ease and self-confidence; but his remembrance of the names of the
letters he drew so readily proved to be far less perfect than his
representations of them on the floor of the round-house.

Abel found his pupil's progress hindered by the very talent that he
had displayed. He was so anxious to draw the letters that he would
not learn them, and Abel was at last obliged to make one thing a
condition of the other.

"Say it then, Jan," he would cry, "and then thee shall make 'em."

Mrs. Lake commissioned Abel to buy a small slate and pencil for Jan
at the village shop, and these were now the child's favorite toys.
He would sit quiet for any length of time with them. Even the sandy
kitten was neglected, or got a rap on its nose with the slate-
pencil, when to toy with the moving point had been too great a
temptation to be resisted. For a while Jan's taste for wielding the
pencil was solely devoted to furthering his learning to read. He
drew letters only till the day that the Cheap Jack called.

The Cheap Jack was a travelling pedler, who did a good deal of
business in that neighborhood. He was not a pedler pure, for he had
a little shop in the next town. Nature had not favored him. He was
a hunchback. He was, or pretended to be, deaf. He had a very ugly
face, made uglier by dirt, above which he wore a mangy hair cap. He
sold rough pottery, cheap crockery and glass, mock jewelry, low
song-books, framed pictures, mirrors, and quack medicines. He
bought old bottles, bones, and rags. And what else he bought or
sold, or dealt with, was dimly guessed at by a few, but fully known
to none.