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.
To gratify that old whim of his about the red shawl, his doting foster-mother made him little crimson frocks; and as he wandered over the downs in his red dress and a white pinafore, his yellow hair flying in the breeze, his chin up, his black eyes wide open, with slate in one hand, his pencil in the other, and the sandy kitten clinging to his shoulder (for Jan never lowered his chin to help her to balance herself), he looked more like some elf than a child of man.