Findelkind came in the middle of seven other children, and was a pretty boy of nine years old, with slenderer limbs and paler cheeks than his rosy brethren, and tender, dreamy, dark-blue eyes that had the look, his mother told him, of seeking stars in midday--_de chercher midi a quatorze heures_, as the French have it. He was a good little lad, and seldom gave any trouble from disobedience, though he often gave it from forgetfulness. His father angrily complained that he was always in the clouds--that is, he was always dreaming--and so very often would spill the milk out of the pails, chop his own fingers instead of the wood, and stay watching the swallows when he was sent to draw water. His brothers and sisters 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 snow-drifts, 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 summer-time 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 also.