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Updated: June 13, 2025
Patrasche lay, dead to all appearances, down in the white powder of the summer dust.
In the distance a throng of the youths of Antwerp were shouting around their successful comrade, and escorting him with acclamations to his home upon the quay. The boy staggered to his feet and drew the dog into his embrace. "It is all over, dear Patrasche," he murmured "all over!" He rallied himself as best he could, for he was weak from fasting, and retraced his steps to the village.
He thinks that I make you idle, dear, and he is not pleased that you should be with me. He is a good man and loves you well: we will not anger him, Alois." But it was with a sad heart that he said it, and the earth did not look so bright to him as it had used to do when he went out at sunrise under the poplars down the straight roads with Patrasche.
Patrasche watched the milk-cans come and go that one day when he had got well and was lying in the sun with the wreath of marguerites round his tawny neck.
No one said anything to him openly, but all the village agreed together to humour the miller's prejudice, and at the cottages and farms where Nello and Patrasche called every morning for the milk for Antwerp, downcast glances and brief phrases replaced to them the broad smiles and cheerful greetings to which they had been always used.
It was his little daughter sitting amidst the hay, with the great tawny head of Patrasche on her lap, and many wreaths of poppies and blue corn-flowers round them both: on a clean smooth slab of pine wood the boy Nello drew their likeness with a stick of charcoal.
"Never mind, Patrasche," he said, with his arms round the dog's neck as they both sat in the door of the hut, where the sounds of the mirth at the mill came down to them on the night air "never mind. It shall all be changed by and by."
In winter the winds found many holes in the walls of the poor little hut, and the vine was black and leafless, and the bare lands looked very bleak and drear without, and sometimes within the floor was flooded and then frozen. In winter it was hard, and the snow numbed the little white limbs of Nello, and the icicles cut the brave, untiring feet of Patrasche.
Patrasche understood, and nestled his nose into the lad's hand, as though to pray him not to be disquieted for any woe or want of his. The winner of the drawing-prize was to be proclaimed at noon, and to the public building where he had left his treasure Nello made his way.
"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.
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