“I cannot sell him,” sobbed Fritz; “I have promised him never to do that.”
“Silly child!” said the Bauer, laughing; “thy bird cares little for all thy promises: besides, he’ll have a better life with me than thee.” “That might he, easily!” said Fritz: “but I’ll not break my word.”
“And what is this wonderful promise thou’st made, my little man?—come, tell it!”
“I told him,” said Fritz, in a voice broken with agitation, “that if the shadow closed over the street down there before any one had hired me, that I would open his cage and let him free; and look! it is nearly across now—there’s only one little glimpse of sunlight remaining!”
Poor child! how many in this world live upon one single gleam of hope—ay, and even cling to it when a mere twilight, fast fading before them!
The Bauer was silent for some minutes; his look wandered from the child to the cage, and back again from the cage to the child. At last he stooped down and peeped in at the bird, which, with a sense of being in disgrace, sat with his head beneath his wing.
“Come, my little man,” said he, laying a hand on Fritz’s shoulder, “I’ll take thee home with me! ‘Tis true I have no cattle—nothing save a few goats—but thou shalt herd these. Pack up thy bird, and let us away, for we have a long journey before us, and must do part of it before we sleep.”
Fritz’s heart bounded with joy and gratitude. It would have been, in good truth, no very splendid prospect for any other to be a goatherd to a poor Bauer—so poor that he had not even one cow; but little Fritz was an orphan, without a home, a friend, or one to give him shelter for a single night. It may be believed, then, that he felt overjoyed; and it was with a light heart he trotted along beside the old Bauer, who never could hear enough about the starling—where he came from? how he was caught? who taught him to speak? what he liked best to feed upon? and a hundred other questions, which, after all, should have been far more numerous ere Fritz found it any fatigue to answer them. Not only did it give him pleasure to speak of Jacob, but now he felt actually grateful to him, since, had the old Bauer not taken a fancy to the bird, it was more than likely he had never hired its master.
The Bauer told Fritz that the journey was a long one, and true enough. It lay across the Zillerthal, where the garnets are found, and over the great mountains that separate the Austrian from the Bavarian Tyrol—many a long, weary mile—many, I say, because the Bauer had come up to Inspruck to buy hemp for spinning when the evenings of winter are long and dark, and poor people must do something to earn their bread. This load of hemp was carried on a little wheeled cart, to which the old man himself was harnessed, and in front of him his dog—a queer-looking team would it appear to English eyes, but one meets them often enough here; and as the fatigue is not great, and the peasants lighten the way by many a merry song—as the Tyrol “Jodeln”—it never suggests the painful idea of over-hard or distressing labour. Fritzerl soon took his place as a leader beside the dog, and helped to pull the load; while the Starling’s cage was fastened on the sheltered side of the little cart, and there he travelled quite safe and happy.
I never heard that Fritz was struck—as he might possibly, with reason, have been—that, as he came into Bavaria, where the wide-stretching plains teem with yellow corn and golden wheat, the peasants seemed far poorer than among the wild mountains of his own Tyrol; neither have I any recollection that he experienced that peculiar freedom of respiration, that greater expansion of the chest, travellers so frequently enumerate as among the sensations whenever they have passed over the Austrian frontier, and breathed the air of liberty, so bounteously diffused through the atmosphere of other lands. Fritz, I fear, for the sake of his perceptive quickness, neither was alive to the fact nor the fiction above quoted; nor did he take much more notice of the features of the landscape, than to mark that the mountains were further off and not so high as those among which he lived—two circumstances which weighed heavily on his heart, for a Dutchman loves not water as well as a Tyroler loves a mountain.