The winter was very sharp already.  That night, after they reached the hut, snow fell, and fell for very many days after that; so that the paths and the divisions in the fields were all obliterated, and all the smaller streams were frozen over, and the cold was intense upon the plains.  Then, indeed, it became hard work to go round for the milk while the world was all dark, and carry it through the darkness to the silent town.  Hard work, especially for Patrasche, for the passage of the years that were only bringing Nello a stronger youth were bringing him old age, and his joints were stiff and his bones ached often.  But he would never give up his share of the labour.  Nello would fain have spared him and drawn the cart himself, but Patrasche would not allow it.  All he would ever permit or accept was the help of a thrust from behind to the truck as it lumbered along through the ice-ruts.  Patrasche had lived in harness, and he was proud of it.  He suffered a great deal sometimes from frost and the terrible roads and the rheumatic pains of his limbs; but he only drew his breath hard and bent his stout neck, and trod onward with steady patience.

“Rest thee at home, Patrasche; it is time thou didst rest, and I can quite well push in the cart by myself,” urged Nello many a morning; but Patrasche, who understood him aright, would no more have consented to stay at home than a veteran soldier to shirk when the charge was sounding; and every day he would rise and place himself in his shafts, and plod along over the snow through the fields that his four round feet had left their print upon so many, many years.

“One must never rest till one dies,” thought Patrasche; and sometimes it seemed to him that that time of rest for him was not very far off.  His sight was less clear than it had been, and it gave him pain to rise after the night’s sleep, though he would never lie a moment in his straw when once the bell of the chapel tolling five let him know that the daybreak of labor had begun.

“My poor Patrasche, we shall soon lie quiet together, you and I,” said old Jehan Daas, stretching out to stroke the head of Patrasche with the old withered hand which had always shared with him its one poor crust of bread; and the hearts of the old man and the old dog ached together with one thought:  When they were gone who would care for their darling?

One afternoon, as they came back from Antwerp over the snow, which had become hard and smooth as marble over all the Flemish plains, they found dropped in the road a pretty little puppet, a tambourine player, all scarlet and gold, about six inches high, and, unlike greater personages when Fortune lets them drop, quite unspoiled and unhurt by its fall.  It was a pretty toy.  Nello tried to find its owner, and, failing, thought that it was just the thing to please Alois.

It was quite night when he passed the mill-house; he knew the little window of her room; it could be no harm, he thought, if he gave her his little piece of treasure-trove—­they had been play-fellows so long.  There was a shed with a sloping roof beneath her casement; he climbed it and tapped softly at the lattice; there was a little light within.  The child opened it and looked out half frightened.