When they reached the foot of the hillside the sheet of ice was still there, as he had expected.
“Never mind,” said the Hermit. “Come out on the ice with me, and put down your ear and listen.”
So the Elf Boy put down his ear and listened; and he heard, as plainly as though there were no ice between, the voice of the brook gurgling in the bottom of its bed. He clapped his hands for joy.
“It is waking up, you see,” said the Hermit. “Other things will waken too, if you will be patient.”
The Elf Boy did not know quite what to think, but he waited day after day with his eyes and ears wide open to see if anything else might happen; and wonderful things did happen all the time. The brook sang more and more distinctly, and at last broke through its cold coverlet and went dancing along in full sight. One morning, while the snow was still around the house, the Elf Boy heard a chirping sound, and looking from his window, saw a red robin outside asking for his breakfast.
“Why,” cried the Boy, “have you really come back agin?”
“Certainly,” said the robin, “don’t you know it is almost spring?”
But the Elf Boy did not understand what he said.
There was a pussy-willow growing by the brook, and the Boy’s next discovery was that hundreds of little grey buds were coming out. He watched them grow bigger from day to day, and while he was doing this the snow was melting away in great patches where the sun shone warmest on the meadow, and the blades of grass that came up into the daylight were greener than anything the Elf Boy had ever seen.
Then the pink buds came on the maple trees, and unfolded day by day. And the fruit trees in the Hermit’s orchard were as white with blossoms as they had lately been with snow.