The drawings were to go in on the first day of December, and the
decision be given on the twenty-fourth, so that he who should win might
rejoice with all his people at the Christmas season.

In the twilight of a bitter wintry day, and with a beating heart, now
quick with hope, now faint with fear, Nello placed the great picture on
his little green milk-cart, and took it, with the help of Patrasche,
into the town, and there left it, as enjoined, at the doors of a public
building.

"Perhaps it is worth nothing at all. How can I tell?" he thought, with
the heart-sickness of a great timidity. Now that he had left it there,
it seemed to him so hazardous, so vain, so foolish, to dream that he, a
little lad with bare feet, who barely knew his letters, could do
anything at which great painters, real artists, could ever deign to look.
Yet he took heart as he went by the cathedral: the lordly form of Rubens
seemed to rise from the fog and the darkness, and to loom in its
magnificence before him, whilst the lips with their kindly smile seemed
to him to murmur, "Nay, have courage! It was not by a weak heart and by
faint fears that I wrote my name for all time upon Antwerp."

Nello ran home through the cold night, comforted. He had done his best:
the rest must be as God willed, he thought, in that innocent,
unquestioning faith which had been taught him in the little gray chapel
amongst the willows and the poplar-trees.

The winter was very sharp already. That night, after they had reached
the hut, snow fell; and fell for very many days after that, so that the
paths and the divisions in the fields were all obliterated, and all the
smaller streams were frozen over, and the cold was intense upon the