"My wife," said the peasant, "has reason to remember the lämmergeier. When she was three years old her father took her to a part of the mountains where they were hay-making, and not being able to work and attend to her at the same time, he set her down by the side of a hut. It was a fine sunny day, and Anna fell asleep. Her father, seeing her sleeping calmly, covered her face with a straw hat, and continued his work. Two hours afterwards he went to the spot, and Anna was gone. He searched for her everywhere, and all the haymakers assisted in the search, but Anna was nowhere to be found. My father and I--I was a mere lad at the time, five years older than Anna--were walking towards a mountain stream, three miles from where Anna had been sleeping, when I heard the cry of a child. It came from a precipice, and above this precipice a vulture was flying. We went in the direction of the cry, and found Anna lying on the edge of the precipice, clinging to the roots with her little hand. She was slipping down, and would have slipped to certain death had we been three minutes later. It was a difficult task to rescue her as it was, but we managed it, and carried her to her father. She had no cap to her head, and no shoes or stockings on her feet; she had lost them in her flight through the air in the vulture's beak. She has a scar on her left arm to this day as a remembrance of her acquaintance with the lämmergeier. So it fell out afterwards, when she was a young woman, that I married her."
Ever and again, as they walked onwards, Christian Almer turned to look upon the vulture, which remained perfectly still, with its wings outstretched, until it was hid from his sight by the peculiar formation of the valleys they were traversing.
Hitherto their course had lain amidst masses of the most beautiful flowers; gentians with purple bells, others spotted and yellow, with brilliant whorls of bloom, the lilac-flowered campanula, the anemone, the blue columbine and starwort, the lovely forget-me-not--which Christian Almer mentally likened to bits of heaven dropped down--and the Alpine rose, the queen of Alpine flowers. Now all was changed. The track was bare of foliage; not a blade of grass peeped up from the barren rocks.
"There is good reason for it," said the peasant; "here, long years ago, a man killed his brother in cold blood. Since that day no flowers will grow upon the spot. There are nights on which the spirit of the murderer wanders mournfully about these rocks; a black dog accompanies him, whose bark you can sometimes hear. This valley is accursed."
Soon afterwards the peasant left Christian Almer to the guidance of the children, and with them the young man spent the day, sharing contentedly with them the black bread and hard sausage they had brought for dinner. This mid-day meal was eaten as they sat beside a lake, in the waters of which there was not a sign of life, and Christian Almer noticed that, as the children ate, they watched the bosom of this lake with a strange and singular interest.
"What are you gazing at?" he asked, curious to learn.
"For the dead white trout," answered the boy. "Whenever a priest dies it floats upon the lake."
In the lower heights, where the fir-trees stretched their feathery tips to the clouds, they found the flower they were in search of, and the children were wild with delight. The sun was setting when they returned to the hut, tired and gratified with their day's wanderings. The peasant's wife smiled as she saw the edelweiss.
"A lucky love-flower," she said to Christian Almer.
These simple words proved to him how hard was the lesson of forgetfulness he was striving to learn; he was profoundly agitated by them.