For Patrasche was their alpha and omega; their treasury and granary; their
store of gold and wand of wealth; their bread-winner and minister; their
only friend and comforter. Patrasche dead or gone from them, they must
have laid themselves down and died likewise. Patrasche was body, brains,
hands, head, and feet to both of them: Patrasche was their very life,
their very soul. For Jehan Daas was old and a cripple, and Nello was but a
child; and Patrasche was their dog.

[Illustration]

A dog of Flanders--yellow of hide, large of head and limb, with wolf-like
ears that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in the muscular
development wrought in his breed by many generations of hard service.
Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard and cruelly from sire to
son in Flanders many a century--slaves of slaves, dogs of the people,
beasts of the shafts and the harness, creatures that lived straining their
sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking their hearts on the
flints of the streets.

Patrasche had been born of parents who had labored hard all their days
over the sharp-set stones of the various cities and the long, shadowless,
weary roads of the two Flanders and of Brabant. He had been born to no
other heritage than those of pain and of toil. He had been fed on curses
and baptized with blows. Why not? It was a Christian country, and
Patrasche was but a dog. Before he was fully grown he had known the bitter
gall of the cart and the collar. Before he had entered his thirteenth
month he had become the property of a hardware-dealer, who was accustomed
to wander over the land north and south, from the blue sea to the green
mountains. They sold him for a small price, because he was so young.