Dame Datchett’s cottage was the last on one side of the street; but it did not face the street, but looked over the water-meadows, and the little river, and the bridge. As Jan sat on the end of the form, he could look through the Dame’s open door, the chief view from which was of a place close by the bridge, and on the river’s bank, where the pig-minders of the village brought their pigs to water. Day after day, when the tedium of doing nothing under Dame Datchett’s superintendence was insufficiently relieved to Jan’s active mind by pinching “Willum” till he giggled, or playing cat’s-cradle with one of his foster-brothers, did he welcome the sight of a flock of pigs with their keeper, scuttling past the Dame’s door, and rushing snorting to the stream. Much he envied the freedom of the happy pig-minder, whilst the vagaries of the pigs were an unfailing source of amusement. The degree and variety of expression in a pig’s eye can only be appreciated by those who have studied pigs as Morland must have studied them. The pertness, the liveliness, the humor, the love of mischief, the fiendish ingenuity and perversity of which pigs are capable, can be fully known to the careworn pig-minder alone. When they are running away,—and when are they not running away?—they have an action with the hind legs very like a donkey in a state of revolt. But they have none of the donkey’s too numerous grievances. And if donkeys squealed at every switch, as pigs do, their undeserved sufferings would have cried loud enough for vengeance before this. Jan’s opportunities for studying pigs were good. As the smallest and swiftest of the flock, his tail tightly curled, and indescribable jauntiness in his whole demeanor, came bounding to the river’s brink, followed by his fellows, driving, pushing, snuffing, winking, and gobbling, and lastly by a small boy in a large coat, with a long switch, Jan was witness of the whole scene from Dame Datchett’s door. And, as he sat with his slate and pencil before him, he naturally took to drawing the quaint comic faces and expressive eyes of the herd, and their hardly less expressive backs and tails; and to depicting the scenes which took place when the pigs had enjoyed their refreshment, and with renewed vigor led their keeper in twenty different directions, instead of going home. Back, up the road, where he could hardly drive them at the point of the switch a few hours before; by sharp turns into Squire Ammaby’s grounds, or the churchyard; and helter-skelter through the water-meadows. The fame of Jan’s “pitcher-making” had gone before him to Dame Datchett’s school by the mouths of his foster-brothers and sisters, and he found a dozen little voices ready to dictate subjects for his pencil. “Make a ’ouse, Janny Lake.” “Make thee vather’s mill, Janny Lake.” “Make a man. Make Dame Datchett. Make the parson. Make the Cheap Jack. Make Daddy Angel. Make Master Chuter. Make a oss—cow—ship—pig!”