Findelkind | Page 4

of fancy. For, indeed, he was a very fanciful little boy: everything
around had tongues for him; and he would sit for hours among the long
rushes on the river's edge, trying to imagine what the wild greengray
water had found in its wanderings, and asking the water-rats and the
ducks to tell him about it; but both rats and ducks were too busy to
attend to an idle little boy, and never spoke, which vexed him.
Findelkind, however, was very fond of his books: he would study day
and night, in his little ignorant, primitive fashion. He loved his missal
and his 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.
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 over that
frightful pass, perished in great numbers, and were eaten by the bears
and the wolves. The little shepherd boy Findelkind--who was a little
boy five hundred years ago, remember," the priest repeated--"was
sorely disturbed and distressed to see these poor dead souls in the snow
winter after winter, and seeing the blanched bones lie on the bare earth,
unburied, when summer melted the snow. It made him unhappy, very
unhappy; and what could he do, he a little boy keeping sheep? He had
as his wages two florins a year; that was all; but his heart rose high, and
he had faith in God. Little as he was, he said to himself he would try
and do something, so that year after year those poor lost travellers and
beasts should not perish so. He said nothing to anybody, but he took the
few florins he had saved up, bade his master farewell, and went on his
way begging,--a little fourteenth century boy, with long, straight hair,
and a girdled tunic, as you see them," continued the priest, "in the
miniatures in the black-letter missal that lies upon my desk. No doubt
heaven favoured him very strongly, and the saints watched over him;
still, without the boldness of his own courage, and the faith in his own
heart, they would not have done so. I