arms, and cuddled them in the skirts of his
sheepskin tunic, and cast his staff away that he might carry them; and
so, thus burdened with their weight, set his face to the snow and the
wind once more and began his downward way. Once a great sob shook him:
that was all. Now he had no fear. The night might have been noonday, the
snowstorm might have been summer, for aught that he knew or cared.

Long and weary was the way, and often he stumbled and had to rest;
often the terrible sleep of the snow lay heavy on his eyelids, and he
longed to lie down and be at rest, as the little brothers were; often it
seemed to him that he would never reach home again. But he shook the
lethargy off him and resisted the longing, and held on his way: he knew
that his mother would mourn for him as Katte mourned for the lambs. At
length, through all difficulty and danger, when his light had spent
itself, and his strength had wellnigh spent itself too, his feet touched
the old highroad. There were flickering torches and many people and loud
cries around the church, as there had been four hundred years before,
when the last sacrament had been said in the valley for the hunter-king
doomed to perish above. His mother, being sleepless and anxious, had
risen long before it was dawn, and had gone to the children's chamber,
and had found the bed of Findelkind empty once more.

He came into the midst of the people with the two little lambs in his
arms, and he heeded neither the outcries of neighbors nor the frenzied
joy of his mother: his eyes looked straight before him and his face was
white like the snow. "I killed them," he said; and then two great tears
rolled down his cheeks and fell on the little cold bodies of the two
little dead twin brothers.

Findelkind was very ill for many nights and many days after that.
Whenever he spoke in his fever he always said, "I killed them." Never
anything else. So the dreary winter months went by, while the deep snow
filled up valleys and meadows and covered the great mountains from
summit to base, and all around Martinswand was quite still, save that
now and then the post went by to Zirl, and on the holy days the bells
tolled: that was all. 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