Findelkind | Page 7

woman was feeding chickens
in the bright clear red of the cold daybreak.
Findelkind timidly held out his hand. "For the poor!" he murmured, and
doffed his cap.
The old woman looked at him sharply. "Oh, is it you, little Findelkind?
Have you run off from school? Be off with you home! I haves mouths
enough to feed here."
Findelkind went away, and began to learn that it is not easy to be a
prophet or a hero in one's own country.
He trotted a mile farther, and met nothing. At last he came to some
cows by the wayside, and a man tending them.
"Would you give me something to help make a monastery?" he said,
timidly, and once more took off his cap. The man gave a great laugh.
"A fine monk, you! And who wants more of these lazy drones? Not I."
Findelkind never answered: he remembered the priest had said that the
years he lived in were very hard ones, and men in them had no faith.
Ere long he came to a big walled house, with turrets and grated
casements,--very big it looked to him,--like one of the first Findelkind's
own castles. His heart beat loud against his side, but he plucked up his
courage, and knocked as loud as his heart was beating.
He knocked and knocked, but no answer came. The house was empty.
But he did not know that; he thought it was that the people within were
cruel, and he went sadly onward with the road winding before him, and
on his right the beautiful impetuous gray river, and on his left the green
Mittelgebirge and the mountains that rose behind it. By this time the
day was up; the sun was glowing on the red of the cranberry shrubs,
and the blue of the bilberry-boughs: he was hungry and thirsty and tired.

But he did not give in for that; he held on steadily; he knew that there
was near, somewhere near, a great city that the people called Sprugg,
and thither he had resolved to go. By noontide he had walked eight
miles, and came to a green place where men were shooting at targets,
the tall, thick grass all around them; and a little way farther off was a
train of people chanting and bearing crosses, and dressed in long
flowing robes.
The place was the Hottinger Au, and the day was Saturday, and the
village was making ready to perform a miracle-play on the morrow.
Findelkind ran to the robed singing-folk, quite sure that he saw the
people of God. "Oh, take me, take me!" he cried to them; "do take me
with you to do heaven's work."
But they pushed him aside for a crazy little boy that spoiled their
rehearsing.
"It is only for Hotting folk," said a lad older than himself. "Get out of
the way with you, Liebchen." And the man who carried the cross
knocked him with force on the head, by mere accident; but Findelkind
thought he had meant it.
Were people so much kinder five centuries before, he wondered, and
felt sad as the many-coloured robes swept on through the grass, and the
crack of the rifles sounded sharply through the music of the chanting
voices. He went on, footsore and sorrowful, thinking of the castle doors
that had opened, and the city gates that had unclosed, at the summons
of the little long-haired boy whose figure was painted on the missal.
He had come now to where the houses were much more numerous,
though under the shade of great trees,--lovely old gray houses, some of
wood, some of stone, some with frescoes on them and gold and colour
and mottoes, some with deep barred casements, and carved portals, and
sculptured figures; houses of the poorer people now, but still memorials
of a grand and gracious time. For he had wandered into the quarter of
St. Nicholas in this fair mountain city, which he, like his country-folk,
called Sprugg, though the government calls it Innspruck.
He got out upon a long, gray, wooden bridge, and looked up and down
the reaches of the river, and thought to himself, maybe this was not
Sprugg but Jerusalem, so beautiful it looked with its domes shining
golden in the sun, and the snow of the Soldstein and Branjoch behind
them. For little Findelkind had never come so far as this before. As he

stood on the bridge so dreaming, a hand clutched him, and a voice said:
"A whole kreutzer, or you do not pass!"
Findelkind started and trembled.
A kreutzer! he had never owned such a treasure in all his life.
"I have no money!" he murmured, timidly, "I came to see if I could get
money for the poor."
The keeper of the