Jan slapped her vigorously, and having smoothed the surface once more, he drew A after A with the greatest rapidity, scrambling along sideways like a crab, and using both hands indifferently, till the row stretched as far as the flour would permit. Abel’s pride in his pupil was great, and he was fain to run off to call his mother to see the performances of their prodigy, but Jan was too impatient to spare him. “Let Jan do more!” he cried. Abel traced a B in the flour. “That’s B, Jan,” said he. “Jan do it,” replied Jan, confidently. “But say it,” said his teacher, restraining him. “Say B, Jan.” “B,” said Jan, impatiently; and adding, “Jan do it,” he began a row of B’s. He hesitated slightly before making the second curve, and looked at his model, after which he went down the line as before, and quite as successfully. And the kitten went down also, pawing out each letter as it was made, under the impression that the whole affair was a game of play with herself. “There bean’t a letter that bothers him,” cried Abel, triumphantly, to the no less triumphant foster-mother. Jan had, indeed, gone through the whole alphabet, with the utmost ease and self-confidence; but his remembrance of the names of the letters he drew so readily proved to be far less perfect than his representations of them on the floor of the round-house. Abel found his pupil’s progress hindered by the very talent that he had displayed. He was so anxious to draw the letters that he would not learn them, and Abel was at last obliged to make one thing a condition of the other. “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.