through the early darkness, bright and happy, and burst with a shout of
joy into their home.

So, on the whole, it was well with them, very well; and Patrasche, meeting
on the highway or in the public streets the many dogs who toiled from
daybreak into nightfall, paid only with blows and curses, and loosened
from the shafts with a kick to starve and freeze as best they might--
Patrasche in his heart was very grateful to his fate, and thought it the
fairest and the kindliest the world could hold. Though he was often very
hungry indeed when he lay down at night; though he had to work in the
heats of summer noons and the rasping chills of winter dawns; though his
feet were often tender with wounds from the sharp edges of the jagged
pavement; though he had to perform tasks beyond his strength and against
his nature--yet he was grateful and content: he did his duty with each
day, and the eyes that he loved smiled down on him. It was sufficient for
Patrasche.

[Illustration]

There was only one thing which caused Patrasche any uneasiness in his
life, and it was this. Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full at every
turn of old piles of stones, dark and ancient and majestic, standing in
crooked courts, jammed against gateways and taverns, rising by the water's
edge, with bells ringing above them in the air, and ever and again out of
their arched doors a swell of music pealing. There they remain, the grand
old sanctuaries of the past, shut in amidst the squalor, the hurry, the
crowds, the unloveliness, and the commerce of the modern world, and all
day long the clouds drift and the birds circle and the winds sigh around
them, and beneath the earth at their feet there sleeps--RUBENS.