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    A Dog of Flanders
    A Dog of Flanders
    A Dog of Flanders
    Ebook49 pages53 minutes

    A Dog of Flanders

    By Ouida

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A classic children’s tale of loyalty, perseverance, and the bond of friendship between a boy and his dog.
     
    Ever since he lost his parents as a baby, Nello has been raised by his caring grandfather in a small village near Antwerp in Flanders. One day they find a dog, injured and alone. Naming the pitiable creature Patrasche, Nello and his grandfather nurse him back to health—and forever after, the child and pup are inseparable.
     
    A Dog of Flanders follows both boy and dog as Nello strives to better his lot in life, from trying to fulfill his heart’s desire and become a great artist to his heart breaking as his true love is forbidden from being seen with someone poor like him. Through life’s hardships—from fire and famine to the unkindness of others—Nello and Patrasche carry on together with the greatest power of all: hope.
     
    As touching as it is timeless, A Dog of Flanders remains one of the finest children’s stories in classic literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJul 4, 2017
    ISBN9781504046305
    Author

    Ouida

    Ouida (1839-1908) was the pseudonym for the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé, known for writing novels that romanticized a fashionable lifestyle. She got this name from the pronunciation of her childhood nickname “Louisa.” In her early twenties she moved to London and began voraciously writing, publishing numerous novels, which gained her wealth and fame. She threw elaborate parties at the Langham Hotel, inviting literary figures that inspired the characters in her books. At the height of her fame, Ouida moved to Italy and lived an extravagant lifestyle. In her later life, this extravagance, along with the lack of sales in her books, left her penniless. She died in poverty in Italy at the age of 69.

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    Reviews for A Dog of Flanders

    3.5/5

    33 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Sweet, in the despairing style - like The Little Match Girl. An innocent boy and the dog who loves him are abused by indifference and casual cruelty until, just before everything would have changed, they die. I was crying at the end...but it's so sweet it's saccharine. I would have preferred if he were rescued in time, and actually went on to express his skill in art - or otherwise developed beyond the innocent scapegoat he is here. I'm glad I read it (and it was a very quick read) but I doubt I'll reread.
    • 4/5
      A classic story of love and devotion, set in a world that sees only monetary worth.

    Book preview

    A Dog of Flanders - Ouida

    Ouida_DogOfFlanders.jpg

    A Dog of Flanders

    Ouida

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    Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.

    They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was a little Ardennois—Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the same age by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other was already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been the beginning of the tie between them, their first bond of sympathy; and it had strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly. Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little village—a Flemish village a league from Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran through it. It had about a score of houses and homesteads, with shutters of bright green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-red or black and white, and walls white-washed until they shone in the sun like snow. In the centre of the village stood a windmill, placed on a little moss-grown slope: it was a landmark to all the level country round. It had once been painted scarlet, sails and all, but that had been in its infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for the soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and weather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar of the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood opposite to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night with that strange, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in the Low Countries seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.

    Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the north-east, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and spreading corn that stretched away from them like a tideless, changeless sea. 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.

    When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty, his daughter had died in the Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her two-year-old son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself, but he took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became welcome and precious to him. Little Nello—which was but a pet diminutive for Nicolas—throve with him, and the old man and the little child lived in the poor little hut contentedly.

    It was a very humble little mud-hut indeed, but it was clean and white as a sea-shell, and stood in a small plot of garden-ground that yielded beans and herbs and pumpkins. They were very poor, terribly poor—many a day they had nothing at all to eat. They never by any chance had enough: to have had enough to eat would have been to have reached paradise at once. But the old man was very gentle and good to the boy, and the boy was a beautiful, innocent, truthful, tender-hearted creature; and they were happy on a crust and a few leaves of cabbage, and asked no more of earth or heaven; save indeed that Patrasche should be always with them, since without Patrasche where would

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