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
north-east, 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: to
have had enough to eat would have been to have reached paradise at once.
But the old man was very gentle and good to the boy, and the boy was a
beautiful, innocent, truthful, tender-hearted creature; and they were
happy on a crust and a few leaves of cabbage, and asked no more of earth
or heaven; save indeed that Patrasche should be always with them, since
without Patrasche where would they have been?