“Just as well,” muttered Koosje, under her breath.

“It is very good of you to have fed and warmed us,” Truide went on, in her faint, complaining tones.  “Many a one would have let me starve, and I should have deserved it.  It is very good of you and we are grateful; but ’tis time we were going, Koosje and Mina;” then added, with a shake of her head, “but I don’t know where.”

“Oh, you’d better stay,” said Koosje, hurriedly.  “I live in this big house by myself, and I dare say you’ll be more useful in the shop than Yanke—­if your tongue is as glib as it used to be, that is.  You know some English, too, don’t you?”

“A little,” Truide answered, eagerly.

“And after all,” Koosje said, philosophically, shrugging her shoulders, “you saved me from the beatings and the starvings and the rest.  I owe you something for that.  Why, if it hadn’t been for you I should have been silly enough to have married him.”

And then she went back to her shop, saying to herself: 

“The professor said it was a blessing in disguise; God sends all our trials to work some great purpose.  Yes; that was what he said, and he knew most things.  Just think if I were trailing about now with those two little ones, with nothing to look back to but a schnapps-drinking husband who beat me!  Ah, well, well! things are best as they are.  I don’t know that I ought not to be very much obliged to her—­and she’ll be very useful in the shop.”

A DOG OF FLANDERS, by Ouida

Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.

They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood.  Nello was a little Ardennois; Patrasche was a big Fleming.  They were both of the same age by length of years; yet one was still young, and the other was already old.  They had dwelt together almost all their days; both were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand.  It had been the beginning of the tie between them,—­their first bond of sympathy,—­and it had strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly.

Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little village—­a Flemish village a league from Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran through it.  It had about a score of houses and homesteads, with shutters of bright green or sky blue, and roofs rose red or black and white, and walls whitewashed until they shone in the sun like snow.  In the centre of the village stood a windmill, placed on a little 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 its infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for the soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now