He was
a strong and healthy little fellow, fed on the free mountain air,
and he was very happy, and loved his family devotedly, and was as
active as a squirrel and as playful as a hare; but he kept his
thoughts to himself, and some of them went a very long way for a
little boy who was only one among many, and to whom nobody had
ever paid any attention except to teach him his letters and tell
him to fear God. August in winter was only a little, hungry
schoolboy, trotting to be catechised by the priest, or to bring
the loaves from the bakehouse, or to carry his father's boots to
the cobbler; and in summer he was only one of hundreds of cowboys,
who drove the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumbling cattle,
ringing their throat bells, out into the sweet intoxication of the
sudden sunlight, and lived up with them in the heights among the
Alpine roses, with only the clouds and the snow summits near. But
he was always thinking, thinking, thinking, for all that; and
under his little sheepskin winter coat and his rough hempen summer
shirt his heart had as much courage in it as Hofer's ever had,--
great Hofer, who is a household word in all the Innthal, and whom
August always reverently remembered when he went to the city of
Innspruck and ran out by the foaming water mill and under the
wooded height of Berg Isel.
August lay now in the warmth of the stove and told the children
stories, his own little brown face growing red with excitement as
his imagination glowed to fever heat.
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