ood priest in Zirl, where he trotted three times
a week with his two little brothers. When not at school, he was chiefly
set to guard the sheep and the cows, which occupation left him very much
to himself, so that he had many hours in the summer-time to stare up to
the skies and wonder--wonder--wonder about all sorts of things; while in
the winter--the long, white, silent winter, when the post-wagons ceased
to run, and the road into Switzerland was blocked, and the whole world
seemed asleep, except for the roaring of the winds--Findelkind, who
still trotted over the snow to school in Zirl, would dream still,
sitting on the wooden settle by the fire, when he came home again under
Martinswand. For the worst--or the best--of it all was that he was
Findelkind.

This is what was always haunting him. He was Findelkind; and to bear
this name seemed to him to mark him out from all other children, and to
dedicate him to heaven. One day, three years before, when he had been
only six years old, the priest in Zirl, who was a very kindly and
cheerful man, and amused the children as much as he taught them, had not
allowed Findelkind to leave school to go home, because the storm of snow
and wind was so violent, but had kept him until the worst should pass,
with one or two other little lads who lived some way off, and had let
the boys roast a meal of apples and chestnuts by the stove in his little
room, and, while the wind howled and the blinding snow fell without,
had told the children the story of another Findelkind,--an earlier
Findelkind, who had lived in the flesh on Arlberg as far back as 1381,
and had been a little shepherd lad, "just like you," said the good man,
looking at the little boys munching their roast crabs, and whose country
had been over there, above Stuben, where Danube and Rhine meet and part.

The pass of Arlberg is even still so bleak and bitter that few care to
climb there; the mountains around are drear and barren, and snow lies
till midsummer, and even longer sometimes. "But in the early ages," said
the priest (and this is quite a true tale that the children heard with
open eyes, and mouths only not open because they were full of crabs and
chestnuts), "in the early ages," said the priest to them, "the Arlberg
was far more dreary than it is now. There was only a mule-track over
it, and no refuge for man or beast; so that wanderers and peddlers, and
those whose need for work or desire for battle brought them ove