"It is so terrible not to see them, Patrasche, just because one is poor and cannot pay! He never meant that the poor should not see them when he painted them, I am sure. And they keep them shrouded there--- shrouded in the dark---the beautiful things! And they never feel the light, and no eyes look upon them unless rich people come and pay. If I could only see them I would be content to die." But he could not see them, and Patrasche could not help him, for to gain the silver piece that the church exacts for looking on the glories of the "Elevation of the Cross" and the "Descent from the Cross" was a thing as utterly beyond the powers of either of them as it would have been to scale the heights of the cathedral spire. The whole soul of the little Ardennois thrilled and stirred with an absorbing passion for art. Going on his way through the old city in the early daybreak before the sun or the people had seen them, Nello, who looked only a little peasant boy, with a great dog drawing milk to sell from door to door, was in a heaven of dreams whereof Rubens was the god. Nello, cold and hungry, with stockingless feet in wooden shoes, and the winter winds blowing among his curls and lifting his poor, thin garments, was in rapture of meditation wherein all that he saw was the beautiful face of the Mary of "Assumption," with the waves of her golden hair lying upon her shoulders and the light of an eternal sun shining down upon her brow. Nello, reared in poverty, and buffeted by fortune, and untaught in letters, and unheeded by men, had the compensation or the curse which is called genius. No one knew it--he as little as any. No one knew it. "I should go to my grave quite content if I thought, Nello, that when thou growest a man thou couldst own this hut and the little plat of ground and labor for thyself and be called Baas by thy neighbors," said the old man Jehan many an hour from his bed. Nello dreamed of other things in the future than of tilling the little rood of earth, and living under the wattle roof, and being called Baas by neighbors, a little poorer or a little less poor than himself. The cathedral spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy evening skies or in the dim, gray, misty morning, said other things to him than this. But these he told only to Patrasche, whispering, childlike, his fancies in the dog's ear when they went together at their work through the fogs of the daybreak or lay together at their rest amongst the rustling rushes by the water's side. There was only one other besides Patrasche to whom Nello could talk at all of his daring fancies. This other was little Alois, who lived at the old red mill on the grassy mound, and whose father, the miller, was the best-to-do husbandman in all the village. Little Alois was a pretty baby, with soft, round, rosy features, made lovely by those sweet, dark eyes that the Spanish rule has left in so many a Flemish face.