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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.
Still, be sure that the real shield and the real reward that served Findelkind of Arlberg was the pure and noble purpose that armed him night and day.
"The chase you have led me! and your mother thinking you were drowned! and all the working day lost, running after old women's tales of where they had seen you! Oh, little fool, little fool! What was amiss with Martinswand, that you must leave it?" Findelkind slowly and feebly rose, and sat up on the pavement, and looked up, not at his father, but at the knight Theodoric.
The little girl heroine adds another to the list of favorites so well known to the young people in "A Little Puritan Rebel," etc. A Dog of Flanders: A CHRISTMAS STORY. Too well and favorably known to require description. The Nürnberg Stove. This beautiful story has never before been published at a popular price. A Provence Rose. A story perfect in sweetness and in grace. Findelkind.
Findelkind, without knowing that he was like so many dissatisfied poets and artists much bigger than himself, dimly felt in his little tired mind how beautiful and how gorgeous and how grand the world must have been when heroes and knights like these had gone by in its daily sunshine and its twilight storms.
Findelkind pulled at the cloak gently, and the old man looked down. "What is it, my boy?" he asked. Findelkind answered, "I came out to get gold: may I take it off that roof?" "It is not gold, child: it is gilding." "What is gilding?" "It is a thing made to look like gold: that is all." "It is a lie, then!" The old man smiled: "Well, nobody thinks so. If you like to put it so, perhaps it is.
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?
Then, seized with sudden rage once more, at thought of his day all wasted, and its hours harassed and miserable through searching for the lost child, he plucked up the light, slight figure of Findelkind in his own arms, and, with muttered thanks and excuses to the sacristan of the church, bore the boy out with him into the evening air, and lifted him into a cart which stood there with a horse harnessed to one side of the pole, as the country people love to do, to the risk of their own lives and their neighbors'. Findelkind said never a word; he was as dumb as Theodoric had been to him; he felt stupid, heavy, half blind; his father pushed him some bread, and he ate it by sheer instinct, as a lost animal will do; the cart jogged on, the stars shone, the great church vanished in the gloom of night.
"Why do you laugh?" cried Findelkind, losing his terror in his indignation, and inspired with the courage which a great earnestness always gives. "You should not laugh. If you were true knights, you would not laugh; you would fight for me. I am little, I know, I am very little, but he was no bigger than I; and see what great things he did.
The moon was still high. Above, against the sky, black and awful with clouds floating over its summit, was the great Martinswand. Findelkind this time called the big dog Waldmar to him, and, with the dog beside him, went once more out into the cold and the gloom, whilst his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, wore sleeping, and poor childless Katte alone was awake.
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