All was silent on the earth and in the air, when through the deep blue of the star-sprinkled sky a little Child-Angel winged his way from Heaven, and hovering over the steep red roofs beneath him, folded his wings and dropped softly into the deserted Market Place. In his hand he held a Scroll with strange writing upon it, and crossing the Square over the rough cobblestones, he fixed the paper to the Fountain, and spreading his white wings, flew up again to the home from which he came.
Next day the country people flocking into the Market Place saw to their astonishment a track of beautiful white flowers springing up from amongst the cobblestones, and stretching from one corner of the Square to the Fountain.
They were star-like flowers, with bright-green leaves, and they grew in patches—"like a child's footsteps," the women said.
A little crowd soon gathered round the paper fastened to the ancient Fountain. On the top of the Scroll was written, very clearly—"All those who can read the words beneath shall be rewarded generously," but the lines that followed were in a strange language, and in such crabbed characters that they defied every effort to decipher them.
All day the crowd ebbed and flowed round the Fountain, while the learned men of the town came with their dictionaries under their arms and spectacles on nose, and sat on stools, attempting to make out the crooked letters of the inscription.
In the end each one decided upon a different language, and the argument became so warm between them that they had to be separated by a party of watchmen, and conducted back again to their own houses.
Professors from the University on the other side of the mountains journeyed over the rough roads, and brought their learning to the old stone Fountain in the Market Place—but they, too, went away discomfited.
No one could read the strange writing, and no one could pull down the paper, for it appeared to be fixed to the stone by some means that made it impossible to tear it away.
Time went on, and the snow covered up the Market Square, threw a white mantle over the steep roofs, and buried the old gardens in its soft deepness.
In one of the houses near the spot where the little Angel had first touched the earth lived a poor, lonely woman. She worked all day at some fine kind of needlework, but when, in the evenings, the sun had set and the twilight began to fall, she would steal out for a few minutes to breathe the fresh air. Often, though she was so wearied with her incessant stitching, she would carry in her hand a flower from the plants that grew in her latticed window to a neighbour's sick child. It was a weary climb up a steep flight of stairs to the attic where the sick child lay, but it was reward enough to the woman to see the bright smile that lighted up the little drawn face as she laid the flower on the counterpane.