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-natured 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?

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.

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.

This man was a drunkard and a brute.  The life of Patrasche was a life of hell.  To deal the tortures of hell on the animal creation is a way which the Christians have of showing their belief in it.  His purchaser was a sullen, ill-living, brutal Brabantois, who heaped his cart full with pots and pans and flagons and buckets, and other wares of crockery and brass and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the load as best he might, whilst he himself lounged idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease, smoking his black pipe and stopping at every wineshop or cafe on the road.