SCARECROWS AND MEN.—JAN REFUSES TO “MAKE GEARGE.”—UNCANNY.—“JAN’S OFF.”-THE MOON AND THE CLOUDS.  
The picture gave Jan great pleasure, but it proved a stumbling-block on the road to learning.
 
To “make letters” on his slate had been the utmost of his ambition, and as he made them he learned them.  But after the Cheap Jack’s visit his constant cry was, “Jan make pitchers.”  And when Abel tried to confine his attention to the alphabet, he would, after a most perfunctory repetition of a few letters that he knew, and hap-hazard blunders over fresh ones, fling his arms round Abel’s neck and say coaxingly, “Abel dear, make Janny pitchers on his slate.”
 
Abel’s pictures, at the best, were of that style of wall decoration dear to street boys.
 
“Make a pitcher of a man,” Jan would cry.  And Abel did so, bit by bit, to Jan’s dictation.  Thus “Make’s head.  Make un round.  Make two eyes.  Make a nose.  Make a mouth.  Make’s arms.  Make’s fingers,” etc.  And, with some “free-handling,” Abel would strike the five fingers off, one by one, in five screeching strokes of the slate-pencil.  But his art was conventional, and when Jan said, “Make un a miller’s thumb,” he was puzzled, and could only bend the shortest of the five strokes slightly backwards to represent the trade-mark of his forefathers.
 
And when a little later Jan said one day, “’Tis a galley crow, that is.  Now make a pitcher of a MAN, Abel dear!” Abel found that the scarecrow figure was the limit of his artist powers, and thenceforward it was Jan who “made pitchers.”
 
He drew from dawn to dusk upon the little slate which he wore tied by a bit of string to the belt of his pinafore.  He drew his foster-mother, and Abel, and the kitten, and the clock, and the flower-pots in the window, and the windmill itself, and every thing he saw or imagined.  And he drew till his slate was full on both sides, and then in very primitive fashion he spat and rubbed it all out and began again.  And whenever Jan’s face was washed, the two faces of his slate were washed too; and with this companion he was perfectly happy and constantly employed.
 
Now it was Abel who gave the subjects for the pictures, and Jan who made them, and it was good Abel also who washed the slate, and rubbed the well-worn stumps of pencil to new points upon the round-house floor.
 
They often went together to a mound at some little distance, where, seated side by side, they “made a mill” upon the slate, Jan drawing, and Abel dictating the details to be recorded.
 
“Put in the window, Jan,” he would say; “and another, and another, and another, and another.  Now put the sails.  Now put the stage.  Now put daddy by the door.”
 
On one point Jan was obstinate.  He steadily refused to “make Gearge” upon his slate in any capacity whatever.  Perhaps it was in this habit of constantly gazing at all things about him, in order to commit them to his slate, which gave a strange, dreamy expression to Jan’s dark eyes.  Perhaps it was sky-gazing, or the windmiller’s trick of watching the clouds, or perhaps it was something else, from which Jan derived an erectness of carriage not common among the children about him, and a quaint way of carrying his little chin in the air as if he were listening to voices from a higher level than that of the round-house floor.
 
If he had lived farther north, he could hardly have escaped the suspicion of uncanniness.  He was strangely like a changeling among the miller’s children.
 
To gratify that old whim of his about the red shawl, his doting foster-mother made him little crimson frocks; and as he wandered over the downs in his red dress and a white pinafore, his yellow hair flying in the breeze, his chin up, his black eyes wide open, with slate in one hand, his pencil in the other, and the sandy kitten clinging to his shoulder (for Jan never lowered his chin to help her to balance herself), he looked more like some elf than a child of man.
 
He had queer, independent ways of his own, too; freaks,—not naughty enough for severe punishment, but sufficiently out of the routine and unexpected to cause Mrs. Lake some trouble.
 
He was no sooner firmly established on his own legs, with the power of walking, or rather toddling, independent of help, than he took to making expeditions on the downs by himself.  He would watch his opportunity, and when his foster-mother’s back was turned, and the door of the round-house opened by some grist-bringer, he would slip out and toddle off with a swiftness decidedly dangerous to a balance so lately acquired.
 
Sometimes Mrs. Lake would catch sight of him, and if her hands were in the wash-tub, or otherwise engaged, she would cry to the nurse-boy, “Abel, he be off!  Jan’s off.”  A comic result of which was that Jan generally announced his own departure in the same words, though not always loud enough to bring detection upon himself.
 
When his chance came and the door was open, he would pause for half a moment on the threshold to say, in a tone of intense self-satisfaction, “He be off.  Abel!  Janny’s off!” and forthwith toddle out as hard as he could go.  As he grew older, he dropped this form; but the elfish habit of appearing and disappearing at his own whim was not cured.
 
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