“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.