“You shall have ‘Joseph and his Bretheren’ cheap,” roared the hunchback, becoming more pressing as the windmiller’s wife seemed slow to be fascinated, and shaking “Joseph and his Brethren,” framed in satin-wood, in her face, as he advanced upon her with an almost threatening air.  “Don’t want ’em?  Take ‘Antony and Cleopatterer.’  It’s a sweet picter.  Too dear?  Do you know what sech picters costs to paint?  Look at Cleopatterer’s dress and the jewels she has on.  I don’t make a farthing on ’em.  I gets daily bread out of the other things, and only keeps the picters to oblige one or two ladies of taste that likes to give their rooms a genteel appearance.”

The long disuse of such powers of judgment as she had, and long habit of always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake’s naturally weak will and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any pressure from without.  To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, and every instant she became more and more convinced that wares she neither wanted nor approved of were necessary to her, and good bargains, because the man who sold them said so.

The Cheap Jack was a knave, but he was no fool.  In a crowded market-place, or at a street door, no oilier tongue wagged than his.  But he knew exactly the moment when a doubtful bargain might be clinched by a bullying tone and a fierce look on his dirty face, at cottage doors, on heaths or downs, when the good wife was alone with her children, and the nearest neighbor was half a mile away.

No length of experience taught Mrs. Lake wisdom in reference to the Cheap Jack.

Each time that his cart appeared in sight she resolved to have nothing to do with him, warned by the latest cracked jug, or the sugar-basin which, after three-quarters of an hour wasted in chaffering, she had beaten down to three-halfpence dearer than what she afterwards found to be the shop price in the town.  But proof to the untrained mind is “as water spilled upon the ground.”  And when the Cheap Jack declared that she was quite free to look without buying, and that he did not want her to buy, Mrs. Lake allowed him to pull down his goods as before, and listened to his statements as if she had never proved them to be lies, and was thrown into confusion and fluster when he began to bully, and bought in haste to be rid of him, and repented at leisure—­to no purpose as far as the future was concerned.

“Look here!” yelled the hunchback, as he waddled with horrible swiftness after the miller’s wife, as she withdrew into the mill; “which do you mean to have? I gets nothing on ’em, whichever you takes, so please yourself.  Take ‘Joseph and his Bretheren.’  The frame’s worth twice the money.  Take the other, too, and I’ll take sixpence off the pair, and be out of pocket to please you.”