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. “You shall have ‘Joseph and his Bretheren’ cheap,” roared the hunchback, becoming more pressing as the windmiller’s wife seemed slow to be fascinated, and shaking “Joseph and his Brethren,” framed in satin-wood, in her face, as he advanced upon her with an almost threatening air. “Don’t want ’em? Take ‘Antony and Cleopatterer.’ It’s a sweet picter. Too dear? Do you know what sech picters costs to paint? Look at Cleopatterer’s dress and the jewels she has on. I don’t make a farthing on ’em. I gets daily bread out of the other things, and only keeps the picters to oblige one or two ladies of taste that likes to give their rooms a genteel appearance.” The long disuse of such powers of judgment as she had, and long habit of always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake’s naturally weak will and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any pressure from without. To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, and every instant she became more and more convinced that wares she neither wanted nor approved of were necessary to her, and good bargains, because the man who sold them said so.