III
At last the singing stopped, the organ was silent, and the Christmas music was ended. The boys arose in order and left the church, two by two, as they had entered it; and the teacher walked in front.
Now, as he passed through the door of the church, little Wolff saw a child sitting on one of the stone steps and fast asleep in the midst of the snow. The child was thinly clad, and his feet, cold as it was, were bare.
In the pale light of the moon, the face of the child, with its closed eyes, was full of a sweetness which is not of this earth, and his long locks of yellow hair seemed like a golden crown upon his head. But his poor bare feet, blue in the cold of that winter night, were sad to look upon.
The scholars, so warmly clad, passed before the strange child, and did not so much as glance that way. But little Wolff, who was the last to come out of the church, stopped, full of pity, before him.
“Ah, the poor child!” he said to himself. “How sad it is that he must go barefoot in such weather as this! And what is still worse, he has not a stocking nor even a wooden shoe to lay before him while he sleeps, so that the Christ Child can put something in it to make him glad when he wakens.”
Little Wolff did not stand long to think about it; but in the goodness of his heart he took off the wooden shoe from his right foot and laid it by the side of the sleeping child. Then, limping along through the snow, and shivering with cold, he went down the street till he came to his cheerless home.
“You worthless fellow!” cried his aunt. “Where have you been? What have you done with your other shoe?”
Little Wolff trembled now with fear as well as with the cold; but he had no thought of deceiving his angry aunt. He told her how he had given the shoe to a child that was poorer than himself. The woman laughed an ugly, wicked laugh.
“And so,” she said, “our fine young gentleman takes off his shoes for beggars! He gives his wooden shoe to a barefoot! Well, we shall see. You may put the shoe that is left in the chimney, and, mind what I say! If anything is left in it, it will be a switch to whip you with in the morning. To-morrow, for your Christmas dinner, you shall have nothing but a hard crust of bread to eat and cold water to drink. I will show you how to give away your shoes to the first beggar that comes along!”