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