seemed filled, went down one stormy night together to the
lake, and sobered droll Fate for an instant by turning her grim comedy
into a somewhat grimmer tragedy.

Soon after losing sight of Starnberg's placid waters, we plunged into the
gloom of the mountains, and began a long, winding climb among their
hidden recesses. At times, shrieking as if in terror, we passed some
ghostly hamlet, standing out white and silent in the moonlight against
the shadowy hills; and, now and then, a dark, still lake, or mountain
torrent whose foaming waters fell in a long white streak across the
blackness of the night.

We passed by Murnau in the valley of the Dragon, a little town which
possessed a Passion Play of its own in the olden times, and which, until
a few years ago, when the railway-line was pushed forward to
Partenkirchen, was the nearest station to Ober-Ammergau. It was a
tolerably steep climb up the road from Murnau, over Mount Ettal, to
Ammergau--so steep, indeed, that one stout pilgrim not many years ago,
died from the exertion while walking up. Sturdy-legged mountaineer and
pulpy citizen both had to clamber up side by side, for no horses could do
more than drag behind them the empty vehicle.

Every season, however, sees the European tourist more and more pampered,
and the difficulties and consequent pleasure and interest of his journey
more and more curtailed and spoilt. In a few years' time, he will be
packed in cotton-wool in his own back-parlour, labelled for the place he
wants to go to, and unpacked and taken out when he gets there. The
railway now carries him round Mount Ettal to Oberau, from which little
village a tolerably easy road, as mountain roadways go, of about four or
five English miles takes him up to the valley of the Ammer.

It was midnight when our train landed us at Oberau station; but the place
was far more busy and stirring than on ordinary occasions it is at
mid-day. Crowds of tourists and pilgrims thronged the little hotel,
wondering, as also did the landlord, where they were all going to sleep;
and wondering still more, though this latter consideration evidently did
not trouble their host, how they were going to get up to Ober-Ammergau in
the morning in time for the play, which always begins at 8 a.m.

Some were engaging carriages at fabulous prices to call for them at five;
and others, who could not secure carriages, and who had determined to
walk, were instructing worried waiters to wake