SUBLUNARY ART.—JAN GOES TO SCHOOL.—DAME DATCHETT AT HOME.—JAN’S FIRST
SCHOOL SCRAPE.—JAN DEFENDS HIMSELF.
EVEN the hero of a tale cannot always be heroic, nor of romantic or
poetic tastes.
The wonderful beauty of the night sky and the moon had been fully felt by
the artist-nature of the child Jan; but about this time he took to the
study of a totally different subject,—pigs.
It was the force of circumstances which led Jan to “make pigs” on his
slate so constantly, instead of nobler subjects; and it dated from the
time when his foster-mother began to send him with the other children to
school at Dame Datchett’s.
Dame Datchett’s cottage was the last house on one side of the village
main street. It was low, thatched, creeper-covered, and had only one
floor, and two rooms,—the outer room where the Dame kept her school, and
the inner one where she slept. Dame Datchett’s scholars were very young,
and it is to be hoped that the chief objects of their parents in paying
for their schooling were to insure their being kept safely out of the way
for a certain portion of each day, and the saving of wear and tear to
clothes and shoes. It is to be hoped so, because this much of discipline
was to some extent accomplished. As to learning, Dame Datchett had
little enough herself, and was quite unable to impart even that, except
to a very industrious and intelligent pupil.
Her school appurtenances were few and simple. From one of them arose
Jan’s first scrape at school. It was a long, narrow blackboard, on which
the alphabet had once been painted white, though the letters were now so
faded that the Dame could no longer distinguish them, even in spectacles.
The scrape came about thus.
As he stood at the bottom of the little class which gathered in a
semicircle around the Dame’s chair, his young eyes could see the faded
letters quite clearly, though the Dame’s could not.
“Say th’ alphabet, childern!” cried Dame Datchett; and as the class
shouted the names of the letters after her, she made a show of pointing
to each with a long “sallywithy” wand cut from one of the willows in the
water-meadows below. She ran the sallywithy along the board at what she
esteemed a judicious rate, to keep pace with the shouted alphabet, but,
as she could not see the letters, her tongue and her wand were not in
accord. Little did the wide-mouthed, white-headed youngsters of the
village heed this, but it troubled Jan’s eyes; and when—in consequence of
her rubbing her nose with her disengaged hand—the sallywithy slipped to Q
as the Dame cried F, Jan brought the lore he had gained from Abel to bear
upon her inaccuracy.
“’Tis a Q, not a F,” he said, boldly and aloud.
A titter ran through the class, and the biggest and stupidest boy found
the joke so overwhelming that he stretched his mouth from ear to ear, and
doubled himself up with laughter, till it looked as if his
corduroy-breeched knee were a turnip, and he about to munch it.
The Dame dropped her sallywithy and began to feel under her chair.
“Which be the young varment as said a F was a Q?” she rather unfairly
inquired.
“A didn’t say a F was a Q”— began Jan; but a chorus of cowardly little
voices drowned him, and curried favor with the Dame by crying, “’Tis Jan
Lake, the miller’s son, missus.”
And the big boy, conscious of his own breach of good manners, atoned for
it by officiously dragging Jan to Dame Datchett’s elbow.
“Hold un vor me,” said the Dame, settling her spectacles firmly on her
nose.
And with infinite delight the great booby held Jan to receive his thwacks
from the strap which the Dame had of late years substituted for the birch
rod. And as Jan writhed, he chuckled as heartily as before, it being an
amiable feature in the character of such clowns that, so long as they can
enjoy a guffaw at somebody’s expense, the subject of their ridicule is
not a matter of much choice or discrimination.
After the first angry sob, Jan set his teeth and bore his punishment in a
proud silence, quite incomprehensible by the small rustics about him,
who, like the pigs of the district, were in the habit of crying out in
good time before they were hurt as a preventive measure.
Strangely enough, it gave the biggest boy the impression that Jan was
“poor-spirited,” and unable to take his own part,—a temptation to bully
him too strong to be resisted.
So when the school broke up, and the children were scattering over the
road and water-meads, the wide-mouthed boy came up to Jan and snatched
his slate from him.
“Give Jan his slate!” cried Jan, indignantly.
He was five years old, but the other was seven, and he held the slate
above his head.
“And who be _Jan_, then, thee little gallus-bird?” said he, tauntingly.
“I be Jan!” answered the little fellow, defiantly. “Jan Lake, the
miller’s son. Give I his slate!”
“Thee’s not a miller’s son,” said the other; and the rest of the children
began to gather round.
“I be a miller’s son,” reiterated Jan. “And I’ve got a miller’s thumb,
too;” and he turned up his little thumb for confirmation of the fact.
“Thee’s not a miller’s son,” repeated the other, with a grin. “Thee’s
nobody’s child, thee is. Master Lake’s not thy vather, nor Mrs. Lake
bean’t thy mother. Thee was brought to the mill in a sack of grist, thee
was.”
In saying which, the boy repeated a popular version of Jan’s history.
If any one had been present outside Dame Datchett’s cottage at that
moment who had been in the windmill when Jan first came to it, he would
have seen a likeness so vivid between the face of the child and the face
of the man who brought him to the mill as would have seemed to clear up
at least one point of the mystery of his parentage.
Pride and wrath convulsed every line of the square, quaint face, and
seemed to narrow it to the likeness of the man’s, as, with his black eyes
blazing with passion, Jan flew at his enemy.
The boy still held Jan’s slate on high, and with a derisive “haw! haw!”
he brought it down heavily above Jan’s head. But Jan’s eye was quick,
and very true. He dodged the blow, which fell on the boy’s own knees,
and then flew at him like a kitten in a tiger fury.
They were both small and easily knocked over, and in an instant they were
sprawling on the road, and cuffing, and pulling, and kicking, and
punching with about equal success, except that the bigger boy prudently
roared and howled all the time, in the hope of securing some assistance
in his favor.
“Dame Datchett! Missus! Murder! Yah! Boohoo! The little varment be a
throttling I.”
But Mrs. Datchett was deaf. Also, she not unnaturally considered that,
in looking after “the young varments” in school-hours, she fully earned
their weekly pence, and was by no means bound to disturb herself because
they squabbled in the street.
Meanwhile Jan gradually got the upper hand of his lubberly and far from
courageous opponent, whose smock he had nearly torn off his back. He had
not spent any of his breath in calling for aid, but now, in reply to the
boy’s cries for mercy and release, he shouted, “What be my name, now,
thee big gawney? Speak, or I’ll drottle ’ee.”
“Jan Lake,” said his vanquished foe. “Let me go! Yah! yah!”
“Whose son be I?” asked the remorseless Jan.
“Abel Lake’s, the miller! Boohoo, boohoo!” sobbed the boy.
“And what be this, then, Willum Smith?” was Jan’s final question, as he
brought his thumb close to his enemy’s eye.
“It be the miller’s thumb thee’s got, Jan Lake,” was the satisfactory
answer.