The miller stood and looked at the portrait with tears in his eyes, it was so strangely like, and he loved his own child closely and well. Then he roughly chid the little girl for idling there whilst her mother needed her within, and sent her indoors crying and afraid. Then, turning, he snatched the wood from Nello's hands.

NELLO AND PATRASCHE

"Dost much of such folly?" he asked. But there was a tremble in his voice.

Nello colored and hung his head. "I draw everything I see," he murmured.

Baas Cogez went into his millhouse sore troubled in his mind.

"This lad must not be so much with Alois," he said to his wife that night. "Trouble may come of it hereafter. He is fifteen now and she is twelve,

and the lad is comely." And from that day poor Nello was allowed in the millhouse no more.

Nello had a secret which only Patrasche knew. There was a little outhouse to the hut, which no one entered but himself-a dreary place, but with an abundant clear light from the north. Here he had fashioned himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here, on the great sea of stretched paper, he had given shape to one of the innumerable fancies which possessed his brain.

No one ever had taught him anything; colors he had no means to buy; he had gone without bread many a time to procure even the poor vehicles that he had there; and it was only in black and white that he could fashion the things he saw. This great figure which he had drawn here in chalk was only an old man sitting on a fallen tree-only that. He had seen old Michel, the woodman, sitting so at evening many a time.

He never had had a soul to tell him of outline or perspective, of anatomy or of shadow, and yet he had given all the weary, worn-out age, all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, careworn pathos of his original, and given them so that the old, lonely figure was a poem, sitting there, meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with the darkness of descending night behind him.

It was rude, of course, in a way, and had many faults no doubt; and yet it was real, true to nature, true to art, mournful, and, in a manner, beautiful.

Patrasche had lain quiet countless hours watching its gradual creation after the labor of each day was done, and he knew that Nello had a hope-vain and wild perhaps, but strongly cherished-of sending

this great drawing to compete for a prize of 200 francs a year, which it was announced in Antwerp would be open to every lad of talent, scholar or peasant, under eighteen, who attempted to win it with unaided work of chalk or pencil. Three of the foremost artists in the town of Rubens were to be the judges and elect the victor according to his merits.

All the spring and summer and autumn Nello had been at work upon this treasure, which, if triumphant, would build him his first steps toward independence and the mysteries of the arts, which he blindly, ignorantly and yet passionately adored.

The drawings were to go in on the 1st of December and the decision to be given on the 24th, so that he who should win might rejoice with all his people at the Christmas season.

In the twilight of a bitter winter day, and with a beating heart, now quick with hope, now faint with fear, Nello placed the great picture on his little green milk cart and left it, as enjoined, at the doors of a public building.

He took heart as he went by the cathedral. The lordly form of Rubens seemed to rise from the fog and darkness and to loom in its magnificence before him, whilst the lips, with their kindly smile, seemed to him to murmur, "Nay, have courage! It was not by a weak heart and by faint fears that I wrote my name for all time upon Antwerp."

The winter was sharp already. That night, after they reached the hut, snow fell, and it fell for many days after that, so that the paths and the divisions of 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 milk, while the world was all dark, and carry it through the darkness to the silent town.

In the winter time all drew nearer to each other, all to all except to Nello and Patrasche, with whom none now would have anything to do, because the miller had frowned upon the child. Nello and Patrasche were left to fare as they might with the old, paralyzed, bedridden man in the little cabin, whose fire often was cold, and whose board often was without bread, for there was a buyer from Antwerp who had taken to drive his mule in of a day for the milk of the various dairies, and there were only three or four of the people who had refused the terms of purchase and remained faithful to the little green cart. So that the burden which Patrasche drew had become light, and the centime pieces in Nello's pouch had become, alas! light likewise.

The weather was wild and cold. The snow was six feet deep; the ice was firm enough to bear oxen and men upon it everywhere. At this season the little village always was gay and cheerful. At the poorest dwelling there were possets and cakes, sugared saints and gilded Jesus. The merry Flemish bells jingled everywhere on the horses, everywhere within doors some well-filled soup pot sang and smoked over the stove, and everywhere over the snow without laughing maidens pattered in bright kerchiefs and stout skirts going to and from mass. Only in the little hut it was dark and cold.

Nello and Patrasche were left utterly alone; for one night in the week before the Christmas day death entered there and took away from life forever old Jehan Daas, who had never known of life aught

save poverty and pain. He had long been half dead, incapable of any movement except a feeble gesture, and powerless for anything beyond a gentle word. And yet his loss fell on them both with a

great horror in it; they mourned him passionately. He had passed away from them in his sleep, and when in the gray dawn they learned their bereavement, unbearable solitude and desolation seemed to close around them. He had long been only a