“Pretty well, my dear,” said the Cheap Jack, grinning hideously. “And now for the letter. Read it aloud, Sal, my dear; you’re a better scholar than me.” Sal opened the thin, well-worn sheet, and read the word “Moerdyk,” but then she paused. And, like Abel, she paused so long that the hunchback pressed impatiently to look over her shoulder. But the letter was written in a foreign language, and the Cheap Jack and his wife were no wiser for it than the miller’s man. CHAPTER XVIII. MIDSUMMER HOLIDAYS.—CHILD FANCIES.—JAN AND THE PIG-MINDER.—MASTER SALTER AT HOME.—JAN HIRES HIMSELF OUT. MIDSUMMER came, and the Dame’s school broke up for the holidays. Jan had longed for them intensely. Not that he was oppressed by the labors of learning, but that he wanted to be out of doors. Many a little one was equally eager for the freedom of the fields, but the common child-love for hedges and ditches, and flower-picking, and the like, was intensified in Jan by a deeper pleasure which country scenes awoke from the artist nature within him. That it is no empty sentimentality to speak of an artist nature in a child, let the child-memories of all artists bear witness! That they inspired the poet Wordsworth with one of his best poems, and that they have dyed the canvas of most landscape painters with the indestructible local coloring of the scenes of each man’s childhood, will hardly be denied. That this is against the wishes and the theories of many excellent people has nothing to do with its truth. If all children were the bluff, hearty, charmingly naughty, enviably happy, utterly simple and unsentimental beings that some of us wish, and so assert them to be, it might be better for them, or it might not—who can say? That the healthy, careless, rough and ready type is the one to encourage, many will agree, who cannot agree that it is universal, or even much the most common. It is probably from an imperfect remembrance of their nursery lives that some people believe that the griefs of one’s childhood are light, its joys uncomplicated, and its tastes simple. A clearer recollection of the favorite poetry and the most cherished day-dreams of very early years would probably convince them that the strongest taste for tragedy comes before one’s teens, and inclines to the melodramatic; that sentimentality (of some kind) is grateful to the verge of mawkishness; and that simple tastes are rather a result of culture and experience than natural gifts of infancy.