were always making fun of him: they were sturdier, ruddier, and
merrier children than he was, loved romping and climbing and
nutting, thrashing the walnut trees and sliding down snowdrifts,
and got into mischief of a more common and childish sort than
Findelkind's freaks of fancy. For indeed he was a very fanciful
little boy: everything around had tongues for him; and he would
sit for hours among the long rushes on the river's edge, trying to
imagine what the wild green-gray water had found in its
wanderings, and asking the water rats and the ducks to tell him
about it; but both rats and ducks were too busy to attend to an
idle little boy, and never spoke, which vexed him.

Findelkind, however, was very fond of his books; he would study
day and night, in his little ignorant, primitive fashion. He loved
his missal and his primer, and could spell them both out very
fairly, and was learning to write of a good priest in Zirl, where
he trotted three times a week with his two little brothers. When
not at school, he was chiefly set to guard the sheep and the cows,
which occupation left him very much to himself; so that he had
many hours in the summertime to stare up to the skies and wonder--
wonder--wonder about all sorts of things; while in the winter--the
long, white, silent winter, when the post-wagons ceased to run,
and the road into Switzerland was blocked, and the whole world
seemed asleep, except for the roaring of the winds--Findelkind,
who still trotted over the snow to school in Zirl, would dream
still, sitting on the wooden settle by the fire, when he came home
again under Martinswand. For the worst--or the best--of it all was
that he WAS Findelkind.

This is what was always haunting him. He was Findelkind; and to