sun; he was sick unto death, and motionless. His master gave him the only
medicine in his pharmacy--kicks and oaths and blows with a cudgel of oak,
which had been often the only food and drink, the only wage and reward,
ever offered to him. But Patrasche was beyond the reach of any torture or
of any curses. Patrasche lay, dead to all appearances, down in the white
powder of the summer dust. After a while, finding it useless to assail his
ribs with punishment and his ears with maledictions, the
Brabantois--deeming life gone in him, or going so nearly that his carcass
was forever useless, unless indeed some one should strip it of the skin
for gloves--cursed him fiercely in farewell, struck off the leathern bands
of the harness, kicked his body aside into the grass, and, groaning and
muttering in savage wrath, pushed the cart lazily along the road up-hill,
and left the dying dog for the ants to sting and for the crows to pick.

It was the last day before Kermesse away at Louvain, and the Brabantois
was in haste to reach the fair and get a good place for his truck of brass
wares. He was in fierce wrath, because Patrasche had been a strong and
much-enduring animal, and because he himself had now the hard task of
pushing his charette all the way to Louvain. But to stay to look after
Patrasche never entered his thoughts: the beast was dying and useless, and
he would steal, to replace him, the first large dog that he found
wandering alone out of sight of its master. Patrasche had cost him
nothing, or next to nothing, and for two long, cruel years had made him
toil ceaselessly in his service from sunrise to sunset, through summer and
winter, in fair weather and foul.

He had got a fair use and a good profit out of Patrasche: being human, he
was wise, and left the dog to draw his last breath alone in the ditch, and
have his bloodshot eyes plucked out as they might be by the birds, whilst
he himself went on his way to beg and to steal, to eat and to drink, to