United States or Moldova ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And thus it came about that Abel was for ever sifting bits of flour through his finger and thumb, to obtain the required flatness and delicacy which marks the latter in a miller born; and playing lovingly with little Jan on the floor of the round-house, he would pass some through the baby's fingers also, crying, "Sift un, Janny! sift un!
But Abel, whose first sight of Jan was as the light of the mill-candle fell on his tear-stained face, said tenderly, "What be amiss, Janny?" "Jan can't make un," sobbed his foster-brother. "What can't Janny make? Tell Abel, then," said the nurse-boy. Jan stuck his fists into his eyes, which were drying fast, and replied, "Jan can't make the moon and the clouds, Abel dear!"
"What be amiss with 'ee, then, Kitty Chuter?" said Jan, looking up from his work; and the question was passed on with some impatience, as her tears prevented her reply. "What be amiss with 'ee?" "Janny Lake have never made a pig for I," sobbed the little maid, with her head dolefully inclined to her left shoulder, and her oval face pulled to a doubly pensive length.
And as Jan sat down, and put his arms about him, on the very spot where they had so often sat together, learning the alphabet and educating their thumbs, Abel laid his head on his foster-brother's shoulder, saying, "I do think, Janny dear, that Mary, she wants me, and the others too. I think I be going after them. But thee'll look to mother, Janny dear, eh?"
So he only shook his head, and cuddled the kitten more tightly than before. "Tell un, Janny dear. Tell un, there's a lovey!" said Mrs. Lake. "Who did daddy put in the hopper?"
Make a oss cow ship pig!" But the popularity obtained by Jan's pigs soon surpassed that of all his other performances. "Make pigs for I, Janny Lake!" and "Make pigs for I, too!" was a sort of whispering chorus that went on perpetually under the Dame's nose.
Sometimes a long triangular mass of small white fleecy clouds would stretch across half the heavens, having its shortest side upon the horizon, and its point at the zenith, where one white fleece seemed to be leading a gradually widening flock across the sky. "See then!" the nurse-boy would cry. "See to the pretty sheep up yonder! Janny mind un! So! so!"
It was with the greatest difficulty that Mr. Hall and Millie, who had been roused by her scream of alarm, succeeded in getting her downstairs, and applying the restoratives customary in such cases. "'Tas sperits," said Mrs. Hall. "I know 'tas sperits. I've read in papers of en. "Take a drop more, Janny," said Hall. "'Twill steady ye." "Lock him out," said Mrs. Hall. "Don't let him come in again.
It was whilst the schoolmaster still knelt outside the windmill that Abel awoke, and raised his eyes to Jan's with a smile. "Thee must go out a bit soon, Janny dear," he whispered, "it be such a lovely day." Jan was too much pleased to hear him speak to wonder how he knew what kind of a day it was, and Abel lay with his head in Jan's arms, breathing painfully and gazing before him.
In the centre of it I found one Janny, or rather his marble bust, brooding over a minute iron-railed garden of half-dried asters opposite a shut-up school, which it appeared from the inscription Janny had founded somewhere in the arid Thirties. It was precisely the sort of school that Janny, by the look of him, would have invented. Not even French adaptability could make anything of it.
Word Of The Day