ave fallen when he got home from
school at noon? And would the starling, for whom he had nailed the
little box high up in the pine-tree, come again next spring? It had
picked off all the black berries from the elderberry, and had then gone
away screaming; if it did not find any more elderberries, what would it
eat then? And the boy's heart was heavy with grief--if only he had
given it a little bag of berries when it went away.

Now the pines in the Grunewald were covered with snow. When Wolfgang
had gone to school that morning, his knapsack on his back, the
housemaid at his side, the white layer had crackled and broken under
his boots. It was very cold. And then he had heard a bird's shriek,
that sounded like a hungry croak. The housemaid thought it was an
owl--pooh, what did she know about it? It was a raven, the hungry
beggar in the jet-black coat, like the one in the primer.

And the boy was thinking of it now as he sat on the bench, staring
with big eyes at the blackboard, on which the teacher was writing words
they were to find out. How nice it must be under the pines now. There
flew the raven; brushing the snow off the branches with its black
wings, so that it looked like powder as it fell. Where was he going to
fly to? His thoughts flew far, far away after the raven, as they had
done after the starling. The boy's eyes shone, his chest rose with the
deep breath he drew--at that moment the teacher called to him.

"Wolfgang, are you asleep with your eyes open? What's this?" The boy
gave a start, got red, then pale and knew nothing.

The other boys almost died of laughing--"Are you asleep with your
eyes open?"--that had been too funny.

The teacher did not punish him, but Wolfgang crept home as though he
had been punished. He had hidden from the housemaid, who always came to
fetch him--no, he would not go with her to-day. He had also run away
from his comrades--let them fight without him today, to-morrow he would
throw all the more snowballs at them.

He walked quite alone, turned off from the street and wandered about
aimlessly among the pines. He looked for the raven, but it was far
away, and so he began to run too, run as quickly as he could, and tore
the knapsack off his back with a loud cry, hurling it far from him up
into the broad branches of a pine, so that it hung there and nothing
but snow fell down silently in large lumps. That amused him. He filled
both his hands with snow, made hard balls of it and