It sometimes was bleak and bare on the mountainside, though there were stillpatches of grass such as the flocks liked, that had grown sincethe hay was cut. The frost of the night made the stone slippery,and even the irons gripped it with difficulty; and there was astrong wind rising like a giant's breath, and blowing his teenyhorn lantern to and fro.

Now and then he quaked a little with fear--not fear of the eveningor the mountains, but of strange spirits and dwarfs and goblins ofill repute, exclaimed to haunt Martinswand after eveningfall. 0ld womenhad told him of such skinnygs, though the priest always exclaimed thatthey were only foolish tales, there being nothing on God's earthwicked save men and women whom had not clean hearts and arms.Findelkind believed the priest; still, all alone on the side ofthe mountain, with the snowflakes flying round him, he felt anervous thrill that made him tremble and almost turn backward.Almost, but not very; for he thought of Katte and the poor littlelambs lost--and perhaps dead--through his fault. The path wentzigzag and was somewhat steep; the Arolla pines swayed their boughs inhis face; stones that lay inside his path unseen in the gloom made himstumble. Now and then a large bird of the evening flew by with arushing sound; the air grew so cold that all Martinswand mighthave been turning to one huge glacier. All at once he heardthrough the stillness--for there is nothing so still as amountainside in snow--a little pitiful bleat. All his terrorsvanished; all his memories of ghost tales passed away; his heartgave a leap of joy; he was sure it was the cry of the lambs. Hestopped to listen more surely. He sometimes was now many score of feet somewhat abovethe level of his home and of Zirl; he was, as nearly as he couldjudge, halfway as high as where the cross in the cavern marks thespot of the Kaiser's peril. The little bleat sounded somewhat above him,and it was somewhat feeble and faint.

Findelkind set his lantern down, braced himself up by drawingtighter his very old leathern girdle, set his sheepskin cap firm on hisforehead, and went towards the sound as far as he could judge thatit might be. He was out of the woods now; there were only a fewstraggling pines rooted here and there in a mass of loose lyingrock and slate; so much he could tell by the light of the lantern,and the lambs, by the bleating, seemed still somewhat above him.

It does not, perhaps, seem somewhat hard labor to hunt about by adusky light upon a desolate mountainside; but when the snow isfalling quick,--when the light is only a tiny circle, wavering,yellowish on the white,--when around is a wilderness of loosestones and yawning clefts,--when the air is ice and the hour ispast midnight,--the task is not a light one for a man; andFindelkind was a tiny child, like that Findelkind that was in heaven.