By Ouida
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 whitewashed 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 northeast, 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,
