The tints had grown very warm on trees and leaves, when Jan one day accomplished, with much labor, the best painting he had yet done.  It was of a scene before his eyes.  The trees were admirably grouped; he put little bits of twigs for the branches, which now showed more than hitherto, and he added a glimpse of the sky by neatly dovetailing the petals of some bluebells into a mosaic.  He had turned back the long sleeves of his coat, and had with difficulty kept the tail of it from doing damage to his foreground, and had perseveringly kept the pigs at bay, when, as he returned with a last instalment of bluebells to finish his sky, he saw a man standing on the path, with his back to him, completely blotting out the view by his very broad body, and with one heel not half an inch from Jan’s picture.

He was a coarsely built old man, dressed in threadbare black.  The tones of his voice were broad, and quite unlike the local dialect.  He was speaking as Jan came up, but to no companion that Jan could see, though his hand was outstretched in sympathy with his words.  He was looking upwards, too, as Jan was wont to look himself, into that azure sky which he was trying to paint in bluebell flowers.

In truth, the stranger was spouting poetry, and poems and recitations were alike unknown to Jan; but something caught his fancy in what he heard, and the flowers dropped from his fingers as the broad but not ungraceful accents broke upon his ear:  —

     “The clouds were pure and white as flocks new shorn,
      And fresh from the clear brook; sweetly they slept
      On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept
      A little noiseless noise among the leaves,
      Born of the very sigh that silence heaves;
      For not the faintest motion could be seen
      Of all the shades that slanted o’er the green.”

The old man paused for an instant, and, turning round, saw Jan, and put his heavy foot into the sky of Jan’s picture.  He drew it back at Jan’s involuntary cry, and, after a long look at the quaint figure before him, said, “Are ye one of the fairies, little man?”

But Jan knew nothing of fairies.  “I be Jan Lake, from the mill,” said he.

“Are ye so?  But that’s not a miller’s coat ye’ve on,” said the old man, with a twinkle in his eye.

Jan looked seriously at it, and then explained.  “I be Master Salter’s pig-minder just now, but I’ve got a miller’s thumb, I have.”

“That’s well, Master Pig-minder; and now would ye tell an old man what ye screamed out for.  Did I scare ye?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Jan, civilly; and he added, “I liked that you were saying.”

“Are ye a bit of a poet as well as a pig-minder, then?” and waving his hand with a theatrical gesture up the wood, the old man began to spout afresh:  —