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Updated: May 14, 2025
There were lights moving about his house, his brothers and sisters were still up; his mother ran out into the road, weeping and laughing with fear and joy. Findelkind himself said nothing. He hung his head. They were too fond of him to scold him or to jeer at him; they made him go quickly to his bed, and his mother made him a warm milk posset and kissed him.
It was ten by the bells of Zirl when they came once more under the solemn shadow of grave Martinswand. There were lights moving about the house, his brothers and sisters were still up, his mother ran out into the road, weeping and laughing with fear and joy. Findelkind himself said nothing. He hung his head.
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.
As they went through the city towards the riverside along the homeward way, never a word did his father, who was a silent man at all times, address to him. Only once, as they jogged over the bridge, he spoke. "Son," he asked, "did you run away truly thinking to please God and help the poor?" "Truly I did!" answered Findelkind, with a sob in his throat. "Then thou wert an ass!" said his father.
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."
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?
It was still dusk in the fresh autumn morning; the sun had not risen behind the glaciers of the Stubaythal, and the road was scarcely seen; but he knew it very well, and he set out bravely, saying his prayers to Christ and to St. Christopher and to Findelkind that was in heaven.
His mother sat between the stove and his bed with a sore heart; and his father, as he went to and fro between the walls of beaten snow from the wood-shed to the cattle-byre, was sorrowful, thinking to himself the child would die and join that earlier Findelkind whose home was with the saints. But the child did not die.
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.
"Where do you come from, and what do you want?" they asked; and he answered, with a sob in his voice: "I want to do like Findelkind of Arlberg." And then the crowd laughed, not knowing at all what he meant, but laughing just because they did not know, as crowds always will do.
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