he
was anything, was a dreamer of dreams, and when he was upon the
high Alps with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky around
him, was quite certain that he would live for greater things than
driving the herds up when the spring-tide came among the blue sea
of gentians, or toiling down in the town with wood and with
timber as his father and grandfather did every day of their
lives. He was a strong and healthy little fellow, fed on the free
mountain-air, and he was very happy, and loved his family
devotedly, and was as active as a squirrel and as playful as a
hare; but he kept his thoughts to himself, and some of them went
a very long way for a little boy who was only one among many, and
to whom nobody had ever paid any attention except to teach him
his letters and tell him to fear God. August in winter was only a
little, hungry school-boy, trotting to be catechised by the
priest, or to bring the loaves from the bake-house, or to carry
his father's boots to the cobbler; and in summer he was only one
of hundreds of cow-boys, who drove the poor, half-blind,
blinking, stumbling cattle, ringing their throat-bells, out into
the sweet intoxication of the sudden sunlight, and lived up with
them in the heights among the Alpine roses, with only the clouds
and the snow-summits near. But he was always thinking, thinking,
thinking, for all that; and under his little sheepskin winter
coat and his rough hempen summer shirt his heart had and much
courage in it as Hofer's ever had,--great Hofer, who is a
household word in all the Innthal, and whom August always
reverently remembered when he went to the city of Innspruck and
ran out by the foaming water-mill and under the wooded height of
Berg Isel.

August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children
stories, his own little brown face growing red with excitement as
his imagination glowed to fever-heat. That human being on the
panels, who was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, as a boy
playing among flowers, as a lover sighing under a casement, as a
soldier in the midst of strife, as a father with children round
him, as a weary, old, blind man on crutches, and, lastly, as a
ransomed soul raised up by angels, had always had the most
intense interest for August, and he had made, not one history for
him, but a thousand; he seldom told them the same tale twice. He
had never seen a story-book in his life; his primer and his
mass-book were all the volumes he had. But nat