“Make a pitcher of a man,” Jan would cry. And Abel did so, bit by bit, to Jan’s dictation. Thus “Make’s head. Make un round. Make two eyes. Make a nose. Make a mouth. Make’s arms. Make’s fingers,” etc. And, with some “free-handling,” Abel would strike the five fingers off, one by one, in five screeching strokes of the slate-pencil. But his art was conventional, and when Jan said, “Make un a miller’s thumb,” he was puzzled, and could only bend the shortest of the five strokes slightly backwards to represent the trade-mark of his forefathers. And when a little later Jan said one day, “’Tis a galley crow, that is. _Now_ make a pitcher of a MAN, Abel dear!” Abel found that the scarecrow figure was the limit of his artist powers, and thenceforward it was Jan who “made pitchers.” He drew from dawn to dusk upon the little slate which he wore tied by a bit of string to the belt of his pinafore. He drew his foster-mother, and Abel, and the kitten, and the clock, and the flower-pots in the window, and the windmill itself, and every thing he saw or imagined. And he drew till his slate was full on both sides, and then in very primitive fashion he spat and rubbed it all out and began again. And whenever Jan’s face was washed, the two faces of his slate were washed too; and with this companion he was perfectly happy and constantly employed. Now it was Abel who gave the subjects for the pictures, and Jan who made them, and it was good Abel also who washed the slate, and rubbed the well-worn stumps of pencil to new points upon the round-house floor. They often went together to a mound at some little distance, where, seated side by side, they “made a mill” upon the slate, Jan drawing, and Abel dictating the details to be recorded. “Put in the window, Jan,” he would say; “and another, and another, and another, and another. Now put the sails. Now put the stage. Now put daddy by the door.” On one point Jan was obstinate. He steadily refused to “make Gearge” upon his slate in any capacity whatever. Perhaps it was in this habit of constantly gazing at all things about him, in order to commit them to his slate, which gave a strange, dreamy expression to Jan’s dark eyes. Perhaps it was sky-gazing, or the windmiller’s trick of watching the clouds, or perhaps it was something else, from which Jan derived an erectness of carriage not common among the children about him, and a quaint way of carrying his little chin in the air as if he were listening to voices from a higher level than that of the round-house floor. If he had lived farther north, he could hardly have escaped the suspicion of uncanniness. He was strangely like a changeling among the miller’s children.