milk cheese. As for the mighty beer-glasses,
with their bright engraven pewter lids, I did
not wonder at the subjects chosen by Dutch
painters; for what could there be on earth
finer than such beer-glasses, such bread-and-
cheese, such a lamp-lighted kitchen, such
handy peasant girls? I ate. I smoked my
little travelling pipe. Memories and dreams
mingled with the fact that a stout waitress
was staring sleepily at me out of her dark
eyes, and that I was staring sleepily at her;
and the fancy that we had been staring at one
another sleepily somewhere else, I couldn't
remember where. I slept. I have no doubt
I went to bed, for it was in bed that I
awoke.

No, there was no rain in the morning! I
shaved by a ray of unadulterated sun-light.
It was a feast day of the Catholic church, and
carts were rattling to the door outside; and
there were voices in a hubbub of sound,
sparkling all over with laughter; and there
was a fellow singing in the mountain
dialect:

           "The snow has been falling,
                    And I must stay here,
              For visit my darling,
                    I can't, O dear!

           "The snow has heen falling,
                    The mountains are white;
              I've now a new darling,
                     And that's all right."

I thought the matter of the song extremely
questionable; but the melody and manner of
it were so blithe that they haunt me still—
especially while shaving.

The kitchen, down-stairs, I found full of life
and bustle. The guides, who keep none of the
church holidays, were fortifying their souls
with "schnaps." The church-goers from the
mountains, who still had far to go before they
reached the pastor, were resting half-way, and
bartering and comparing news together. The
waitresses were anything but sleepy; the
ostler was plunged in a thousand cares; the
cattle of the farmers stamped; and chafed
their rusty bits outside. On the walls of the
room, the pictures were of Hofer and of other
champions of the mountains; and, to me, the
people talked about their local memories.
They told me of the famous defence of that
pass during the "French wars;" and how the
man who built the inn in which we then
talked, had defended the pass with the desperate
energy of a Guerilla, and the success of
an unerring shot—how, in fact, he had been
the Leonidas of their unsung Thermopylæ.

A fine bold race of men they are who
filled this little world; they won my respect
at the first glance. The landlord, a powerful
young man, came among us with a bold eye,
neither blustering nor cringing; he reviewed
his guests with a free good-humoured look,
such as might grace the face of one of nature's
gentlemen.

Then to me, fortified with breakfast, came
the ostler, saying that a car was ready—a
narrow little one-horsed curiosity; for curious
the car must be that is constructed to
jog, unshattered, over these rough mountain
roads. The horse was capering beside his
pole—single horses in Austria are not
indulged with shafts—and friend ostler, who
was to drive me on to the next village, looked
so unutterably contented with the world,
laughing to himself out of the fulness of his
delight, that I determined to share some
part of his shower of good-humour by inducing
him to talk to me. Accordingly I won
his confidence by the offer of a cigar. Then,
to my great astonishment, he began praising
the cigars of Milan in very good Italian.
That made me curious, and I discovered that
he had been a soldier in the fifth battalion of
rifles, and had served in Italy.

It had an odd effect to hear this rude
mountain peasant garble the music of Italian
with his uncouth dialect, and recall here, among
the firs, the plains of Italy. Here, in the
pleasant autumn morning, he was eloquent
about the tumult and the roar of battle in
the disastrous years 1848 and 1849.
Unconscious of the horse and cart, and puffing
manfully at the cigar, he told, with earnest eyes,
how he had loved "Father Radetzky," how
the other generals often asked too much from
the tired troops, how batteries were captured;
how he did not like eating polenta for his
dinner; mingling strangely the affairs of
history with the story of the ostler. He
had become a soldier through the love
which he preserved still for the pomp of war,
the arms, the gay dress, and the music. But
he was a mountaineer when he enlisted; and,
on getting his discharge, he hurried back
directly to the mountains, resolved to enter
into service where he could in his home
district, without a sigh for sunny Italy. These
mountaineers at home, seem to care little
enough for the glories which we travel over
sea and land to visit. Take them away,
however, they are not easy until the firs
again are rustling overhead, and they are
comfortably wrapped up in the mists of their
own hills.

So our driver spoke with joy of his design
to live another summer in his native place.
This was a feast day, too, in the next village,
and—secret of his abounding happiness—his
Dirndl, his sweetheart, was there waiting for
him; yes, and we were now very near, he told
me with a voice that came as if his heart
were singing under it.

The horse halts, snorting, and pricks up
his ears at the loud sound of horns and
fiddles in the village inn. Here our ride
ends. The driver is gone in a minute, and
has already found his place among the happy
throng of dancers. That place I suppose
to be—from the pair of beaming eyes that
joyously greet him—beside his Dirndl. How
he prances, and laughs, and swings round