The gardener and his wife supposed that Johannes had run away from home because he had been hardly treated. They pitied him, and promised to let him stay. So he remained and helped to work in the garden and attend to the flowers. They gave him a little room to sleep in with a bedstead painted blue. Out of it, in the morning, he could see the wet yellow lime-leaves flutter past the window, and at night the black boughs waving to and fro, and the stars playing hide-and-seek between them. And he gave names to the stars, and the brightest of them he called Windekind.
He told his history only to the flowers, most of which he had known before at home; to the large, solemn asters, the many-hued zinnias, and the white chrysanthemums which bloom on so late into the blustering autumn. When all the rest of the flowers were dead the chrysanthemums still stood upright--even when one morning the first snow had fallen and Johannes came to see how they were getting on, they held up their cheerful faces and said: 'Yes, we are still here. You would never have thought it!' And they looked very brave; but two days later they were all dead.
But palms and tree-ferns were still thriving in the hot-house, and the strange blossoms of orchids hung in the damp heat. Johannes peeped with amazement into their gorgeous cups, and thought of Windekind. How cold and colourless everything seemed then when he came out again--the sloppy snow with black footmarks, and the sighing, dripping branches of the trees!
But when the snow-flakes had been noiselessly falling hour after hour so that the boughs bent under the growing burthen, Johannes ran off gleefully into the purple twilight of the snow-laden wood. That was silence--but not death. It was almost more lovely than summer verdure, as the dazzling whiteness of the tangled twigs made lace-work against the light-blue sky, or as one of the over-weighted boughs shook off its load of snow, which fell in a cloud of glittering powder.
Once in the course of such a walk, when he had gone so far that all round him there was nothing to be seen but snow and snow-wrapped woods, half white and half black, and every sound of life seemed stifled under the glistening downy shroud, it happened that he thought he saw a tiny white creature running swiftly in front of him. He followed it--it resembled no animal that he knew; but when he tried to catch it, it promptly vanished into a hollow trunk. Johannes stared into the hole where it had disappeared and thought to himself: 'I wonder if it was Wistik?'