



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, S. R. Ellison, Ted Garvin,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team








A DOG OF FLANDERS

By Louisa De La Rame

(Ouida)


_Illustrated In Color By_ Maria L. Kirk



ILLUSTRATIONS

NELLO, AWAKENED FROM HIS SLEEP, RAN TO HELP WITH THE REST

THEN LITTLE NELLO TOOK HIS PLACE BESIDE THE CART

NELLO DREW THEIR LIKENESS WITH A STICK OF CHARCOAL

THE PORTALS OF THE CATHEDRAL WERE UNCLOSED AFTER THE MIDNIGHT MASS

A DOG OF FLANDERS

A STORY OF NOeEL

[Illustration]


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 <DW72>: 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 <DW36>.

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.

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-hearted 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 <DW36>, and Nello
was but a child; and Patrasche was their dog.

[Illustration]

A dog of Flanders--yellow of hide, large of