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 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 .