wine-shop where he drank his sou's worth of black beer, quite as good as
any of the famous altarpieces for which the stranger folk traveled far
and wide into Flanders from every land on which the good sun shone.

There was only one other beside Patrasche to whom Nello could talk at
all of his daring fantasies. This other was little Alois, who lived at
the old red mill on the grassy mound, and whose father, the miller, was
the best-to-do husbandman in all the village. Little Alois was only a
pretty baby with soft round, rosy features, made lovely by those sweet
dark eyes that the Spanish rule has left in so many a Flemish face,
in testimony of the Alvan dominion, as Spanish art has left broad-sown
throughout the country majestic palaces and stately courts, gilded
house-fronts and sculptured lintels--histories in blazonry and poems in
stone.

Little Alois was often with Nello and Patrasche. They played in the
fields, they ran in the snow, they gathered the daisies and bilberries,
they went up to the old gray church together, and they often sat
together by the broad wood fire in the mill-house. Little Alois, indeed,
was the richest child in the hamlet. She had neither brother nor sister;
her blue serge dress had never a hole in it; at kermess she had as many
gilded nuts and Agni Dei in sugar as her hands could hold; and when she
went up for her first communion her flaxen curls were covered with a
cap of richest Mechlin lace, which had been her mother's and her
grandmother's before it came to her. Men spoke already, though she had
but twelve years, of the good wife she would be for their sons to woo
and win; but she herself was a little gay, simple child, in no wise
conscious of her heritage, and she loved no playfellows so well as Jehan
Daas's grandson and his dog.