Jan went back to school. Though his foster-mother was indignant, and ready to do battle both with Dame Datchett and with William Smith’s aunt (with whom, in lieu of parents, the boy lived), and though Abel expressed his anxiety to go down and “teach Willum to vight one of his own zize,” Jan steadily rejected their help, and said manfully, “Jan bean’t feared of un. I whopped un, I did.”
So Mrs. Lake doctored his bruises, and sent him off to school again. She yielded the more readily that she felt certain that the windmiller would not take the child’s part against the Dame.
No further misfortune befell him. William, if loutish and a bit of a bully on occasion, was not an ill-natured child; and, having a turn for humor of a broad, unintellectual sort, he and Jan became rather friendly on the common, but reprehensible ground of playing pranks, which kept the school in a titter and the Dame in doubt. And, if detected, they did not think a dose of the strap by any means too high a price to pay for their fun.
For William’s sufferings under that instrument of discipline were not to be measured by his doleful howlings and roarings, nor even by his ready tears.
“What be ’ee so voolish for as to say nothin’ when her wollops ’ee?” he asked of Jan, in a very friendly spirit, one day. “Thee should holler as loud as ’ee can. Them that hollers and cries murder she soon stops for, does Dame Datchett. She be feared of their mothers hearing ’em, and comin’ after ’em.”
Jan could not lower himself to accept such base advice; but his superior adroitness did much to balance the advantage William had over him, in a less scrupulous pride.
As to learning, I fear that, after the untoward consequences of his zeal for the alphabet, Jan made no effort to learn any thing but cat’s-cradle from his neighbors.
On one other occasion, indeed, he was somewhat over-zealous, and only escaped the strap for his reward by a friendly diversion on the part of his friend. The Dame had a Dutch clock in the corner of her kitchen, the figures on the face of which were the common Arabic ones, and not Roman. And as one of the few things the Dame professed was to “teach the clock,” she would, when the figures had been recited after the fashion in which her scholars shouted over the alphabet, set those who had advanced to the use of slates to copy the figures from the clock-face.
Slowly and sorrowfully did William toil over this lesson. Again and again did he rub out his ill-proportioned fives, with so greasy a finger and such a superabundance of moisture as to make a sort of puddle, into which he dug heavily, and broke two pencils.
“A vive be such an akkerd vigger,” he muttered, in reply to Jan, who had looked up inquiringly as the second pencil snapped. “’Twill come aal right, though, when a dries.”