But William had slightly moved the strap with his foot, as he stood with a perfectly unmoved and vacant countenance beside the Dame, which made some delay; and as Mrs. Datchett bent lower on the right side of her chair, William began upon the left a “hum,” which, with a close imitation of the crowing of a cock, the grunting of a pig, and the braying of a donkey, formed his chief stock of accomplishments.

“Drat the thing!  Where be un?” said the Dame, endangering her balance in the search.

“B-z-z-z-z!” went William behind the chair; and he added, sotto voce, to Jan, “She be as dunch as a bittle.”

At last the Dame heard, and looked round.  “Be that a harnet, missus, do ’ee think?” said William, with a face as guileless as a babe’s.

Dame Datchett rose in terror.  William bent to look beneath her chair for the hornet, and of course repeated his hum.  As the hornet could neither be found nor got rid of, the alarmed old lady broke up the school, and went to lay a trap of brown sugar outside the window for her enemy.  And so Jan escaped a beating.

But this and the story of his first fight are digressions.  It yet remains to be told how he took to drawing pigs.

Dame Datchett’s cottage was the last on one side of the street; but it did not face the street, but looked over the water-meadows, and the little river, and the bridge.

As Jan sat on the end of the form, he could look through the Dame’s open door, the chief view from which was of a place close by the bridge, and on the river’s bank, where the pig-minders of the village brought their pigs to water.  Day after day, when the tedium of doing nothing under Dame Datchett’s superintendence was insufficiently relieved to Jan’s active mind by pinching “Willum” till he giggled, or playing cat’s-cradle with one of his foster-brothers, did he welcome the sight of a flock of pigs with their keeper, scuttling past the Dame’s door, and rushing snorting to the stream.

Much he envied the freedom of the happy pig-minder, whilst the vagaries of the pigs were an unfailing source of amusement.

The degree and variety of expression in a pig’s eye can only be appreciated by those who have studied pigs as Morland must have studied them.  The pertness, the liveliness, the humor, the love of mischief, the fiendish ingenuity and perversity of which pigs are capable, can be fully known to the careworn pig-minder alone.  When they are running away,—­and when are they not running away?—­they have an action with the hind legs very like a donkey in a state of revolt.  But they have none of the donkey’s too numerous grievances.  And if donkeys squealed at every switch, as pigs do, their undeserved sufferings would have cried loud enough for vengeance before this.