Findelkind | Page 7

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 bridge laughed.
"You are a little beggar, you mean? Oh, very well! Then over my bridge you do not go.
"But it is the city on the other side?"
"To be sure it is the city; but over nobody goes without a kreutzer."
"I never have such a thing of my own! never! never!" said Findelkind, ready to cry.
"Then you were a little fool to come away from your home, wherever that may be," said the man at the bridge-head. "Well, I will let you go, for you look a baby. But do not beg; that is bad."
"Findelkind did it!"
"Then Findelkind was a rogue and a vagabond," said the taker of