A DOG OF FLANDERS

Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.

They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was a
little Ardennois--Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the same
age by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other was already
old. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both were orphaned and
destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been the
beginning of the tie between them, their first bond of sympathy; and it
had strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm and
indissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly. Their home was a
little hut on the edge of a little village--a Flemish village a league
from Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with
long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the breeze on the edge of
the great canal which ran through it. It had about a score of houses and
homesteads, with shutters of bright green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-red
or black and white, and walls white-washed until they shone in the sun
like snow. In the centre of the village stood a windmill, placed on a
little moss-grown slope: it was a landmark to all the level country round.
It had once been painted scarlet, sails and all, but that had been in its
infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for the
soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and
weather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff
in the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would
have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend
any other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar
of the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood
opposite to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night with
that strange, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in the
Low Countries seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.

Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth
upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on
the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the
north-east, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and spreading
corn that stretched away from them like a tideless, changeless sea. It was
the hut of a very old man, of a very poor man--of old Jehan Daas, who in
his time had been a soldier, and who remembered the wars that had trampled
the country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had brought from his
service nothing except a wound, which had made him a cripple.

When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty, his daughter had died in
the Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her
two-year-old son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself, but
he took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became
welcome and precious to him. Little Nello---which was but a pet diminutive
for Nicolas--throve with him, and the old man and the little child lived
in the poor little hut contentedly.

A DOG OF FLANDERS