ghts
without number, and lasted as a great order down to the days of Joseph
II. This is what Findelkind in the fourteenth century did, I tell you.
Bear like faith in your hearts, my children, and, though your generation
is a harder one than his, because it is without faith, yet you shall
move mountains, because Christ and St. Christopher will be with you."

Then the good man, having said that, blessed them and left them alone to
their chestnuts and crabs and went into his own oratory to prayer. The
other boys laughed and chattered, but Findelkind sat very quietly
thinking of his namesake all the day after, and for many days and weeks
and months this story haunted him. A little boy had done all that, and
this little boy had been called Findelkind--Findelkind, just like
himself.

It was a beautiful story, and yet it tortured him. If the good man had
known how the history would root itself in the child's mind perhaps he
would never have told it, for night and day it vexed Findelkind, and yet
seemed beckoning to him and crying, "Go, thou, and do likewise!"

But what could he do?

There was the snow, indeed, and there were the mountains, as in the
fourteenth century, but there were no travellers lost. The diligence did
not go into Switzerland after autumn, and the country-people who went by
on their mules and in their sledges to Innspruck knew their way very
well, and were never likely to be adrift on a winter's night or eaten by
a wolf or a bear.

When spring came Findelkind sat by the edge of the bright pure water
amongst the flowering grasses and felt his head heavy. Findelkind of
Arlberg, who was in heaven now, must look down, he fancied, and think
him so stupid and so selfish sitting there. The first Findelkind a few
centuries before had trotted down on his bare feet from his
mountain-pass, and taken his little crook and gone out boldly over all
the land on his pilgrimage, and knocked at castle-gates and city-walls
in Christ's name and for love of the poor. That was to do something
indeed!

This poor little living Findelkind would look at the miniatures in the
priest's missal, in one of which there was the fourteenth-century boy
with long hanging hair and a wallet and bare feet, and he never doubted
that it was the portrait of the blessed Findelkind who was in heaven;
and he wondered if he looked like a little boy there or if he were
changed to the likeness of an angel.

"He was a boy just like me," thought the