he deserted Market Place. In his hand
he held a Scroll with strange writing upon it, and crossing the Square
over the rough cobblestones, he fixed the paper to the Fountain, and
spreading his white wings, flew up again to the home from which he
came.

Next day the country people flocking into the Market Place saw to
their astonishment a track of beautiful white flowers springing up
from amongst the cobblestones, and stretching from one corner of the
Square to the Fountain.

They were star-like flowers, with bright-green leaves, and they grew
in patches--"like a child's footsteps," the women said.

A little crowd soon gathered round the paper fastened to the ancient
Fountain. On the top of the Scroll was written, very clearly--"All
those who can read the words beneath shall be rewarded generously,"
but the lines that followed were in a strange language, and in such
crabbed characters that they defied every effort to decipher them.

All day the crowd ebbed and flowed round the Fountain, while the
learned men of the town came with their dictionaries under their arms
and spectacles on nose, and sat on stools, attempting to make out the
crooked letters of the inscription.

In the end each one decided upon a different language, and the
argument became so warm between them that they had to be separated by
a party of watchmen, and conducted back again to their own houses.

Professors from the University on the other side of the mountains
journeyed over the rough roads, and brought their learning to the old
stone Fountain in the Market Place--but they, too, went away
discomfited.

No one could read the strange writing, and no one could pull down the
paper, for it appeared to be fixed to the stone by some means that
made it impossible to tear it away.

Time went on, and the snow covered up the Market Square, threw a white
mantle over the steep roofs, and buried the old gardens in its soft
deepness.

In one of the houses near the spot where the little Angel had first
touched the earth lived a poor, lonely woman. She worked all day at
some fine kind of needlework, but when, in the evenings, the sun had
set and the twilight began to fall, she would steal out for a few
minutes to breathe the fresh air. Often, though she was so wearied
with her incessant stitching, she would carry in her hand a flower
from the plants that grew in her latticed window to a neighbour's sick
child. It was a weary climb up a steep flight of sta