Читать книгу The Legend of the Glorious Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegel in the land of Flanders and elsewhere - Charles de Coster - Страница 4

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November was come, the month of hail-storms, when sufferers from cold in the head abandon themselves freely to their concerts of coughing and spitting. This also is the month when the turnip-fields are filled with gangs of youths that there disport themselves and steal whatever they can, to the mighty wrath of the peasants, who try in vain to catch them, chasing after them with sticks and pitchforks.

Well, on an evening when Ulenspiegel was returning home from one of these raids, he heard close by, in a corner of the hedgerow, a sound as of groaning. He leant down, and beheld a dog lying stretched out on the stones.

“Hallo!” he cried. “Poor little beast! What are you doing out here so late at night?”

He patted the dog, and found that its back was all wet, as though some one had been trying to drown it. He took it in his arms to warm it, and when he had reached home he said:

“I have brought back a wounded animal. What shall we do with it?”

“Dress its wounds,” said Claes.

Ulenspiegel laid the dog on the table; whereupon he and Claes and Soetkin saw that it was a little red-haired Luxemburg terrier, and that it was wounded in the back. Soetkin sponged the wounds, and anointed them with ointment, and bound them up with linen bandages. Then Ulenspiegel took the dog and put it in his bed; but Soetkin desired to have it in her own, saying she was afraid that Ulenspiegel would hurt the little red-haired thing. For in those days Ulenspiegel was wont to toss about in his sleep all night like a young devil in a stoup of holy water. Ulenspiegel, however, had his way, and he took such care of the dog that in the space of six days it was walking about like any other dog, and giving itself great airs.

And the village schoolmaster christened him Titus Bibulus Schnouffius: Titus after a certain good Emperor of the Romans who was fond of befriending lost dogs; Bibulus because the dog loved beer with all the passion of a confirmed drunkard; and Schnouffius because he would always run about sniffing and putting his nose into every rat-hole and mole-hole he could find.