THE BLUE COAT.—PIG-MINDING AND TREE-STUDYING.—LEAF-PAINTINGS.—A STRANGER.—MASTER SWIFT IS DISAPPOINTED.  
When Jan returned to the windmill, and gravely announced that he had hired himself out as pig-minder to Master Salter, Mrs. Lake was, as she said, “put about.”  She considered pig-minding quite beneath the dignity of her darling, and brought forward every objection she could think of except the real one.  But the windmiller had no romantic dreams on Jan’s behalf, and he decided that “’twas better he should be arning a shillin’ a week than gettin’ into mischief at whoam.”  Jan’s ambition, however, was not satisfied.  He wanted a blue coat, such as is worn by the shepherd-boys on the plains.  He did not mind how old it was, but it must be large; long in the skirt and sleeves.  He had woven such a romance about Master Salter’s swineherd and his life, as he watched him week after week from Dame Datchett’s door with envious eyes, that even his coat, with the tails almost sweeping the ground, seemed to Jan to have a dignified air.  And there really was something to be said in favor of sleeves so long that he could turn them back into a huge cuff in summer, and turn them down, Chinese fashion, over his hands in winter, to keep them warm.
 
Such a blue coat Abel had possessed, but it was not suitable for mill work, and Mrs. Lake was easily persuaded to give it to Jan.  He refused to have it curtailed, or in any way adapted to his figure, and in it, with a switch of his own cutting, he presented himself at Master Salter’s farm in good time the following morning.
 
It could not be said that Jan’s predecessor had exaggerated the perversity of the pigs he drove.  If the coat of his choice had a fault in Jan’s estimation, it was that it helped to make him very hot as he ran hither and thither after his flock.  But he had not studied pig-nature in vain.  He had a good deal of sympathy with its vagaries, and he was quite able to outwit the pigs.  Indeed, a curious attachment grew up between the little swineherd and his flock, some of whom would come at his call, when he rewarded their affection, as he had gained it, by scratching their backs with a rough stick.
 
But there were times when their playful and errant peculiarities were no small annoyance to him.  Jan was growing fast both in mind and body.  Phases of taste and occupation succeed each other very rapidly when one is young; and there are, perhaps, no more distinct phases, more sudden strides, than in the art of painting.  With Jan the pig phase was going, and it was followed by landscape-sketching.
 
Jan was drawing his pigs one day in the little wood, when he fancied that the gnarled elbow of a branch near him had, in its outline, some likeness to a pig’s face, and he began to sketch it on his slate.  But in studying the tree the grotesque likeness was forgotten, and there burst upon his mind, as a revelation, the sense of that world of beauty which lies among stems and branches, twigs and leaves.  Painfully, but with happy pains, he traced the branch joint by joint, curve by curve, as it spread from the parent stem and tapered to its last delicate twigs.  It was like following a river from its source to the sea.  But to that sea of summer sky, in which the final ramifications of his branch were lost, Jan did not reach.  He was abruptly stopped by the edge of his slate, which would hold no more.
 
To remedy this, when next he drew trees, he began the branches from the outer tips, and worked inwards to the stem.  It was done for convenience, but to this habit he used afterwards to lay some of the merit of his admirable touch in tree-painting.  And so “pig-making” became an amusement of the past, and the spell of the woods fell on Jan.
 
It was no very wonderful wood either, this one where he first herded pigs and studied trees.  It was composed chiefly of oaks and beeches, none of them of very grand proportions.  But it was little cut and little trodden.  The bramble-bowers were unbroken, the leaf-mould was deep and rich, and a very tiny stream, which trickled out of sight, kept mosses ever green about its bed.  The whole wood was fragrant with honeysuckle, which pushed its way everywhere, and gay with other wild flowers.  But the trees were Jan’s delight.  He would lie on his back and gaze up into them with unwearying pleasure.  He looked at his old etching with new interest, to see how the artist had done the branches of the willows by the water-mill.  And then he would get Abel to put a very sharp point to his own slate-pencil, and would go back to the real oaks and beeches, which were so difficult and yet so fascinating to him.
 
He was very happy in the wood, with two drawbacks.  The pigs would stray when he became absorbed in his sketching, and the slate and slate-pencil, which did very well to draw pigs in outline, were miserable implements, when more than half the beauty of the subject to be represented was in its color.  For the first evil there was no remedy but to give chase.  Out of the second came an amusement in favor of which even the beloved slate hung idle.
 
In watching beautiful bits of coloring in the wood, contrasted greens of many hues, some jutting branch with yellowish foliage caught by the sun, and relieved by a distance of blue grays beyond,—colors and contrasts which only grew lovelier as the heavy green of midsummer was broken by the inroad of autumnal tints,—Jan noticed also that among the fallen leaves at his feet there were some of nearly every color in the foliage above.  At first it was by a sort of idle trick that he matched one against the other, as a lady sorts silks for her embroidery; then he arranged bits of the leaves upon the outline on his slate, and then, the slate being too small, he amused himself by grouping the leaves upon the path in front of him into woodland scenes.  The idea had been partly suggested to him by a bottle which stood on Mrs. Salter’s mantelpiece, containing colored sands arranged into landscapes; a work of art sent by Mrs. Salter’s sister from the Isle of Wight.
 
The slate would have been quite unused, but for the difficulties Jan got into with his outlines.  At last he adopted the plan of making a sketch upon his slate, which he then laid beside him on the walk, and copied it in leaves.  More perishable even than the pig-drawings, the evening breeze generally cast these paintings to the winds, but none the less was Jan happy with them, and sometimes in quiet weather, or a sheltered nook, they remained undisturbed for days.
 
Dame Datchett’s school reopened, but Jan would not leave his pigs.  He took the shilling faithfully home each week to his foster-mother.  She found it very useful, and she had no very high ideas about education.  She had some twinges of conscience in the matter, but she had no strength of purpose, and Jan went his own way.
 
The tints had grown very warm on trees and leaves, when Jan one day accomplished, with much labor, the best painting he had yet done.  It was of a scene before his eyes.  The trees were admirably grouped; he put little bits of twigs for the branches, which now showed more than hitherto, and he added a glimpse of the sky by neatly dovetailing the petals of some bluebells into a mosaic.  He had turned back the long sleeves of his coat, and had with difficulty kept the tail of it from doing damage to his foreground, and had perseveringly kept the pigs at bay, when, as he returned with a last instalment of bluebells to finish his sky, he saw a man standing on the path, with his back to him, completely blotting out the view by his very broad body, and with one heel not half an inch from Jan’s picture.
 
He was a coarsely built old man, dressed in threadbare black.  The tones of his voice were broad, and quite unlike the local dialect.  He was speaking as Jan came up, but to no companion that Jan could see, though his hand was outstretched in sympathy with his words.  He was looking upwards, too, as Jan was wont to look himself, into that azure sky which he was trying to paint in bluebell flowers.
 
In truth, the stranger was spouting poetry, and poems and recitations were alike unknown to Jan; but something caught his fancy in what he heard, and the flowers dropped from his fingers as the broad but not ungraceful accents broke upon his ear:—
 
“The clouds were pure and white as flocks new shorn,
And fresh from the clear brook; sweetly they slept
On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept
A little noiseless noise among the leaves,
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves;
For not the faintest motion could be seen
Of all the shades that slanted o’er the green.”
 
The old man paused for an instant, and, turning round, saw Jan, and put his heavy foot into the sky of Jan’s picture.  He drew it back at Jan’s involuntary cry, and, after a long look a............