ld 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.

It was a very humble little mud hut indeed, but it was clean and white
as a sea-shell, and stood in a small plot of garden ground that yielded
beans and herbs and pumpkins. They were very poor, terribly poor; many a
day they had nothing at all to eat. They never by any chance had enough;
to have had enough to eat would have been to have reached paradise at
once. But the old man was very gentle and good to the boy, and the boy
was a beautiful, innocent, truthful, tender-natured creature; and they
were happy on a crust and a few leaves of cabbage, and asked no more of
earth or heaven--save indeed that Patrasche should be always with them,
since without Patrasche where would they have been?

For Patrasche was their alpha and omega; their treasury and granary;
their store of gold and wand of wealth; their bread-winner and minister;
their only friend and comforter. Patrasche dead or gone from them, they
must have laid themselves down and died likewise. Patrasche was body,
brains, hands, head, and feet to both of them; Patrasche was their very
life, their very soul. For Jehan Daas was old and a cripple, and Nello
was but a child; and Patrasche was their dog.

A dog of Flanders--yellow of hide, large of head and limb, with
wolf-like ears that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in the
muscular development wrought in his breed by many generations of hard
service. Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard and cruelly from
sire to son in Flanders many a century--slaves of slaves, dogs of the
people, beasts of the shafts and the harness, creatures that lived
straining their sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking their
hearts on the flints of the streets.

Patrasche had been born of parents who had labored hard all their
days over the sharp-set stones of the various cities and the long,
shadowless, weary roads of the two Flanders and of Brabant. He had been
born to no other heritage than those of pain and of toil. He had been
fed on curses and baptized with blows. Why not? It was a Christian
country, and Patrasche was but a dog. Before he was fully grown he had
known the bitter gall of the cart