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, 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;