince them.  A mother with all her own and her neighbors’ children sickening about her would walk miles in a burst shoe to fetch the doctor or a big bottle of medicine, but she won’t walk three yards farther than usual to draw her house-water from the well that the sewer doesn’t leak into.  That is a fact, not a fable; and, in the cases I am thinking of, all medical remonstrance was vain.  Uneducated people will take any thing in from the doctor through their mouths, but little or nothing through their ears.

When such is the state of matters in busy, stirring districts, among shrewd artisans, and when our great seat of learning smells as it does smell under the noses of the professors, it is needless to say that the “black fever” found every household in the little village prepared to contribute to its support, and met with hardly an obstacle on its devastating path.

To comment on Master Salter’s qualifications for the post of sanitary inspector would be to insult the reader’s understanding.  Of course he owned several of the picturesque little cottages where the refuse had to be pitched out at the back, and the slops chucked out in front, and where the general arrangements for health, comfort, and decency were such as one must forbear to speak of, since, on such matters, our ears—Heaven help us!—have all that delicacy which seems denied to our noses.

If the causes of the calamity were little understood, portents were plentifully noted.  The previous winter had been mild.  A thunderbolt fell in the autumn.  There was a blight on the gooseberries, and Master Salter had a calf with two heads.  As to the painter, a screech-owl had been heard to cry from his chimney-top, not three weeks before his death.

There was a pause of a day or so after Master Linseed died, and then victims fell thick and fast.  Children playing happily with their mimic boats on the open drain that ran lazily under the noontide sun, by the footpath of the main street, were coffined for their hasty burial before the sun had next reached his meridian.  The tears were hardly dry in their parents’ eyes before these also were closed in their last sleep.  The very aged seemed to linger on, but strong men sickened and died; and at the end of the week more than one woman was left sitting by an empty hearth, a worn-out creature whom Death seemed only to have forgotten to take away.

At first there was a reckless disregard of infection among the neighbors.  But, after one or two of these family desolations, this was succeeded by a panic, and even the noble charity which the poor commonly show to each other’s troubles failed, and no one could be got to nurse the sick or bury the dead.

Now the Rector was an old man.  Most of the parish officers were aged, and patriarchs in white smock frocks were as plentiful as creepers at the cottage doors.  The healthy breezes and the dull pace at which life passed in the district seemed to make men slow to wear out.  If the Rector had profited by these features of the parish in health, it must be confessed that they had also had their influence on his career.  He was a good man, and a learned one.  He stuck close to his living, and he was benevolent.  But he was not of those heroic natures who can resist the influence of the mental atmosphere around them; and in a dull parish, in a sleepy age, he had not been an active parson.  Some men, however, who cannot make opportunities for themselves, can do nobly enough if the chance comes to them; and this chance came to the Rector in his sixty-ninth year, on the wings of the black fever.  To quicken spiritual life in the soul of a Master Salter he had not the courage even to attempt; but a panic of physical cowardice had not a temptation for him.  And so it came about that of four men who stayed the panic, by the example of their own courage, who went from house to house, and from sick-bed to sick-bed—who drew a cordon round the parish, and established kitchens and a temporary hospital, and nursed the sick, and encouraged the living, and buried the dead,—the most active was the old Rector.

The other three were the parish doctor, Squire Ammaby, and the schoolmaster.

On the very first rumor of the epidemic, Lady Louisa had carried off Amabel, and had gone with Lady Craikshaw to Brighton.  Both the ladies were indignant with the Squire’s obstinate resolve to remain amongst his tenants.  In her alarm, Lady Louisa implored him to sell the property and buy one in Ireland, which was Lady Craikshaw’s native country; and the list she contrived to run up of the drawbacks to the Ammaby estate would have driven a temper less stolid than her husband’s to distraction.

When the fever broke out among the children, the schools were closed, and Master Swift devoted his whole time to laboring with the parson, the doctor, and the Squire.

No part of the Rector’s devotion won more affectionate gratitude from his people than a single act of thoughtfulness, by which he preserved a record of the graves of their dead.  He had held firmly on to a decent and reverent burial, and, foreseeing that the poor survivors would be quite unable to afford gravestones, he kept a strict list of the dead, and where they were buried, which was afterwards transferred to one large monument, which was bought by subscription.  He cut the village off from all communication with the outer world, to prevent a spread of the disease; but he sent accounts of the calamity to the public papers, which brought abundant help in money for the needs of the parish.  And in these matters the schoolmaster was his right-hand man.

The disease was most eccentric in its path.  Having scourged one side only of the main street, it burst out with virulence in detached houses at a distance.  Then it returned to the village, and after lulls and outbreaks it ceased as suddenly as it began.

It was about midway in its career that it fell with all its wrath upon Master Lake’s windmill.

The mill stood in a healthy position, but the dwelling room was ill-ventilated, and there were defective sanitary arrangements, which Master Swift had anxiously pointed out to the miller.  The plague had begun in the village, and the schoolmaster trembled for Jan.  But Master Lake was not to be interfered with, and, when the schoolmaster spoke of poison, thought himself witty as he replied,—

“It be a uncommon slow pison then, Master Swift.”

It must also be allowed that such epidemics, once started, do havoc in apparently clean houses and amongst well-fed people.

It was a little foster-sister of Jan’s who sickened first.  She died within two days.  Her burial was hasty enough, but Mrs. Lake had no time to fret about that, for a second child was ill.  Like many another householder, the poor windmiller was now ready enough to look to his drains, and so forth; but it may be doubted if the general stirring up of dirty places at this moment did not do as much harm as good.  It was hot,—terribly hot.  Day after day passed without a breeze to cool the burning skins of the sick, and yet it was not sunshiny.  People did say that the pestilence hung like a murky vapor above the district, and hid the sun.

Trades were slack, corn-grinding amongst the rest, and Master Lake did the housework, helped by Jan and Abel.  He was stunned by the suddenness and the weight of the calamity which had come to him.  He was very kind to Mrs. Lake, but the poor woman was almost past any feeling but that which, as a sort of instinct or inspiration, guided a constant watching and waiting on her sick children.  She never slept, and would not have eaten, but that Master Lake used his authority to force some food upon her.  At this time Jan’s chief occupations were cookery and dish-washing.  His constant habit of observation made all the experiences of life an education for him; he had often watched his foster-mother prepare the family meals, and he prepared them now, for Abel and the windmiller could not, and she was with the sick children.

Before the second child died, two more fell ill on the same day.  Only Abel and Jan were still “about.”  The mother moved like an automaton, and never spoke.  Now and then a deep sigh or a low moan would escape her, and the miller would move tenderly to her side, and say, “Bear up, missus; bear up, my lass,” and then go back to his pipe and his cherry-wood chair, where he seemed to grow gray as he sat.

Master Swift came from time to time to the mill.  He was everywhere, helping, comforting, and exhorting.  Some said his face shone with the light of another world, for which he was “marked.”  Others whispered that the strain was telling on him, and that it wore the look it had had in the brief insanity which followed his child’s death.  But all agreed that the very sight of him brought help and consolation.  The windmiller grew to watch for him, and to lean on him in the helplessness of his despair.  And he listened humbly to the old man’s fervid religious counsels.  His own little threads of philosophy were all blowing loose and useless in this storm of trouble.

The evening that Master Swift came up to arrange about the burial of the second child, he found the other two just dead.  The first two had suffered much and been delirious, but these two had sunk painlessly in a few hours, and had fallen asleep for the last time in each other’s arms.

It did not lessen the force of Master Swift’s somewhat stern consolations that in all good faith he conveyed in them an expectation that the Last Day was at hand.  Many people thought so, and it was, perhaps, not unnatural.  In these days, which were long years of suffering, they were shut off from the rest of humanity, and the village was the world to them,—a world very near its end.  With Death so busy, it seemed as if Judgment could hardly linger long.

It is true that this did not form a part of the Rector’s religious exhortations.  But some good people were shocked by the tea-party that he gave to the young people of the place, and the games that followed it in the Rectory meads, at the very height of the fever; though the doctor said it was better than a hogshead of medicine.

“To encourage low spirits in this panic is just to promote suicide, if ye like the responsibeelity of that,” said the doctor to Master Swift, who had confided his doubts as to the seemliness of the entertainment.  “I tell ye there’s a lairge proportion of folk dies just because their neighbors have died before them, for the want of their attention being directed to something else.  Away wi’ ye, schoolmaster, and take your tuning-fork to ask the blessing wi’.  What says the Scripture, man?  ‘The living, the living, he shall praise Thee!’”

The doctor was a Scotchman, and Master Swift always listened with sympathy to a North countryman.  He was convinced, too, and took his tuning-fork to the meals, and led the grace.

Nor could his expectation of the speedy end of all things restrain his instinctive anxiety and watchfulness for Jan’s health.  On the evening of that visit to the mill, he used some little manoeuvring to accomplish Jan’s being sent back with him to the village, to arrange for the burial of the three children.

A glow of satisfaction suffused his rough face as he got Jan out of the tainted house into the fresh evening air, though it paled again before that other look which was now habitual to him, as, waving his hand towards the ripening corn-fields, he quoted from one of Mr. Herbert’s loftiest hymns,—

“We talk of harvests,—there are no such things,
   But when we leave our corn and hay.
There is no fruitful year but that which brings
   The last and loved, though dreadful Day.
         Oh, show Thyself to me,
         Or take me up to Thee!”