So it happened that one frosty night, about Christmas-tide, little Gottlieb lay awake, very hungry, on the ledge of the wall, covered with straw, which served him for a bed.
It had once been the hermit's bed. And very narrow Gottlieb thought it must have been for the hermit, for more than once he had been in peril of falling over the side, in his restless tossings. He supposed the hermit was too good to be restless, or perhaps too good for the dear angels to think it good for him to be hungry, as they evidently did think it good for Gottlieb and Lenichen, or they would be not good angels at all, to let them hunger so often, not even as kind as the ravens which took the bread to Elijah when they were told. For the dear Heavenly Father had certainly told the angels always to take care of little children.
The more Gottlieb lay awake and tossed and thought, the further off the angels seemed.
For, all the time, under the pillow lay one precious crust of bread, the last in the house until his mother should buy the loaf to-morrow.
He had saved it from his supper in an impulse of generous pity for his little sister, who so often awoke, crying with hunger, and woke his poor mother, and would not let her go to sleep again.
He had thought how sweet it would be, when Lenichen awoke the next morning, to appear suddenly, as the angels do, at the side of the bed where she lay beside her mother, and say,—
"Dear Lenichen! see, God has sent you this bit of bread as a Christmas gift."
For the next day was Christmas Eve.
This little plan made Gottlieb so happy that at first it felt as good to him as eating the bread.
But the happy thought, unhappily, did not long content the hungry animal part of him, which craved, in spite of him, to be filled; and, as the night went on, he was sorely tempted to eat the precious crust—his very own crust—himself.