“Doggie, my dear, thou art but ill advised to leave the home where good messes await thee, delicious scraps, and bones full of marrow, to follow upon the road of adventure a vagabond fellow who mayhap will not always have even roots to give thee for thy food. Be guided by me, dog of no prudence, and go back to thine own baes. Avoid the rains, snows, hails, drizzles, mists, hoarfrosts, and other lean fare that fall upon the wanderer’s back. Stay in the corner of the hearth, keeping thyself snug and warm, rolled up into a ball before the gay fire; leave me to walk in the mud, the dust, the cold, and the heat, roasted to-day, to-morrow frozen, feasted on Friday, famished on Sunday. Thou wilt do a sensible thing if thou dost return whence thou comest, dogling of small experience.”
The animal did not appear to hear Ulenspiegel at all. Wagging his tail and leaping all he could, he went barking for appetite’s sake. Ulenspiegel thought it was for friendliness, but he never thought of the liver he carried in his satchel.
He walked on; the dog followed him. Having thus gone more than a league, they saw in the road a cart drawn by an ass hanging its head. Upon a bank on the roadside there sat, between two clumps of thistles, a big man holding in one hand a knuckle bone of mutton, which he was gnawing, and in the other a flask whose juice he was draining. When he was not in the act of eating or of drinking, he whimpered and wept.
Ulenspiegel having stopped, the dog stopped likewise. Smelling the mutton and the liver, he climbed up the bank. There, sitting on his hindquarters beside the man, he pawed his doublet, that he might share the feast, but the man, repulsing him with an elbow and holding the knuckle bone high in air, groaned lamentably. The dog imitated him for greedy longing. The ass, cross to find himself harnessed to the cart, and so unable to reach the thistles, began to bray.
“What wouldst thou have, Jan?” asked the man of his ass.
“Nothing,” answered Ulenspiegel, “except that he would fain breakfast on these thistles that flourish beside you as they grow on the roodscreen of Tessenderloo beside and above Monseigneur Christ. That dog, too, would not be grieved to effect a wedlock of jaws with the bone you have there; in the meanwhile, I am going to give him the liver I have here.”
The liver having been devoured by the dog, the man looked at his bone picked it again to have the meat that still remained on it, then he gave it thus denuded of flesh to the dog, who, setting his forepaws on it, began to crunch it on the grass.
Then the man looked at Ulenspiegel.
The latter knew Lamme Goedzak, of Damme.
“Lamme,” he said, “what dost thou here drinking, eating, and whimpering? What trooper can have rudely dressed down your ears?”