A DOG OF FLANDERS, 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