primer, and could spell them both out very fairly, and was learning
to write of a good 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 also.

This was 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
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 the 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 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 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--"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, which
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