murmured, and doffed his cap.

The old woman looked at him sharply: "Oh, is it you, little Findelkind?
Have you run off from school? Be off with you home! I have mouths enough
to feed here."

Findelkind went away, and began to learn that it is not easy to be a
prophet or a hero in one's own country. He trotted a mile farther and
met nothing. At last he 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
those 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 sun was high:
its rays were 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 come
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 Hoettinger 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 spoilt their
rehearsing.

"It was only for Hoetting-folk," said a lad older than himself. "Get out
of the way with you, liebchen;" and the man who ca