ISBN: 2940013517844

Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was alittle Ardennois--Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of… Mehr…

Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was alittle Ardennois--Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the sameage by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other was alreadyold. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both were orphaned anddestitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been thebeginning of the tie between them, their first bond of sympathy; and ithad strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm andindissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly. Their home was alittle hut on the edge of a little village--a Flemish village a leaguefrom Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, withlong lines of poplars and of alders bending in the breeze on the edge ofthe great canal which ran through it. It had about a score of houses andhomesteads, with shutters of bright green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-redor black and white, and walls white-washed until they shone in the sunlike snow. In the centre of the village stood a windmill, placed on alittle moss-grown slope: it was a landmark to all the level country round.It had once been painted scarlet, sails and all, but that had been in itsinfancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for thesoldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind andweather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiffin the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which wouldhave thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attendany other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altarof the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stoodopposite to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night withthat strange, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in theLow Countries seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birthupward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut onthe edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in thenorth-east, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and spreadingcorn that stretched away from them like a tideless, changeless sea. It wasthe hut of a very old man, of a very poor man--of old Jehan Daas, who inhis time had been a soldier, and who remembered the wars that had trampledthe country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had brought from hisservice nothing except a wound, which had made him a cripple.When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty, his daughter had died inthe Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy hertwo-year-old son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself, buthe took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon becamewelcome and precious to him. Little Nello---which was but a pet diminutivefor Nicolas--throve with him, and the old man and the little child livedin the poor little hut contentedly. Digital Content>E-books>Juv Young Readers>Juv Young Readers>Juv Fiction PB, SAP Digital >16<

ISBN: 2940013517844

A DOG OF FLANDERS A-DOG-OF-FLANDERS~~LOUISA-DE-LA-RAM-Ecirc Juv Young Readers>Juv Young Readers>Juv Fiction PB NOOK Book (eBook), SAP