Findelkind never answered: he remembered the priest had said that the years he lived in were very hard ones, and men in them had no faith. Ere long he came to a big walled house, with turrets and grated casements--very big it looked to him--like one of the first Findelkind's own castles. His heart beat loud against his side, but he plucked up his courage and knocked as loud as his heart was beating. He knocked and knocked, but no answer came. The house was empty. But he did not know that: he thought it was that the people within were cruel, and he went sadly onward with the road winding before him, and on his right the beautiful, impetuous gray river, and on his left the green Mittelgebirge and the mountains that rose behind it. By this time the sun was high: its rays were glowing on the red of the cranberry-shrubs and the blue of the bilberry-boughs; he was hungry and thirsty and tired. But he did not give in for that: he held on steadily. He knew that there was near, somewhere near, a great city that the people called Sprugg, and thither he had resolved to go. By noontide he had walked eight miles, and come to a green place where men were shooting at targets, the tall thick grass all around them; and a little way farther off was a train of people chanting and bearing crosses and dressed in long flowing robes. The place was the Hoettinger Au, and the day was Saturday, and the village was making ready to perform a miracle-play on the morrow. Findelkind ran to the robed singing-folk, quite sure that he saw the people of God. "Oh, take me! take me!" he cried to them--"do take me with you to do Heaven's work!" But they pushed him aside for a crazy little boy that spoilt their rehearsing. "It was only for Hoetting-folk," said a lad older than himself. "Get out of the way with you, liebchen;" and the man who carried the cross knocked him with force on the head by mere accident, but Findelkind thought he had meant it. Were people so much kinder five centuries before? he wondered, and felt sad as the many-colored robes swept on through the grass and the crack of the rifles sounded sharply through the music of the chanting voices. He went on footsore and sorrowful, thinking of the castle-doors that had opened and the city-gates that had unclosed at the summons of the little long-haired boy painted on the missal. He had come now to where the houses were much more numerous, though under the shade of great trees--lovely old gray houses, some of wood, some of stone, some with frescoes on them and gold and color and mottoes, some with deep-barred casements and carved portals and sculptured figures--houses of the poorer people now, but still memorials of a grand and gracious time. For he had wandered into the quarter of St. Nicholas of this fair mountain-city, which he, like his country-folks, called Sprugg, though the government and the world called it Innspruck.