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Updated: May 14, 2025
He took a little staff from the piles of wood lying about, and went out on to the highroad, on his way to do Heaven's will. He was not very sure but that was because he was only nine years old and not very wise but Findelkind that was in heaven had begged for the poor: so would he.
Findelkind pulled at the coat 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.
Findelkind was alone wide awake, watching the big white moon sail past his little casement, and hearing Katte bleat. Where were her poor twin lambs? The night was bitterly cold, for it was already far on in autumn; the rivers had swollen and flooded many fields, the snow for the last week had fallen quite low down on the mountainsides.
Findelkind was frightened; but he shut his eyes and set his teeth, and said to himself that the martyrs must have had very much worse than these things to suffer in their pilgrimage.
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.
A few steps brought him to the Goldenes Dachl. He forgot his hunger and his pain, seeing the sun shine on all that gold and the curious painted galleries under it. He thought it was real, solid gold. Real gold laid out on a house-roof, and the people all so poor! Findelkind began to muse, and wonder why everybody did not climb up there and take a tile off and be rich.
He was a little boy just like me, no better and no bigger, and as poor, and yet he had so much faith, and the world then was so good, that he left his sheep and got money enough to build a church and a hospice to Christ and St. Christopher. And I want to do the same for the poor. Not for myself no, for the poor. I am Findelkind too, and Findelkind that is in heaven speaks to me."
It looked to Findelkind like a group of knights those knights who had helped and defended his namesake with their steel and their gold in the old days of the Arlberg quest.
But perhaps it would be wicked. Perhaps God put the roof there with all that gold to prove people. Findelkind got bewildered. If God did such a thing, was it kind? His head seemed to swim, and the sunshine went round and round with him. There went by him, just then, a very venerable-looking old man with silver hair; he was wrapped in a long cloak.
He heard, he understood: he knew that they did not mean to help him, these men with the steel weapons and the huge steeds, but that they meant to shut him up in a prison him, little free-born, forest-fed Findelkind.
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