The Brabantois had paused to drink beer himself at every wayside house, but he had forbidden Patrasche to stop for a moment for a draft from the canal. Going along thus, in the full sun, on a scorching highway, having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, and, which was far worse for him, not having tasted water for nearly twelve; being blind with dust, sore with blows, and stupefied with the merciless weight which dragged upon his loins, Patrasche, for once, staggered and foamed a little at the mouth and fell. He fell in the middle of the white, dusty road, in the full glare of the sun; he was sick unto death and motionless. His master gave him the only medicine in his pharmacy--kicks and oaths and blows with the oak cudgel--which had been often the only food and drink, the only wage and reward, ever offered to him. But Patrasche was beyond the reach of any torture or of any curses. Patrasche lay, dead to all appearances, down in the white powder of the summer dust. His master, with a parting kick, passed on and left him. After a time, among the holiday makers, there came a little old man who was bent, and lame, and feeble. He was in no guise for feasting. He was poor and miserably clad, and he dragged his silent way slowly through the dust among the pleasure seekers. He looked at Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled down in the rank grass and weeds of the ditch and surveyed the dog with kindly eyes of pity. There was with him a little, rosy, fair-haired, dark-eyed child of a few years old, who pattered in amid the bushes, that were for him breast high, and stood gazing with a pretty seriousness upon the poor, great, quiet beast. Thus it was that these two first met--the little Nello and the big Patrasche. They carried Patrasche home; and when he recovered he was harnessed to the cart that carried the milk cans of the neighbors to Antwerp. Thus the dog earned the living of the old man and the boy who saved him. There was only one thing which caused Patrasche any uneasiness in his life, and it was this: Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full at every turn of old piles of stones, dark, and ancient, and majestic, standing in crooked courts, jammed against gateways and taverns, rising by the water's edge, with bells ringing above them in the air, and ever and again out of their arched doors a swell of music pealing. There they remain, the grand old sanctuaries of the past, shut in amid the squalor, the hurry, the crowds, the unloveliness, and the commerce of the modern world, and all day long the clouds drift, and the birds circle, and the winds sigh around them, and beneath the earth at their feet there sleeps--Rubens.