“Your welcome letter to hand, and I do hope, my dear Jan, It finds you well as it leave me at present. I be mortal bad with a cough, and your friends as searched everywhere, and dragged every place for you, encluding the plains for twenty mile round and down by the watermill. That Cheap John be no more your vather nor mine, an e’d better not show his dirty vace yearabouts after all he stole. but your poor mother, she was allus took in by him, but she said with her own mouth, that woman be no more the child’s mother, and never wos a mother, and your mother knowed wots wot, poor zowl! And I’m glad, my dear Jan, you be doing well in a genteel line, though I did hope you’d take to the mill; but work is slack, and I’m not wot I wos, and I do miss Master Swift. He had a stroke after you left, and confined to the house, so I will conclude, my dear Jan, and go down and rejoice his heart to hear you be alive. I’d main like to see you, Jan, my dear, and so for sartin would he and all enquiring friends; and I am till deth your loving vather, or as good, and I shan’t grudge you if so be you finds a better. “ABEL LAKE.” “P.S. I’d main like to see your vace again, Jan, my dear.” Jan sobbed so bitterly in reading the postscript that, after vain attempts to console him by chaff, the bow-legged boy wept from sympathy. As to the painter, the whole letter so caught his capricious fancy that he was for ever questioning Jan as to the details of his life in that out-of-the-world district where the purest breath of heaven turned the sails of the windmill, and where the miller took payment for his work “in kind.” “It must be a wonderful spot, Giotto,” said he; “and, if I were richer, just now we’d go down together, and paint sunsets, and see your friends.” And he walked up and down the studio, revolving his new caprice, whilst Jan tried to think if any thing were likely to bring money into his master’s pocket before long. Suddenly the artist seized a sketch that was lying near, and, turning it over, began one on the other side, questioning Jan as he drew. “What do old country wives dress in down yonder?—What did you wear in the mill?—Where does the light come from in a round-house,” etc. Presently he flung it to Jan, and, in answer to the boy’s cry of admiration, growled, “Ay, ay. You must do what _you_ can now, for every after-touch of mine will spoil it. There are hundreds of men, Giotto, whose sketches are good, and their paintings daubs. But it is only the sketches of great men that sell. The public likes canvas and linseed oil for its money, where small reputations are concerned.”