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Updated: June 21, 2025
"This is Alois's name-day, is it not?" said the old man Daas that night from the corner where he was stretched upon his bed of sacking. The boy gave a gesture of assent: he wished that the old man's memory had erred a little, instead of keeping such sure account. "And why not there?" his grandfather pursued. "Thou hast never missed a year before, Nello."
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.
When the winter came, Jehan Daas thanked the blessed fortune that had brought him to the dying dog in the ditch that fair-day of Louvain; for he was very old, and he grew feebler with each year, and he would ill have known how to pull his load of milk-cans over the snows and through the deep ruts in the mud if it had not been for the strength and the industry of the animal he had befriended.
Fortunately for his peace, his former owner was killed in a drunken brawl at the kermess of Mechlin, and so sought not after him nor disturbed him in his new and well-loved home. A few years later, old Jehan Daas, who had always been a cripple, became so paralyzed with rheumatism that it was impossible for him to go out with the cart any more.
It was the hut of a very old man, of a very poor man of old Jehan Daas, who in his time had been a soldier, and who remembered the wars that had trampled the country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had brought from his service nothing except a wound, which had made him a cripple.
'E's not takken off 'is breeches for tree daas. 'E caaun't sleap; 'e wunna eat and 'e wunna drink. There's work to be doon and 'e wunna lay haand to it. Wull yo goa oop t' 'im, Dr. Rawcliffe?" Rowcliffe went up. In the low lighted room the thing that Gwenda Cartaret had seen lay stretched in the middle of the great bed, covered with a sheet.
"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?
In their fondness for honey they destroy the nest and at the same time the bee. The principal enemies of mice are cats and owls, and therefore the finest clovers and the most beautiful pansies are found near villages where cats and owls abound." Preyer, Der Kampf um daas Dasein, p. 22.
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