How he longed for the winter to be over and the spring to come, that he might lead the goats to the hills, and to the little glen of the shrine! He could read now. The letters would be no longer a secret; they would speak to him, and to his heart, like the voice of that beauteous image. How ardently did he wish to be there! and how, when the first faint sun of April sent its pale rays over the plain, and glittered with a sickly delicacy on the lake, how joyous was his spirit and how light his step upon the heather! Many a little store of childish knowledge had Grettl’a opened to his mind in their winter evenings’ study; but somehow, he felt as if they were all as nothing compared to what the golden letters would reveal. The portrait, the lonely glen, the solemn reverence of the kneeling worshippers, had all conspired to create for him a mass of emotions indescribably pleasurable and thrilling. Who can say the secret of such imaginings, or bound their sway? The wished-for hour came, and it was alone and unseen that he stood before the shrine and read the words, “Maria, Mutter Gottes, hulf uns.” If this mystery were unrevealed to his senses, a feeling of dependent helplessness was too familiar to his heart not to give the words a strong significance. He was poor, unfriended, and an orphan: who could need succour more than he did? Other children had lathers and mothers, who loved them and watched over them; their little wants were cared for, their wishes often gratified. His was an uncheered existence: who was there to “_help him?_” Against the daily load of his duties he was not conscious of needing aid; his burden he was both able and willing to bear. It was against his thoughts in the long hours of solitude--against the gloomy visions of his own free-thinking spirit, he sought assistance; against the sad influence of memory, that brought up his childhood before him, when he had a father who loved him--against the dreary vista of an unloved future, he needed help. “And could _she_ befriend him?” was the question he asked his heart. “He must ask Grettl’a this; she would know it all!” Such were the reflections with which he bent his way homeward, as eagerly as in the morning he had sought the glen. Grettl’a did know it all, and more too, for she had a prayer-book, and a catechism, and a hymn-book, though hitherto these treasures had been unknown to Fritz, whose instructions were always given in a well-thumbed little volume of fairy tales, where “Hans Däumling” and “The Nutz-cracker” figured as heroes.