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.