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.