morning, noon
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 whitewashed 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 northeast , 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 .